Tootfinder

Shame it's not #caturday because Pixie just came and sat in her favourite plant pot right next to me.

Current State in Privacy-Preserving Text Preprocessing for Domain-Agnostic NLP
Abhirup Sinha, Pritilata Saha, Tithi Saha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03204 https://

Current State in Privacy-Preserving Text Preprocessing for Domain-Agnostic NLP
Privacy is a fundamental human right. Data privacy is protected by different regulations, such as GDPR. However, modern large language models require a huge amount of data to learn linguistic variations, and the data often contains private information. Research has shown that it is possible to extract private information from such language models. Thus, anonymizing such private and sensitive information is of utmost importance. While complete anonymization may not be possible, a number of diffe…

Seeing more “but but AI is sentient and alive it’s eugenics if you don’t like it” discourse from the botlickers.
This is so dehumanizing.
I’m a human being, not a fucking algorithm averaging numbers from a stolen set of other numbers on your graphics card, fuck right off.

"Piracy is a human right, collective ownership of the seas, comrades!"
— Erik L. Midtsveen
#Piracy #Privacy #ThePirateBay

"""
In the sixteenth century, lunacy was a constant theme that was never questioned. It was still frequent in the seventeenth century, but started to disappear, and by 1707, the year in which Le François asked the question ‘Estne aliquod lunae in corpora humana imperium?’ (Does the moon have any influence over the human body?), after lengthy discussions, the university decided that their reply was in the negative. In the course of the eighteenth century the moon was rarely cited among the causes of madness, even as a possible factor or an aggravation. But right at the end of the century the idea reappears, perhaps under the influence of English medicine, which had never entirely forgotten the moon, and Daquin, followed by Leuret and Guislain, all admitted the influence of the moon on the phases of maniacal excitement, or at the least on the agitation of their patients. But what is important here is not so much the return of the theme as the possibility and conditions necessary for its reappearance. It reappears entirely transformed, filled with a new significance that it did not formerly possess. In its traditional form, it designated an immediate influence, a direct coincidence in time and intersection in space, whose mode of action was entirely situated in the power of the stars. But in Daquin by contrast, the influence of the moon acts through a whole series of mediations, in a kind of hierarchy, surrounding man. The moon acts on the atmosphere with such intensity that it can set in motion a mass as heavy as the ocean. The nervous system, of all the parts that make up the human organism, is the part most sensitive to atmospheric variations, as the slightest variation in temperature, humidity or dryness can have serious effects upon it. The moon therefore, given the important power that its trajectory exerts on the atmosphere, is likely to act most on people whose nervous fibres are particularly delicate:
“Madness is an exclusively nervous condition, and the brain of a madman must therefore be infinitely more susceptible to the influence of the atmosphere, which itself undergoes considerable changes of intensity as a result of the different positions of the moon relative to the earth.” [Daquin, Philosophie de la folie, Paris, 1792]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Right, it’s time we started an initiative to find and call out (with receipts) accounts on the fediverse engaged in genocide denial and genocide apologism in support of Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
There are accounts (and even whole instances, it would seem) that are engaged in this and, further, attempts to silence the voices, not to mention threaten the livelihoods of, those of us speaking out against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and attempting …

Strengthening legal protection against discrimination by algorithms and artificial intelligence
Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02859 https://…

Strengthening legal protection against discrimination by algorithms and artificial intelligence
Algorithmic decision-making and other types of artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to predict who will commit crime, who will be a good employee, who will default on a loan, etc. However, algorithmic decision-making can also threaten human rights, such as the right to non-discrimination. The paper evaluates current legal protection in Europe against discriminatory algorithmic decisions. The paper shows that non-discrimination law, in particular through the concept of indirect discriminatio…

UN’s Top Court Rules That ‘Clean, Healthy’ Environment Is a Human Right #environment

UN’s Top Court Rules That ‘Clean, Healthy’ Environment Is a Human Right
In a landmark finding, the UN’s top court stated that a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment” is a human right.

'tis already the spooky season for Violet!
Violet turns 13 this month. Doesn't she look fabulous?
#Greyhounds #AdoptDonrShop

#ChristopherHitchens

On The Road - To Xi’An 🗿
在路上 - 去西安 🗿
📷 Minolta Hi-Matic AF
🎞️Kentmere Pan 200
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

4 Oct is the feast of St Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order. He's the patron saint of animals, the environment, and ecologists - so it's also #WorldAnimalDay.
🎨 #LuttrellPsalter f60v (East Anglia c.1325-35)

She's right. So very, very right.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOwANiADYoc/?igsh=dnFiN3M5cjJjZXF6

Irene's Entropy on Instagram: "In a world where the top is trying to tear us apart, know that we hold power in our every day decisions of how we treat our friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is always some commonality in our human experience. Find it. Sometimes it takes work, but it’s what will make this world a better place. #storyteller #musician #news #currentevents #quinceñera #empowerment #love #fyp"
229K likes, 15K comments - irenes.entropy on September 18, 2025: "In a world where the top is trying to tear us apart, know that we hold power in our every day decisions of how we treat our friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is always some commonality in our human experience. Find it. Sometimes it takes work, but it’s what will make this world a better place. #storyteller #musician #news #currentevents #quinceñera #empowerment #love #fyp".

"Nigel Farage joins a disturbingly long list of UK politicians who are trying to win votes with promises of stripping other people of their human rights. If they win, nothing stops them taking away your rights too." -- @… is completely right about this, as #Trump

We are all human, or none of us are. — Common Weal
Nigel Farage joins a disturbingly long list of UK politicians who are trying to win votes with promises of stripping other people of their human rights. If they win, nothing stops them taking away your rights too.

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

👋 Hello! I’m Łukasz. Thirty-something, living in Warsaw, Poland. On fedi since 2021 or so. Right now, I'm merging my two accounts into one and giving this profile a fresh new start.
I live a few parallel lives.
Most of the time I’m a web developer. I work with TypeScript, React and all that jazz. But I still enjoy static site generators and good ol’ HTML/CSS.
In another life, I’m a documentary photographer and photojournalist. I’m interested in activism, art and culture, politics, and pretty much anything interesting happening on city streets. A big part of my photography journey involves documenting protests and demonstrations in Poland, especially those related to human rights and social issues. I’m also drawn to street art, particularly when it carries strong messages.
I occasionally blog and translate. Many years ago I wrote two books about WordPress. However, these days I’m more likely to go outside and touch grass than spend even more time in front of a screen.
Outside of that, expect me to post about mental health and politics. I promise to use CWs when appropriate.
I post in both English and Polish, depending on the topic.
Aaaand that’s it. Nice to meet you! ☺️
#introduction

Moody Urbanity - Nowhere 🔲
情绪化城市 - 无处 🔲
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

DriveQA: Passing the Driving Knowledge Test
Maolin Wei, Wanzhou Liu, Eshed Ohn-Bar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21824 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21824…

DriveQA: Passing the Driving Knowledge Test
If a Large Language Model (LLM) were to take a driving knowledge test today, would it pass? Beyond standard spatial and visual question-answering (QA) tasks on current autonomous driving benchmarks, driving knowledge tests require a complete understanding of all traffic rules, signage, and right-of-way principles. To pass this test, human drivers must discern various edge cases that rarely appear in real-world datasets. In this work, we present DriveQA, an extensive open-source text and vision-…

Slop at work is an act of self rebellion against bureaucracy and must be defended as a basic human right.

Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
JUSTIN: The only human working here, yes. I'm training the animals to work of course, but its slow. Very slow. I've got them right physically, you see, but its the psychology that's difficult. What they want to do is exist; however, I'm trying brain implants and so on but they hate it, it's...it's painful. That's why they rebelled and broke out.
DAYNA: The most developed ones?

The horror of the mass starvation in Gaza and Sudan right now is beyond words. It’s hard to even know what to say about it.
These two famines have in common that they are the result of scorched-earth military campaigns targeting specific ethnic groups. All famines are human-made in this modern world, but these famines are •intentional•.
Who are we, we humans with our so-called civilization, if we still after all these years of trying cannot stop genocides in progress?

TIL: Conspiracy theorists' main drive for believing absurd things is: I have a vague but persistent feeling that someone is getting away with something.
And of course, they are right, we're all getting fucked (/me assumes the 1% isn't here).
#filokwintet #human

Court rules countries must protect human right to stable climate, urging urgent action to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Fictional depiction of mild self-harm, blood.
#WritersCoffeeClub July 23: Share a description you're proud of.
I've been writing a vampire novel lately. Here's a description from the scene when the vampire character proves to the human protagonist that he's been telling the truth:
—
"It's okay, Ada," he gave me a reassuring close-mouthed smile. "Just watch."
He slashed across his wrist in a motion that made the matching scars on my left arm hum. I covered them with my right hand, as if to calm my skin that I wasn't hurting it like that anymore. That we were merely watching someone else.
The cut on Theodore's arm turned red and angry, as expected. And then, just before the wound pooled up enough to bleed, it closed. I watched time run backwards as it disappeared, the skin stitching itself together to leave no trace of the violence imposed on it by the blade.
"What?" I walked up to him as he handed his wrist to me for inspection. I ran the tips of my fingers over the spot where the cut was mere moments before - but Theodore's skin, cold as always, was smooth and unharmed.
—

The ref cam is also stupid. The perspective is way too distant and the jostling of video on a running human without stabilizing technology is too ridiculous to actually show anything.
PGMOL can’t even get VAR right with umpteen HD replays, so maybe they’re happy to have a ragged replay as a face-saving charade.
If it was accurately synced to what Simon Hooper saw, large sections of the game would be blank screens. He’s hopeless. I don’t need a camera affixed to his chest to see t…

In any case, day 2: Ursula K Le Guin.
As I've said elsewhere, part of her science fiction thesis is that "human" can encompass much more than what we mere Terrans think of it as, and that moral standing extends broadly throughout the universe. This is the antithesis of Tokens fantasy, wherein "race" is real and determines moral standing. For Le Guin, it's barely okay to intervene in complex alien politics unless you carefully ensure you're not causing systemic harms; for Tolkien, it's okay to ambush and murder orc children, because they are by nature evil.
Add to her excellent politics Le Guin's masterful worldbuilding and unparalleled range of plots, and you have the one author I loved as a decidedly liberal and naïve teen and love even more now that I'm an adult. She's an absolute legend and deserves a very high place on any list of women authors (or list of authors, period.).
For a short story, try "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" which you can read here: https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf
For fantasy "A Wizard of Earthsea" (also has a nice graphic novel adaptation), or for science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness" or if you want a more anarchist flavor, "The Dispossessed."
I'll close this with an amazing quote from her:
"""
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
"""

Look, if you’re going to “both sides” the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, I’ll tell you the exact same thing I would if you tried to “both sides” The Holocaust: Fuck right off, you sorry, genocide-denying excuse for a human being.

Digital welfare fraud detection and the Dutch SyRI judgment
Marvin van Bekkum, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23843 https://arxiv…

Digital welfare fraud detection and the Dutch SyRI judgment
In 2020, a Dutch court passed judgment in a case about a digital welfare fraud detection system called Systeem Risico Indicatie (SyRI). The court ruled that the SyRI legislation is unlawful because it does not comply with the right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights. In this article we analyse the judgment and its implications. This ruling is one of first in which a court has invalidated a welfare fraud detection system for breaching the right to privacy. We show that the …

Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic in recent weeks to launch The Argument,
a new publication that aims to push back against the populist right by strengthening the ideas and arguments of modern liberalism and convincing readers of their legitimacy.
“To move out of this post-liberal, populist moment towards a better future
— one with equal rights, material prosperity, and commitment to human progress
— will require our government, culture, politics, and people to recom…

The Argument | Substack
Join Us. We're Libbing Out. Click to read The Argument, a Substack publication.

“Individually we are nothing, united we are everything!”
By Akbar Behkalam (1999, oil on canvas)
On the occasion of the merger of IG Metall and the Wood and Plastics Union.

Human brains are not computers, but thinking of mine as a system with wildly insufficient ram and a slow, buggy swap that's always freezing and needing a full reboot is explaining a lot for me right now. #adhd

Concrete Jungle III 🏗️
水泥丛林 III 🏗️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Oh my, the shooting was horrible, right in the middle of him speaking. Just, snuffed out. A human being gone just like that. I once saw someone make an analogy to human death like that, being able to kill a human so simply is like destroying the empire state building with a ball of paper.
#charliekirk #usa

Signs on Capital Crescent Trail next to Kenwood. (Neighborhood that led successful fight to partially reverse road diet on Little Falls Parkway, road where prior to road diet cyclists & pedestrians crossing on trail were repeatedly hit, one killed, by drivers.)

Direct observation of the crossed interhemispheric transfer of the left-right mirror-images in human vision
Albert Le Floch, Guy Ropars
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08703

Direct observation of the crossed interhemispheric transfer of the left-right mirror-images in human vision
Symmetry breaking is common in animal and human brains where the lack of asymmetry often perturbs behavioral and cognitive functions. In particular, the ubiquity of mirror-image confusion in young children, which often persists in dyslexia, is established. However, the very existence of these symmetric mirror-images and their perceptual or memory nature remain controversial. Here, using the noise-activated afterimage method, we demonstrate that a dyslexic with mirror-images is an ideal candidat…

Pig unions are a unifying structure of America's Freikorps. Just as the dismantling of the Wehrmacht left a whole lot of trained thugs with nothing to do in Germany, our falling crime rates have left cops in a similar position of idleness, except that they mostly still have jobs where they can create their own work. https://

Jess👾 (@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange)
Attached: 1 image "Head of Police Union Said" ... Okay I'm just gonna stop you right there. If a police union head said police officers are human beings, I'd start stockpiling wooden stakes, garlic, and holy water. Those motherfuckers make Fox News look trustworthy.

My Personal Privacy - Your resource for achieving better online privacy
Why privacy:
The right to privacy is a well-established, fundamental human right. It is necessary for a safe and just society. It is especially important in regions where intolerance and discrimination are backed by autocratic regimes. While you may not feel the need for privacy in all of your online activity, you should be able to achieve a high level of privacy when you need it. This website and the document…

Court rules: Countries must protect human right to a stable climate. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

But when it comes to ways for meeting the challenge, it always gets very vague. “Educators have a critical role to play” essentially means: “whatever, figure something out.”
Just create “curricula that blend machine efficiency with human judgment.” Right. And we need to encourage “reflection on the learning process itself.” Pray tell me why students should do so. What's the incentive if they’re already using

But when it comes to ways for meeting the challenge, it always gets very vague. “Educators have a critical role to play” essentially means: “whatever, figure something out.”
Just create “curricula that blend machine efficiency with human judgment.” Right. And we need to encourage “reflection on the learning process itself.” Pray tell me why students should do so. What's the incentive if they’re already using

Learning to Look: Cognitive Attention Alignment with Vision-Language Models
Ryan L. Yang, Dipkamal Bhusal, Nidhi Rastogi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21247 https://

Learning to Look: Cognitive Attention Alignment with Vision-Language Models
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) frequently "cheat" by exploiting superficial correlations, raising concerns about whether they make predictions for the right reasons. Inspired by cognitive science, which highlights the role of attention in robust human perception, recent methods have sought to guide model attention using concept-based supervision and explanation regularization. However, these techniques depend on labor-intensive, expert-provided annotations, limiting their scalability. We …

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 07 - Killer
BLAKE: It wasn't an ordinary human being.
BELLFRIAR: It was the body of one.
BLAKE: I think it had been adapted.
BELLFRIAR: What?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/207/349

Oh no it happened - client for a research project I’m working on got upset that we’re doing manual data analysis of survey responses, and complained about why we are so slow when their internal team working on a different report got “everything done in a couple of days with #AI tools”
And then they told us that waiting for proper human analysis is a “waste of time” and that we need to just chuck our dataset into AI and “get it over with”
I really don’t know what to do right now 🥲
Trying to do this properly on their expected timeline will mean very little sleep for multiple days, but giving up on the project quality and dumping it into AI is will make this entire project a waste of time. (As I wouldn’t be able to trust the output of the analysis, or be proud of it to showcase the final report as an example of our work, and not to mention that I don’t want to support this expectation to rush everything at work with these AI models)

Neuroaesthetics and the Science of Visual Experience
Harish Vijayakumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11599 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.1…

Neuroaesthetics and the Science of Visual Experience
Neuroaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field that brings together neuroscience, psychology, and the arts to explore how the human brain perceives and responds to visual beauty. This paper examines the neural mechanisms behind aesthetic experiences, aiming to explain why certain designs or artworks feel emotionally or cognitively "right." By analyzing the interaction between perception, emotion, and cognition, neuroaesthetics reveals how beauty is constructed in the brain and how this understan…

Orwell was literally a peniless immigrant in France.
It's all there in "Down and Out in Paris and London".
It taught him empathy for the poor, who he wrote about as human beings.
This is the antidote to the xenophobia that was being pedalled in London today.
https://

One reason I love winter so much? It’s peak cozy cuddle season. Only downside, no one to cuddle with. Bi/pan and blanket-wrapped, just waiting for the right human. 💖💜💙💛😔
#Pansexual #Bisexual #Cuddle

Tell Congress: NO Funding for Primate Breeding! #AnimalRights

URGENT: Tell Congress NO to Funding Primate Breeding!
Right now, Congress is working on the 2025 federal budget, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has allocated a staggering $30 million to expand primate breeding and research at National Primate Research Centers. This funding will support invasive, unethical experiments on primates—causing unimaginable suffering while advancing unreliable science that fails over 90% of the time in human clinical trials. 🔬 Despite these facts, the NIH asked for $10 million, but the Senate has tripled th…

Housing, food and energy security are “more important now than ever with climate change,”
Haíɫzaqv Hereditary Chief λšλíya sila, Frank Brown, says. 
“Housing is a human right.
It’s imperative we make some progress around ensuring people have adequate housing and that it’s appropriate for the threats that are coming.”
https://

Heiltsuk Nation is building for the climate crisis | The Narwhal
The B.C. First Nation is building energy efficient, affordable homes grounded in culture

Replaced article(s) found for cs.HC. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.HC/new
[1/1]:
- Affordances and Design Principles of The Political Left and Right
Felix Anand Epp, Jesse Haapoja, Matti Nelimarkka

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Urban Spots 🟤
在路上 - 去西安/ 城市的点 🟤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI