Tootfinder

Une belle gang de toto ceux la
"La chambre de commerce réclame des « études impartiales » pour mesurer l’imprégnation de l’arsenic dans la population, explique M. Beaupré, qui dit ne pas savoir si la Direction de santé publique est impartiale."
Pis eux, sont impartiaux??

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

Une exposition prolongée Š de faibles concentrations de PFAS peut perturber les fonctions cérébrales, endommager les neurones et altérer la mémoire et le comportement des souris, selon une récente recherche.
#PFAS

Replaced article(s) found for cs.DS. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DS/new
[1/1]:
- An Objective Improvement Approach to Solving Discounted Payoff Games
Daniele Dell'Erba, Arthur Dumas, Sven Schewe

Le trafic est perurbé entre Juvisy et Dourdan et entre Juvisy et Saint-Martin d'Étampes dans les 2 sens.
Pour plus d'informations sur cette perturbation, consultez le fil X du RER C.
Motif : panne de signalisation (dysfonctionnement des feux de signalisation dans le secteur de Paris Austerlitz).
🤖 21/07 18:12

Went to see a Hoopla improv show at The Bell, a mix of half a dozen different groups doing different thin
gs. "Shuffle improv" were basing their scenes on a shuffled playlist built by the audience on the way in
and an interesting format from a improv-as-a-second-language group chatting about their experiences in a
foreign land and basing their scenes off it. The group called "twelve people" only had six but were good
chaotic fun.
Lots of stuff about cooking and food.
I found myself pondering optimum size for an improve group. In general the larger groups seemed more fun to me, with the exception of three-person "burn the script" who did excellent work. More than eight wouldn't fit in the tiny stage at that venue. In rehearsal I like to have the group split in half and perform for each other. Hard to do that with fewer than six. Still up in the air if our group will get off the ground or not. More people does mean more calendar clashes even if it makes for a cheaper-per-person room hire.
Everyone has instagram pages, which are no use to me. Won't link or visit there. Interesting that nobody has a Twitter profile any more and of course nobody seems to have just a damned website which still strikes me as madness. Imagine not wanting to own your own space on the web?
#improv #london

Informo a todos que até o final deste mês essa conta serš apenas sobre eu me lamuriando por estar trabalhando durante as férias rs. Se estiver incomodando demais, me coloquem no mudo por 10 dias, pois eu receio que serš impossível eu me refrear de reclamar frequentemente aqui rs.

MoR: Better Handling Diverse Queries with a Mixture of Sparse, Dense, and Human Retrievers
Jushaan Singh Kalra, Xinran Zhao, To Eun Kim, Fengyu Cai, Fernando Diaz, Tongshuang Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15862

MoR: Better Handling Diverse Queries with a Mixture of Sparse, Dense, and Human Retrievers
Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is powerful, but its effectiveness hinges on which retrievers we use and how. Different retrievers offer distinct, often complementary signals: BM25 captures lexical matches; dense retrievers, semantic similarity. Yet in practice, we typically fix a single retriever based on heuristics, which fails to generalize across diverse information needs. Can we dynamically select and integrate multiple retrievers for each individual query, without the need for manual…

Russland: Haben weitere Ortschaft eingenommen
Russische Truppen haben nach Angaben des Verteidigungsministeriums in Moskau die Ortschaft Olexandro-Schultyne in der östlichen ukrainischen Region Donezk eingenommen. Zudem seien über Nacht ukrainische Energie-Infrastruktur, militärisch-industrielle Einrichtungen und Flugplätze angegriffen worden, teilt das Moskauer Ministerium mit. Die Angaben lassen sich nicht unabhängig überpr…
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Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Lawrow: Europäische Truppen in Ukraine "inakzeptabel" ++
Russlands Außenminister Lawrow hat einen möglichen Friedenseinsatz europäischer Truppen in der Ukraine als "völlig inakzeptabel" bezeichnet. Die Ukraine testete laut Präsident Selenskyj erfolgreich eine Rakete mit 3.000 Kilometern Reichweite.

When Algorithms Infer Gender: Revisiting Computational Phenotyping with Electronic Health Records Data
Jessica Gronsbell, Hilary Thurston, Lillian Dong, Vanessa Ferguson, Diksha Sen Chaudhury, Braden O'Neill, Katrina S. Sha, Rebecca Bonneville
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14150

When Algorithms Infer Gender: Revisiting Computational Phenotyping with Electronic Health Records Data
Computational phenotyping has emerged as a practical solution to the incomplete collection of data on gender in electronic health records (EHRs). This approach relies on algorithms to infer a patient's gender using the available data in their health record, such as diagnosis codes, medication histories, and information in clinical notes. Although intended to improve the visibility of trans and gender-expansive populations in EHR-based biomedical research, computational phenotyping raises signif…