@Techmeme@techhub.socialTea says hackers accessed a database from more than two years ago, leaking 72,000 images, including 13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tea-app-hacked-13000-phot…
@lschiff@mastodon.sdf.orgExcellent piece by a dear friend of mine about #censorship in our national parks. Read her piece and then use the #DefendResearch toolkits to call your elected officials and write a letter to the editor!
@markhburton@mstdn.socialUrgent action UK readers as MAP’s lifesaving clinic in Gaza forced to close under new displacement order
Please call your MP today, the last day of parliament.
Demand that,
they call on Keir Starmer and David Lammy to:
*urge Israel to rescind these latest evacuation orders
*suspend all arms transfers to Israel, including parts for F-35 fighter jets
*take all possible steps to hold all perpetrators accountable.
Medical Aid for Palestinians
@rberger@hachyderm.io“Obama’s Prophetic Voice Has Never Been More Needed
Dare we hope for audacity?
As various leaders call for resistance against Trump’s march to dictatorship, one prophetic voice has been missing in action. Barack Obama, before he was president, was a professor of constitutional law. He understands the stakes better than anyone. He also knows how to give a powerful and inspiring speech….”
https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php
@aral@mastodon.ar.alCongratulations, UK, you’ve won the Orwell award.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/02/uk-mps-vote-to-proscribe-palestine-action-as-terrorist-group
@cdarwin@c.imPolice arrested over 40 people outside the Trump International Hotel in New York City
as hundreds gathered for a peaceful action led by Jewish leaders
calling for the end to Israel’s starvation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Democracy Now! was at the demonstration and spoke to some of the protesters,
including Motaz Azaiza, renowned photojournalist from Gaza,
and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, who was arrested.
“We’re here to say, ‘Let Gaza live,’ to risk everyt…
@primonatura@mstdn.social"MP Cites DeSmog Reporting to Bolster Call for Ban on Fossil Fuel Advertising"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #FossilFuels
@arXiv_csSE_bot@mastoxiv.pageHow Does LLM Reasoning Work for Code? A Survey and a Call to Action
Ira Ceka, Saurabh Pujar, Irene Manotas, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray, Shyam Ramji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13932
@Dragofix@veganism.social
@arXiv_csHC_bot@mastoxiv.pageHow Viable are Energy Savings in Smart Homes? A Call to Embrace Rebound Effects in Sustainable HCI
Christina Bremer, Harshit Gujral, Michelle Lin, Lily Hinkers, Christoph Becker, Vlad C. Coroam\u{a}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14653
@crell@phpc.socialMessage your congresscritters, NOW. Tell them to order Trump to call off the military.
(He won't listen, but that sets up a direct confrontation sooner rather than later. Which is good for us.)
https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress…
@markhburton@mstdn.socialOnce the Tory Party at prayer, now a voice of conscience.
#CofE #Palestine #BDS
Bishops call on UK government to take action over West Bank settler violence | Anglicanism | The Guardian
@iam_jfnklstrm@social.linux.pizzaSkriv ubder för att stödja att israel släpper in mjölk till spädbarn https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/let_milk_into_gaza_loc/?copy&utm_source=copy&utm_medium=social_s…
@jacobgudiol@mastodonsweden.se"At 6 months in, I think it’s time for food and nutrition advocates, scientists and professionals to call out the MAHA agenda for what it is - it’s a movement with the right vibes, the wrong priorities and solutions, headed up by someone with dangerous thoughts on public health who is not going to improve the health of Americans, nutritional or otherwise."
6 Months of MAHA
@denmanrooke@social.coopWe in Game Workers Unite Ireland stand in solidarity with Animation Workers of Ireland, and the international trade union coalition happening to organise against the threat of AI in the animation industry, and we support their call to acton.
Join them Thursday 12 June at 14:00 at the Pâquier in Annecy!!
#Animation
@jlpiraux@wallonie-bruxelles.social"L'obstruction, le retard ou l'affaiblissement de réglementations démocratiquement adoptées signalent un changement de priorités en faveur du profit privé Š court terme, au détriment des objectifs sociaux et environnementaux Š long terme"
#RulesToProtect #démocratie
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz“I’ve been a very law-abiding citizen and very respectful of authority all my life but I knew I had to do this and it was my duty to do this.”
- Deborah Hinton, 81
“The focus shouldn’t be on Palestine Action. The focus should be on what the government isn’t doing for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
- Father John McGowan, 75
“As a former officer in the British army, I am horrified that the government is misusing our armed forces to be complicit in the genocide rather than to end it.”
- Chris Romberg, 75
“Palestine Action’s methods sit very uneasily with me. It’s difficult to accept that vandalism is the only way to go. However, I feel we have to do something and I support their stand against genocide.”
- Richard Whitmore-Jones, 74
“The policeman said: ‘You’re a bit heavy.’ He had to call one of his friends over to help carry me. I thought that was a bit of a liberty.”
- Trevelyan Evans, 64
#PalestineAction #protests #UKLaw #Gaza #Palestine #Israel
@markhburton@mstdn.socialUrgent action before 12.00 CET / 11.00 BST
Call for the Protection of the Freedom Flotilla and an End to the Gaza Blockade - Deadline 5th June 12.00 CET | Framaforms.org
https://framaforms.org/call-for-the-pr
@cdarwin@c.imTrump took extraordinary action on Saturday by calling up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protests in California,
making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
It is the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialLLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding
@gedankenstuecke@scholar.socialWith every month that passes, it becomes more clear that quitting that cursed place was the right call:
«Peter Kyle said it was clear further action was needed to ensure the government-backed Alan Turing Institute met its full potential. […] Making clear that the Turing 2.0 strategy did not meet government requirements, Kyle indicated that he expected leadership changes at ATI.» 🍿
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/04/minister-demands-overhaul-of-uks-leading-ai-institute-alan-turing
@servelan@newsie.socialAnonymous: "Call to action: US National Protest July 4th! WASHINGTON DC AND EVERY STATE CAPITOL, CITY HALL, AND TOWN HALL. #3E #NoKings #HandsOff #Indivisible #FiftyFiftyOne #StopICE #NoKingsProtest" — Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mxc7liuon6iq5gzapmmwkq22/post/3ls4xdh5voc2e
@cdarwin@c.imMajor medical organizations are suing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services
over actions they call a “public health emergency that demands immediate legal action and correction.”
“He’s doing everything he possibly can to undermine vaccine confidence,”
said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association,
one of the organizations joining the lawsuit.
“Quite frankly, we’ve had e…
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.pageDoc2Agent: Scalable Generation of Tool-Using Agents from API Documentation
Xinyi Ni, Haonan Jian, Qiuyang Wang, Vedanshi Chetan Shah, Pengyu Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19998 …
@arXiv_mathAP_bot@mastoxiv.pageA subsequentially fast dynamo on $\mathbb{T}^3$
Keefer Rowan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23936 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23936…
@arXiv_mathDG_bot@mastoxiv.pageA Riemannian viewpoint on the Amari-Cencov $\alpha$-connections and Proudman-Johnson equations
Martin Bauer, Alice Le Brigant, Cy Maor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00371 https://
