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.

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/

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!

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.

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

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.

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