Tootfinder

Opt-in global Mastodon full text search. Join the index!

@hikingdude@mastodon.social
2025-12-23 21:12:47

A this photo from yesterday's location scouting could fit for #thickTrunkTuesday , right?
It's been quite a time since I went to a new location with the clear intent of location scouting. - It took me a while until I was able to "see" something as I was so much in walking/hiking-mode.
But it was a good experience to do it again.

This black-and-white image captures a serene and somewhat mysterious winter scene. A large, leafless tree stands prominently in the foreground, its intricate branches reaching out in all directions. The tree is surrounded by a light layer of frost, adding a delicate texture to the scene. The background is shrouded in a thick fog, creating a sense of depth and obscuring the landscape beyond the tree. The fog gives the image an ethereal and tranquil quality, evoking a sense of calm and solitude.…
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
2025-10-20 18:04:26

Has anyone making this feature actually asked any accessibility experts and any disabled people if this is a good idea?
Because in practice this will give you terrible results, because AI can’t know what you intent do communicate with the image.
Even if it would give good results (it doesn’t and never will) and you’re too lazy to write alt text yourself, it would be better to do this on the receiving end where the disabled person could fine-tune generative alt text to their specific needs.
mastodon.social/@MonaApp/11540

@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to
2025-11-16 09:17:07

"For Levy and Newborn, the stakes were clear, and the title of the first chapter of the book says it all: “The Challenge is World Champion Kasparov”. Said chapter describes in detail the match between a first iteration of a chess supercomputer by IBM, the less well-known “Deep Thought”. It was a strong contender, having defeated quite a few grandmasters along the way (including the aforementioned Levy), but was no match for Kasparov in August 1989."

David Levy & Monty Newborn
The literature about and around chess is too long to enumerate in an article of a thousand words, and this is clearly not my intent. If you want to learn chess, there are so many good books around, it is hard to pick just one. There are, however, fewer books explaining the art of how to teach a computer to play chess; and the one chosen for this issue of the Library section does a magnificent job at precisely that.

@arXiv_csIR_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-09-30 07:58:14

How good are LLMs at Retrieving Documents in a Specific Domain?
Nafis Tanveer Islam, Zhiming Zhao
arxiv.org/abs/2509.22658 arxiv.org/pdf/25…

How good are LLMs at Retrieving Documents in a Specific Domain?
Classical search engines using indexing methods in data infrastructures primarily allow keyword-based queries to retrieve content. While these indexing-based methods are highly scalable and efficient, due to a lack of an appropriate evaluation dataset and a limited understanding of semantics, they often fail to capture the user's intent and generate incomplete responses during evaluation. This problem also extends to domain-specific search systems that utilize a Knowledge Base (KB) to access da…

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-11-28 23:49:06
Content warning: Discussion of rape in Le Guin's fiction

Just finished "Orsinian Tales" by Ursula K Le Guin. It's... good, but not nearly as anarchist as a lot of her other work. These are short fiction stories weaving mostly through a fictional Eastern European country during the cold war, although some stretch farther back into history.
As typical for Le Guin a bunch of male protagonists, and a few parts that might seem to excuse sexual assault, which I've always found an odd thing in Le Guin's work (the rape in "The Dispossessed" bothered me too; the lack of strong female characters in "A Wizard of Earthsea" also sticks out to me). On the other hand, I've read from an interview that she wrote "Earthsea" absolutely knowing her audience (teenage boys) and intentionally writing something that would sell, which speaks to true mastery of her craft (I think the opening of "The Word for World is Forest" demonstrates what an expert can do wielding an intimate understanding of pulp science fiction tropes with intent, for example).
In any case, she writes sublime similes and sparse characters who nevertheless seem to embody deep wisdom about the human condition. I feel that often enough just a few words or sentences in a story bear forth hefty wisdom while around them Le Guin constructs something like an austere painting in muted tones, full of rich details that one can easily miss.
#AmReading #ReadingNow