Tootfinder

Quanta Magazine authors Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz strike up a conversation with Ellie Pavlick (Research Scientist at Google Deep Mind) about the differences and similarities between the way people understand language, what NLP algorithms do, and the fact that such conversations more often than not shed light into more than Linguistics' computational side.
"Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?"

Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans? | Quanta Magazine
AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into both AI and the human mind.

I guess there's no real need to explain why I'm doing this, but there's always someone who was lucky enough to be living in the jungle for a while (or something like that), disconnected from everything.
Hypothetical jungle person: I envy you.
Summary: I'm tired of big corporations stealing everything they can to train their #LLMs, and I'm also tired of companies like #Microsoft being active collaborators of the Trump regime.

Could anyone spare a "Like" for these kids who are trying to plant some seeds of Open Source in the USA Midwest?
#FOSS

Looks like the USPS shut down the covidtests.gov at 8:00 PM EDT on 3/9/2025, per text on the website.
I'm feeling somewhat fortunate in that I got my order placed and received in the last couple weeks.
If they had too many tests stockpiled, better management and allowing people to order additional test kits seems like a better choice than destroying good tests. 
#CovidTests…

#harvard Very nice comments at the #nytimes who mend wrath with high literacy:
"Trump and the ignorant like him have always wanted (...) As they rest in the shallow, dirty bathwater of their reactionary, time-worn bigotries, misconceptions, and lies they tell to explain their bitterness a…

Why Harvard Decided to Fight Trump
The Trump administration will freeze over $2 billion in federal funds because Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands. Harvard leaders believed saying no was worth the risk.

"Go is a triumph in developer experience and efficiency, a language and a runtime created by very experienced designers built to solve a particular problem in a lightweight manner. Just like PostgreSQL and Git, some technologies survive Darwinian evolutionary cataclysms and rise to the top of their craft. Without any doubt, Go belongs to this select group, and if somewhat naïvely we take the past 15 years as a proof, its future looks definitely bright."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-age-of-concurrency/

Quanta Magazine Staff Writer Yasemin Saplakoglu describes the various ongoing inter-disciplinary efforts to advance our scientific understanding of the Human brain. Computer scientists and computational neuroscientists collaborate as the latter borrow mathematical models from the former, and studies ways to incorporate new biological data to enhance, or supplant existing computational models.
"AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That's OK."

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK | Quanta Magazine
The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

Subject: Testing post
Testing again. I like testing
@…
#TryNodeBB

"Trofim Lysenko était un scientifique soviétique dont le déni dogmatique de la science a conduit Š une famine de masse lorsque ses idées ont été appliquées Š l'agriculture. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ressemble beaucoup Š Lysenko dans son déni de la science. Ses résultats seront-ils aussi désastreux ?"
#lysenkisme

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

Wow, what a weird rabbit-hole I just ended up down.
So, the “Spread Mastodon" page (tutorial?) recommends a cool-sounding browser extension as an alternative to all those constantly-dead 'fedifinder' / Twitter-person-looker-upper-tools: the ‘Whosum Social Assistant' browser extension.
Sounds cool! Sounds like the correct solution to this problem!

@…
I'd like to join tootfinder.ch.
I see in your profile that you link to it but I did find your fedi address first on your site:
https://tootfinder.ch/join.php

8 Light writer Taylor Keazirian argues in favor of maintaining a set of "living" documents as part of software development project efforts. Common misconceptions about software documentation are addressed and refuted with insights on what a minimal technical set of documents for a software project should look like.
"Mastering Technical Documentation"

Mastering Technical Documentation | 8th Light
Technical documentation is an essential part of successful software development teams. Learn actionable strategies to create clear, maintainable, and effective docs. Boost efficiency, reduce bottlenecks, and empower your team.

"Trofim Lysenko était un scientifique soviétique dont le déni dogmatique de la science a conduit Š une famine de masse lorsque ses idées ont été appliquées Š l'agriculture. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ressemble beaucoup Š Lysenko dans son déni de la science. Ses résultats seront-ils aussi désastreux ?"
#lysenkisme

True story time. ~7 years ago, onsite team meeting
New hire said when starting job, they thought "model" in job description meant we take photos, wondered where the girls were. Initially sounded like joke, but as they kept going, I realized they were serious. Next few years confirmed laziness, lack of curiosity.
How do you see "model" in #DataAnalytics job &amp…

I'm 37 years old and I finally finished a #JRPG game for the first time in my life ( #SeaOfStars ).
I like them a lot, but I often get bored of the grinding, or I have to leave it for some time and when I come back I don't remember what I was doing.
Why I managed to finish it this time? Because I had more important, stressing and boring things to do instead, and my brain demanded procrastination. #ADHD

This was it all along and I didn't find it...
sometimes search engines need to make themselves easier to find!
But I'm glad...
I'm glad that I finally found it...after losing it like 2-3 weeks ago!
https://www.tootfinder.ch/

Le DOGE a le soutien des Américains. Arrêtez de vous faire des illusions, les gens.
Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/polls/doge-elon-musk.html

Is my profile hostile enough?
I mean am I saying:
"If you do x, I will mute you"
"If you do y, I will block you"
etc.?
I guess my most "hostile" thing in my profile is:
"Replyguys/Attackers vs Mastodon/Fediverse: What happened? Did the attack stop!?"
It was more hostile earlier, I said something like:
I won you loser Replyguys, I have a filter shield now!
I try to make it nicer and more neutral...…

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

@… thank you for noticing my zirk.us post.
At the time I did not have any receipts, I just blocked them for personal reasons...
If I get any future receipts I'll save them so I can show them...
Also I'm deleting that post since otherwise it may seem like I'm throwing baseless accusations at instances...

I am knitting Earthly in Patons Linen (cotton, linen, viscose) and it’s my first time working with linen.
I was told, and everything I’m reading, and watching on YouTube emphasizes the importance of blocking my linen swatches. I hand washed in warm water with agitation, and am tumble drying now. After it’s dry, I’ll machine wash and dry the swatches like my son will when he’s living with the finished sweater. The swatches have become very soft, have grown a bit in length, but so far the width seems stable. Will see how second blocking goes. It’s going to be a very nice sweater if I can get the sizing right. Using the EZ PZ Gauge Ruler to measure, and the stitches were better defined after the first blocking.
Planning to make an XL (size 46” chest) depending on what happens with the swatches, since according to Google, yarn can be machine washed and tumbled dry, it may shrink up to 10%, (which would make the XL a 43.2” fit) BUT I had a bamboo ribbon yarn top shrink to child size in my washer (still sad about that, the pre wash size was perfect!) so I’m gun shy. RIP Coachella tank in Tahki Yarns Bali ribbon. I’d use that yarn again, but definitely wet block, and handwash (it got accidentally thrown into the washing machine)
#knitting #earthly #ErikaKnight #swatching

Tar Hollow State Park
Taken 8 May 2024
#ThickTrunkTuesday #FallenTree #Ohio #StatePark

I have a relatively new #ASUS ProArt13 laptop where I still have a #Microsoft #Windows installation so I can keep upgrading its firmware (I planned removing it once I have a stable #Linux distro with kernel >= 6.14).
I'm surprised by how unstable it is. Just leaving it doing nothing for more than 10 minutes is enough to trigger a #BlueScreenOfDeath (I can reproduce the issue). If I keep doing stuff, it does not crash.
At this point I'm not sure if it's Microsoft's fault or ASUS'... but I suspect the blame falls on Windows side (nothing like that happens on my Linux installation).
#Windows11