Tootfinder

Das ist Terror.
„Landesweit hätten 145 Frauen Anzeige erstattet, 21 davon in Paris, weil sie mit einer Spritze gestochen worden seien, teilte das Innenministerium mit. Zwölf Tatverdächtige seien festgenommen worden.
Zuvor habe es in den sozialen Medien offenbar Aufrufe gegeben, Frauen während der Fête de la Musique anzugreifen und mit Spritzen zu stechen, so das Ministerium.“
Mysteriöse Angriffe - Über 100 Spritzenattacken auf Frauen bei Fête de la Musique

Little #MastodonTip : if you ask a question in a post and eventually get a good answer, you can edit your post with the answer added!
That way people who have boosted it will know the answer as well (it should notify them) and people who see it know that there is no need to answer.

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

The weird paradox of really disliking AI is that I still find myself thinking about it all the time.
I read about it, I watch videos about it, I write about it, I bring it up in conversation. And just make myself angrier in the process. And make all my algorithms show me more content about it 😓
I feel like I’m Cady in the movie Mean Girls addicted to talking about how she hated Regina George:
“I was a woman possessed. I spent about 80 percent of my time talking about Regina. And the other 20 percent of the time, I was praying for someone else to bring her up so I could talk about her more. [..] I could hear people getting bored with me. But I couldn't stop.”

Von Neumann was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Von Neumann
supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on
the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious) when he was asked
how to solve problems. One time one of his students tried to get more helpful
information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem. Von
Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes.".

"Some AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO₂ emissions than others, researchers find"
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology

Some AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO₂ emissions than others, researchers find
No matter which questions we ask an AI, the model will come up with an answer. To produce this information—regardless of whether the answer is correct or not—the model uses tokens. Tokens are words or parts of words that are converted into a string of numbers that can be processed by the LLM.

Why are there so few women in the tech industry? If you think you know the answer, read the report #linkTuesday

Ich hab die Idee¹ von @… (bzw seiner Tochter) mal mit meiner Diss² ausprobiert³: klappt großartig, um „Strategien“ unterschiedlicher Chatbots zu explorieren.
• Gemini schlägt mir allerlei⁴ Dissertationen von Leuten vor, die so ähnlich aber nicht genau so heißen wie ich.
• GPT-4o phantasiert zunächst einen Titel zusammen und behauptet dann⁴ m…

Christopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺 (@skyglowberlin@fediscience.org)
Attached: 4 images My daughter just came up with a great exercise: challenge your students to find the title of your PhD using ONLY LLMs (no Google allowed). If any of them manage, they get gummy bears 😃 I asked five different models, and got five different answers, all five of which were completely wrong 😂 #AI #ChatGPT #AISlop #LLM #LLMFail #Education #HigherEducation #AcademicChatter

Happen to be in Frankfurt/Main some time the next few weeks? Go and see Annegret Soltau's works at Städel Museum, ending Aug 17: #art…

Dienstag ist #DNIP Briefing-Tag. Heute zu Zuckerbergs Sammelwut (und was man dagegen tun kann) https://dnip.ch/2025/05/20/dnip-briefing-25-zuckerbergs-s…