@vform@openbiblio.socialIf British Library reading rooms become ‘co-working spaces’, what, exactly, is a national library for? | Andy Beckett | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/29/british-library-reading-rooms-co-wo…
@ncoca@social.coop#GoogleMaps has become essentially useless for the few things I would check on there that CoMaps/OSM often lacks (hours, menu photos) because now, you can't see those thing without logging in.
And, of course, I have no #google account.
@philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.comRE: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117529823729259748
With every passing day I become increasingly emboldened that it is not only “not radical” but in fact “the only right choice” to only ever run software you yourself write, and to never connect…
@CerstinMahlow@mastodon.acm.orgI head the CAS Texten at ZHAW. Yesterday we awarded the certificates and celebrated. It’s not unusual, that some participants become friends or start doing business together somehow. It’s also not unusual that people have a different job in the end. But the last cohort was special:
2 out of 11 lost their job, 1 quit, another is thinking about quitting
#AcademicChatter
@laimis@mstdn.socialMy poor kids have become #whitesox fans but at least they got to see them win yesterday in the playoffs. I keep on warning them that these moments will be rare in your baseball fandom lives :)
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialCondé Nast partners with Shopify to become the first major publisher on the Shop app, featuring weekly curated collections from editors at Vogue, GQ, and more (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/10/29/conde-nast-shopify-shop-vogue-gq
@YaleDivinitySchool@mstdn.socialYale Divinity School and Chicago Theological Seminary Advance Toward a Historic Affiliation
Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) announced today that it has entered into formal negotiations—the first stage of a multi-year approval and transition process.
https://
@StephenRees@mas.toThe President is Equal Parts Moron and Monster
Which makes it hard to cut a deal with him
Bill McKibben
12 minutes ago
As we head towards the midterms, the president’s closing argument has mostly been about various people’s posteriors, but he has also taken the time to make several, um, substantive points.
One is his theory that solar panels become incredibly hot to the touch during their operation, and hence will kill “all the animals.” As he explained his theor…
@avstockhausen@fedihum.orgBookmarked: CEAlex maps #Alexandria #Karten CartAlex is the CEAlex maps platform designed to become the…
@v_i_o_l_a@openbiblio.social"Bullshit universities: the future of automated education"
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02340-8
"[…] The dream that AI could teach students effectively neglects the importance of ‘learning how’ in order to ‘learn that’, that teachers are also role models, and t…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialAxel Springer's Telegraph begins layoffs, pledging to become an "AI-powered" global business; sources: up to 100 jobs will go, with culture and sports hit hard (Esther Addley/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/20…
@nerb@techhub.socialDo I become a bit more cyborg or not?
Endo says my excuse about pumps and tubing is gone with the Omnipod 5 and really wants me to consider it. Says I will love it once I get used to it.
So what say those who use one?
Not real sure I want to trust tech to keep me alive or not but am tempted.
@jonippolito@digipres.clubIf AI were a nation, the increased economic activity it promises to stimulate would become the fifth largest CO2 emitter, just behind Russia—study.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/11/ai-will-do-more-to-boost…
@newsie@darktundra.xyzThe Chestnut Grove Caught in the Middle of A Years-Long Data Center Fight https://www.404media.co/west-virginia-american-chestnut-trees-data-center/
@StephenRees@mas.toI wonder about the reliability of "points" schemes.
For example today's message reads "Become a points millionaire! Spend $20 and scan your app for a chance to win 1 million pts. From May 21 to June 3."
Today is October 22!
Maybe they are using AI
@grumpybozo@toad.socialOne of my earliest lessons in basic online OpSec was:
ALWAYS LOG OFF.
I never regret learning it well. It has become annoyingly complex to follow that edict for everything, but it remains useful. @… https://mindly.social/@cazabon/117514549509063616
@pre@boing.worldActually you know, the whole AI craze might bring Markdown to a more general audience.
If Markdown is the language you speak to the AI in, when you want to tell it a diagram or a link or a list or a code-fragment, then perhaps it'll become actual lingua-franca and the kids will be speaking on the streets and the bots will be using it to talk to each other.
#markdown #isTheFutrure #becauseOfAi
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioI saw Patrick Stewart live twice.
The first time was in a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” at the Guthrie. The moment he stepped on stage, I reflexively thought “Hey! It’s Captain Picard!” …and then, not 2 seconds later, before he’d even spoken a word: “No, no, it’s not, it just…kinda looks like him.”
Just his gate, the way he held himself, he’d become a completely different person. I’d imprinted on Picard in my formative years, and Stewart’s acting was so damn good that it took 2 wordless seconds to wipe Picard from my mind.
2/
@jensilber@mastodon.socialThis weekend I went to a cooking class (one of those spend-two-hours-and-make-this-menu things) and I got to wondering: Do you think it's become more fun or more exasperating to be a chef leading a class like that since the popularity of "The Bear"?
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIt only takes a very rudimentary understanding of economics to see that, in the long run, the market price of running "agentic AI" (or whatever the latest buzz becomes) and the salary of any kind of knowledge worker can only be separated by a gap that's dependent on *management's* ability to tell their output apart.
There is a cosmic-scale gap between the long-term value to a company in paying a salary to a human vs. getting an LLM to "do" the "same" work, but it's a gap that many people are investing heavily in hiding right now, and CEOs and managers become incredibly gullible when you promise them they won't have to deal with humans who might ask for raises, even though it should be obvious you plan to jack up prices once they're locked in. They also aren't well-known for a deep understanding of how their workers actually generate value, and tend to be easily distracted by shiny but shallow demos, which is exactly what LLMs can produce well.
Even in the most optimistic scenario I can imagine for these developments, the myth of upward mobility that's been a lynchpin for defusing class solidarity among wage laborers is going to take a significant beating. There's a completely obvious game plan underway to try to use fascism to shore up the power of the wealthy against any kind of mass movement, and to play the ancient divide-and-conquer game along race and gender lines just as usual, so the range of outcomes is huge, but every time you use an LLM you're pushing this closer to a sharper conflict.
#AI #LLMs
@johnhobbs@mstdn.caIn an earlier post I introduced the principle that there were four categories of side hustle. Let’s now talk about the third category.
B Quadrant: Building Systems, Not Just Income
Business-owner side hustles focus on leverage.
Examples:
• Online businesses
• Automated systems
• Team-based models
Pros:
✔ Scalable
✔ Time flexibility over time
✔ Can become a true asset
Cons:
✖ Learning curve
✖ Requires patience
✖ Needs structure and mentorship
💡 This is where side hustles stop being “extra money” and start becoming options.To me, this is the best type of side hustle to target. Remember, the whole point of a side hustle is that you can start one while already doing something else.
Question:
Would you rather work harder – or smarter?
@veit@mastodon.socialResearchers at ETH Zurich and Anthropic have published an impressive study demonstrating just how fragile online anonymity has become. They show that large language models can be used for de-anonymisation on a large scale. With unrestricted internet access, their agent was able to re-identify users of Hacker News and participants in Anthropic interviews with a high degree of accuracy, based solely on pseudonymous online profiles and conversations: #Anonymity #LLM
@jonippolito@digipres.clubI'm seeing a resurgence of educators leaning on the "friction" metaphor, so I'm revisiting my EBR article on the subject. Let’s not fetishize friction, which can become a convenient defense of teaching practices that serve educators better than learners. https://jonippolito.substack.com/p/…
@patrick_townsend@infosec.exchangeAI may eventually kill us all, but first it will make us miserable.
You have probably heard of the security weakness in the PHP programming language. If not, it is urgent that you become informed on this issue. It affects a massive number of websites and internal applications. Hackers can bypass security credentials and get full access to servers. Patches are available and should be applied as soon as possible.
Because we have entered a heavy activity period before the December holidays, many companies are in lock-down mode. No one wants to risk upgrades during the most busy season of the year. But this is an exception. A five-alarm fire, if you will. The patches are easier than the Year-2000 event, but much more critical to get done now.
Best wishes to my IT colleagues, and my sympathies.
@Carwil@mastodon.onlineIt's become commonplace to say that "LLMs can handle large amounts of data," something that is true for other computer methods including ML.
When actually tested, however, LLM performance collapses as scale increases.
#generativeAI #AIscience #AIfailuremodes
@kidehen@mastodon.socialRE: https://mastodon.social/@openlink/117305170248048530
Open protocols beat proprietary plumbing. In the age of AI, that advantage compounds: LLMs are trained on those protocols, so the Agents they power become powerful generic clients you drive in natural language.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social"I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
"Oh yeah? Well, *I* am become Egg, survivor of apocalypses."
Humans like to think we're a "dominant species" but we don't even have a hardened spore, seed, or egg form that can survive 10,000 years of dormancy and/or interplanetary travel in hard vacuum.
@rberger@hachyderm.io" End-times fascism is a fascism that is very much in conversation with planetary-scale existential crises; a fascism that is taking the end of this world for granted.
We thought long and hard about the politics of putting any kind of qualifier on a word like “fascism.” And the reason we ended up deciding that it did need that is we thought about how our world has changed since Mussolini declared himself a fascist.
Our fascists have weapons that last century’s fascists couldn’t dream of. There was no atomic bomb. Hitler and Mussolini died before the Trinity test. They didn’t understand that fossil fuels were warming the planet.
Our world has become more dangerous, and fascism has changed in response and has made peace with the idea of collapse. And now what they’re fighting for is who is going to survive that cataclysm."
#GiftArticle #USPolitics
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/magazine/naomi-klein-astra-taylor-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.A1E.Rtdw.rFNpJLCeJtGi&smid=url-share
@pre@boing.worldEveryone on TV wears a poppy, starting around this time of year.
It is supposed to commemorate how stupid it was to force millions of people to die in pointless power-struggle racism-fueled wars. The red for all the blood spilled.
I don't generally bother. It seemed to become more a symbol of heroism than a lament at the horror and pointlessness. To encourage soldiers rather than discourage them from agreeing to this insanity.
I put one in my profile name for a bit this year though.
It ain't red.
The pointless utter horror of it all, never ended it seems. I mean come on.
And apparently a poppy these colours has been working as an excellent troll on the insane gammon press.
[I think you can copy emoji from this server if you ask your admin. I only control mine.]
#freePalestine
@Carwil@mastodon.onlineThis isn't just an "AIs can't count" problem. Models become worse at providing individual answers when lots of instances are included in the context window.
@kidehen@mastodon.socialRE: https://mastodon.social/@openlink/117288641430725097
Open protocols beat proprietary plumbing. In the age of AI, that advantage compounds: LLMs are trained on those protocols, so the Agents they power become powerful generic clients you drive in natural language.
@kidehen@mastodon.socialRE: https://mastodon.social/@openlink/117282951474278480
Open protocols beat proprietary plumbing. In the age of AI, that advantage compounds: LLMs are trained on those protocols, so the Agents they power become powerful generic clients you drive in natural language.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialA good way of thinking about companies like Proton or Anthropic that proudly declare they're using LLMs to code is that they've declared "we're replacing all of our junior engineers with unpaid interns from a temp agency." The unpaid interns have photographic memories and have memorized all of the code on github, but they're still pretty clueless and clumsy, and they also have zero loyalty to the company, zero ability to learn from mistakes, and zero understanding of or interest in the actual purpose of what they're building (actually, this comparison is unfair to interns on average, think of the least motivated and curious intern you've ever worked with).
The remaining staff at these companies become managers, but in the most frustrating possible way, since the agents they're managing constantly mess stuff up and have been made incapable of learning from their mistakes. Their working memory is actually pretty limited too, so if your instructions get too complicated, they start forgetting the first part of what you said. You can try to compensate for their inability to learn by writing down more instructions in text files for them to read, but the issue with their working memory makes this a losing strategy in the long run. You can try to carefully control which reminders of what not to do they read based on what parts of the code they're working on, but you don't really have good tools to control that either (such tools could be built, and would have been already if those in charge weren't so incompetent and mesmerized by their own shitty mirages).
So when things like this Cursor attack happen (or whenever the next big Proton vuln hits; it's clearly coming soon based on their dev practices) companies will say "humans make the same kinds of mistakes" or "human programmers might have written that vulnerability too." They're not exactly wrong, but they're eliding the fact that teams of temp interns make mistakes at rates orders of magnitude higher than teams of experienced security experts, and having fired the later to hire the former is a choice that everyone buying your product should pay attention to, whether the former comes in the form of actual incompetent interns or LLM agents.
#AI #LLMs #Proton #Anthropic #Cursor
@katrinakatrinka@infosec.exchangeThese are the real issues with pregnancy that the cis men in leadership of the #LDS church don't need or care to know.
They haven't been faced with the reality women, girls, anyone with a working uterus has to face. No one has ever even considered coming between them and their doctor before they can get treatment.
No one has ever educated them about how common miscarriage (spontaneous anortion) actually is. They have never had to consider their personal health when it comes to sex, reproduction, or just living with a uterus and ovaries that can cause health problems.
They don't understand or need to personally consider the real repercussions of Idaho’s laws. That so many Ob/Gyns have left the state, getting regular checkups and cancer screenings are no longer regular. That getting pregnant may end with you on a helicopter fleeing the state for emergency treatment.
These woman are sharing the reality of what their lives have become after the passage of the strict laws in Idaho and the need to change the law, for any who care to know.
#Mormon #ExMo #Abortion #Idaho #utpol
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/10/18/idaho-abortion-law-moms-are-taking/
@rene_mobile@infosec.exchangeI just watched the #BlackHat #OpenAI #HuggingFace talk (#OpenAI understands it themselves. However, emergence is still no indication of actual intelligence, and the talk is again ripe with anthropomorphism.
3. Yes, it is surprising and somewhat terrifying how good these LLM agent loops have become in finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. We are seeing a much stronger version of the earlier next-generation fuzzing leap in tool capabilities.
4. The comparison with fuzzing and other tools is important for another reason: #OpenAI conducted their experiments on the live Internet. No, forcing internal test runs to go through a proxy server is *not the same as running in an isolated environment*. If there is a connection to a live production system, it is by definition not an effective sandbox. What happened to people letting their cool new fuzzers run live on non-consenting production targets on the Internet back then? They were criminally liable. Why should #OpenAI not be held liable for any damages caused by their systems?
Just because you don't understand the complexity that you built doesn't mean you aren't responsible for what it does!
5. The agent loops first successfully started exploited their proxy server on May 26th, discovered July 4th-6th as active exploitation and takeover. Credentials were revoked and the proxy server patched. "At this point, AI training and evaluations resume."
WHAT THE ACTUAL F...? You discovered emergent behavior in your overly complex system that you didn't understand, saw active exploitation of your internal systems to an extent that they were owned with admin privileges, and your response was to patch the uppermost surface holes, and then continue letting the out-of-control complex system run and continue on the same course? You didn't think to, let's see, maybe stop or at least pause the highly irresponsible experiment while figuring out - in detail - what went wrong, why, and how to avoid the same thing happening again on a systematic level?
6. On July 8th, completely unsurprisingly, the LLM agent loops continue to do the same thing and find another surface hole that hasn't been patched yet to take over again. Why should this have stopped? You haven't done any root cause analysis on the system level. Why do you expect that the problem should have stopped?
7. It takes another 11 days to discover that this is happening again. So you turned the system that had broken something back on again without a detailed root cause analysis and then didn't even watch carefully? I can't even...
8. And no, the response is not to fight fire with fire. Complexity on the attacker side (#OpenAI is the attacker, not the defender - they are the guilty perpetrator, not the innocent victim of circumstance) should be fought with *reduced* attack surface on the defender systems. Adding LLM agent loops that the "frontier" companies themselves quite obviously have no control over to already brittle systems with the hope of auto-patching your way out of vulnerabilities does not seem like a wise course of action. You don't mitigate complexity with even more complexity. The next 2 years will be ... exciting - and your best bet is going to be to disable all dependencies and complex interactions that your production systems don't absolutely require.
