Tootfinder

Nearly 100 House Democrats urge RFK Jr. to restore millions in family planning grants (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5337240-lawmakers-robert-f-kennedy-jr-restoration-family-planning-grants/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250606/p107#a250606p107

Breaking the Barriers of Text-Hungry and Audio-Deficient AI
Hamidou Tembine, Issa Bamia, Massa NDong, Bakary Coulibaly, Oumar Issiaka Traore, Moussa Traore, Moussa Sanogo, Mamadou Eric Sangare, Salif Kante, Daryl Noupa Yongueng, Hafiz Tiomoko Ali, Malik Tiomoko, Frejus Laleye, Boualem Djehiche, Wesmanegda Elisee Dipama, Idris Baba Saje, Hammid Mohammed Ibrahim, Moumini Sanogo, Marie Coursel Nininahazwe, Abdul-Latif Siita, Haine Mhlongo, Teddy Nelvy Dieu Merci Kouka, Mariam Serine Jerid…

Breaking the Barriers of Text-Hungry and Audio-Deficient AI
While global linguistic diversity spans more than 7164 recognized languages, the current dominant architecture of machine intelligence remains fundamentally biased toward written text. This bias excludes over 700 million people particularly in rural and remote regions who are audio-literate. In this work, we introduce a fully textless, audio-to-audio machine intelligence framework designed to serve this underserved population, and all the people who prefer audio-efficiency. Our contributions in…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03328 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

Foundation Models for Rapid Autonomy Validation
We are motivated by the problem of autonomous vehicle performance validation. A key challenge is that an autonomous vehicle requires testing in every kind of driving scenario it could encounter, including rare events, to provide a strong case for safety and show there is no edge-case pathological behavior. Autonomous vehicle companies rely on potentially millions of miles driven in realistic simulation to expose the driving stack to enough miles to estimate rates and severity of collisions. To …

I decided to share some of my observations that would benefit you if you are building applications: a deep dive session into the archetypes of attackers.
This session is for people who are developing software of any kind. It could be an API endpoint, a blog, or a complex application used by millions.
Join in or share with smart people.
Let me help you!

Five years to the day COVID was declared a pandemic this is where we're at: the world's richest country has signed an order to pull out of WHO, dismantled USAID and millions for vaccines, life-saving treatments for HIV/AIDS, TB, and infectious disease, overturned women's rights to safe procedures - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
#COVID

Kennedy Links Measles Outbreak to Poor Diet and Health, Citing Fringe Theories
In a recent interview, the health secretary also suggested that the measles vaccine had harmed children in West Texas, center of an outbreak.

Andrew Sheer is currently spinning a conspiracy theory that “ties” Carney while in the UK to lobbying for “rules" to "force" aviation companies to use "non-conventional" fuel and then “he invests in that company and makes millions”.
And that, folks, is how the Conservatives are going to tie "New World Order" conspiracies to any kind of climate action, even very weak action like Sustainable Airline Fuel.
God I hate this guy's gross smile.
#canPoli #CdnPoli #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency
#CanPoli #CdnPoli

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld