Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

I’m staying on Mastodon because the operating model is immune to hostile billionaire takeover 🏴‍☠️

Here lies tpolecat, slain by his printer card. There seems to be a subtle but serious problem with the card I designed because I took it out and my disk failures went away, then put it back and my disk failed almost immediately. Seriously no idea how this could be possible but I'm bummed about it and also lost a couple days of work. 10/31

I need to contact Ezra Klein. I wouldn't ask in public like this unless it was really, really important. Can anyone connect me? My email address is on my blog. Thank you!

On Monday, @bcantrill and I were joined by @postwait, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and @sogrady to talk about tech conferences. Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed in the decades since we met these folks at conferences! What's worth the trip in 2025? https://youtu.be/YBId0FLKxCo

In our study for instance we found that by troubling the definition of "adoption" we learned a lot: people can feel that their TEAM uses AI but they don't, and people can also be covertly using AI without their team knowing, btw there are already interesting gender diffs here, and people can be using AI but not trusting its output vs using AI and trusting it deeply; all of this is to say when you do designed social science you get to think about how to construct the measure & we really need that

new french PM any good ? any french people here ?

Die EU will den Abbau von #Lithium für Batterien auf dem europäischen Territorium fördern. In #Bosnien raubt das vielen Menschen die Zukunftsperspektive. Und mittendrin steckt eine Firma aus Zug.

https://www.republik.ch/2024/12/13/im-lithiumrausch?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=cm&utm_content=lithium-bosnien

The lowest random natural number is:

I remade this page today! I hope you like it!: https://streetartutopia.com/what-is-street-art/

usually I'm very against the "write a bad draft and edit it to be good" approach (I feel like the "bad draft" just distracts me and I'd rather just delete it until the inspiration for a good version comes) but I guess right now it's kind of working for me

tried a new strategy with this terminal zine: sending a draft to beta readers that is genuinely just not very good (bad organization, basically just a collection of random facts) and getting some very early feedback. It feels bad but the feedback has actually been SO helpful, lots of positive comments telling me what the interesting bits are.

We are actively seeking a Security Engineer II, Application Security, to join our growing AI/ML Security team at Trail of Bits!

You'll get to work across the entire AI/ML stack - from examining LLM web applications and training pipelines to analyzing neural network architectures and MLOps environments. Our team conducts comprehensive security assessments of AI/ML systems, develops novel testing frameworks, and helps shape industry standards for AI/ML security.

If you would like to learn more about our work in the AI security space, check out some of our recent engagements and publications:

- AiLayer Labs https://github.com/trailofbits/publications/blob/master/reviews/2024-05-ailayerlabs-6079smartcontracts-securityreview.pdf

- Pickle File Attacks https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/06/11/exploiting-ml-models-with-pickle-file-attacks-part-1/

- Audit Gradio 5 https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/10/10/auditing-gradio-5-hugging-faces-ml-gui-framework/

Feel free to apply for the role below!
https://apply.workable.com/trailofbits/j/221A3565AB/

"We don't have to let the numbers play god with our inferences"

So I promised that @flourn0 and I were going to sit down & have a casual chat about that "ghost engineers" viral stuff we've been seeing in the news & our POV as scientists working on activity data in software development. So we did! And I posted my very first youtube video! We hope that this provides some help and support if you're a developer feeling overwhelmed by big claims like this!

https://youtu.be/e4gJxiDIFJ8?si=fS3U5p5XHZu72IGn

Systemd 257 released https://lwn.net/Articles/1001657/ #tech #linux

dtrace.conf is live and @bcantrill is mid-state of the union https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQN1t2qlhaw

Today is the day of dtrace.conf(24), our quadrennial DTrace conference! It's online and it's free -- join @ahl and me and a terrific slate of presenters starting at 9a Pacific!
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/12/05/dtrace.conf24/

@grimalkina I think it is in part a consequnce of the biases of social media. Lots more ADHD folks than dyslexic on written social media, dyslexics are on Instagram.

@grimalkina I'll second that after two decades in tech. In general, techies use of "neurodivergence" is for "cool" or "savant like" conditions. "Aspis" -- once outright fashionable but now dated. Synesthesia is one of the cool ones. PTSD and mood disorders are considered "mental health issues". "Super recognisers" -- cool, prosopagnosia not cool. Learning disabilities - ah, well, poor kids. Advocacy seems to be absent or very rare for anything considered to come with "less ability".

I've been curious about something for a long time. When people in tech say "neurodivergence", do you think about experiences like PTSD, mood disorders, learning disabilities, and other less commonly mentioned categories that also fall under the big tent of neurodivergence (e.g., not always just specifically things that there is a lot of online popular content about, like ADHD)?