@inthehands@hachyderm.ioIt’s worth noting that even •attempting• this is a hell of a lift, and she has political room to do it because of the steadfast local resistance to ICE and the tremendous international outpouring of support for the Twin Cities — which in turn exist because of the individual and community action of local residents.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIn the interests of starting a more productive dialogue than yesterday's main character was interested in, let's make a #brainstorm thread about design changes to ActivityPub and/or client UI that could actually help address drive-by (often racist) harassment on the fediverse.
Feel free to discuss pros/cons but don't feel an idea needs to be perfect to suggest it. Also since this is a brainstorm don't worry about complexity/implementation cost. If you have a great-but-hard-to-implement idea someone else may think of a way to simplify it.
Note that the underlying problem *is* a social one, do there won't be a technological fix! But tech changes can make social remedies easier/harder.
I've got some to start:
1. Have a "protected mode" that users can voluntarily turn on. Some servers might turn it on by default. In protected mode, users whose accounts are less than D days old and/or who have fewer than F followers can't reply to or DM you. F and D could have different values for same-sever vs. different-server accounts, and could be customized by each user. Obviously a dedicated harasser can get around this, but it ups the activation energy for block evasion and pile-ons a bit. Would be interesting to review moderation records to estimate how helpful this might or might not be. Could also have a setting to require "follows-from-my-server" although that might be too limiting on private servers. Restriction would be turned off for people you mention within that thread and could be set to unlimit anyone you've ever mentioned. Would this lock new users out of engagement entirely? If everyone had it on via a default, you'd have you post your own stuff until someone followed you (assuming F=1). One could add "R non-moderated replies" and/or "F favorites" options to soften things; those experiencing more harassment could set higher limits. When muting/blocking/reporting someone who replied to your post, protected mode could be suggested with settings that would have filtered the post you're reporting.
2. Enable some form of public moderation info to be displayed when both moderator and local server opt-in. Obviously each server would be able to ignore federated public tags. I'm imagining "banned from X server for R reason (optional link to evidence)" appearing on someone's profile & an icon on their PFP in each post viewed by someone on server Y *if* the mods of server X decide it's appropriate *and* server Y opts in to displaying such tags from server X specifically. Alliances of servers with similar moderation preferences could then have moderation action on one server result in clear warning propagation to others without the other mods needing to decide whether to also take action immediately. In some cases different moderation preferences would mean you wouldn't take action yourself but would keep the notice up for your users to consider. Obviously the "Scarlet Letter" vibe ain't great, but in some cases it's deserved, and when there's disagreement between servers about that, mods on server Y could either disable a specific tag or disable federation of mod tags from that server in general. Even better shared moderation tools are of course possible.
3. Different people/groups have different norms around boosting. Currently we only have a locked/public binary. Without any big protocol changes, adding a "prefers boosts/doesn't" setting which would warn in the UI before a viewer chooses to boost if the preference is "doesn't" could help. This could be set per-post, but could also have defaults and could have different values for same-server or not, or for particular servers. For example, I could say "default to prefer boosts from users on my server but not from users on other servers" or "default to prefer boosting on all servers except mastodon.social." Last option might be harder to implement I guess.
#ActivityPub #Meta #Harassment
@ubuntourist@mastodon.socialThe DC Activist Street Band (DCASB) rehearsing at Lamont Plaza in Mount Pleasant, DC, April 2.
https://nextdoor.com/p/GhkW_g76BwzF?utm_source=share&extras=NjgzNzM5ODk=&…
@paulwermer@sfba.socialThe President and his lickspittles in Congress are introducing legislation to shield fossil fuel companies from liability for their intentional and knowing actions to emit GHGs, fully aware of the damage, destruction and death that would cause.
Please, if you live in California, write you congress people and tell them to oppose this legislation. It's easy, I just did it using this action network link:
@PaulWermer@sfba.socialThe President and his lickspittles in Congress are introducing legislation to shield fossil fuel companies from liability for their intentional and knowing actions to emit GHGs, fully aware of the damage, destruction and death that would cause.
Please, if you live in California, write you congress people and tell them to oppose this legislation. It's easy, I just did it using this action network link:
@ubuntourist@mastodon.social15,000 people singing to call on ICE to leave their jobs!
🎵🎵🎵
Oh-h-h, It's okay to change your mind,
Show us your courage,
Leave this behind,
It's okay to change your mind,
And you can join us,
Join us here any time
🎵🎵🎵
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVEuV1hkvjG/
@cdarwin@c.imOrganizers across the U.S. are planning more than 3,000 local events Saturday for
No Kings Day of Nonviolent Action.
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/17/trump-no-kings-protest-safety-tips
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.itTo be clear, this is #ICE killing another person. They way they terrorize and disappear people, it is only natural to run from them.
"Ellis also pointed out that local law enforcement agencies in Chatham County have restrictive chase policies, and would not have been able to take the action ICE did."
"CCPD Chief Jeff Hadley offered his condolences to Davis’ family, say…
@StephenRees@mas.toFrom Bill McKibben
"I work on solar energy because it will help limit the damage from climate change, and because it’s potentially liberating, empowering local communities instead of vast multinationals. But there are days when I work on solar energy just because it’s the sharpest stick with which to poke Exxon and Chevron and the rest, companies that I despise. Companies that if I’m honest I hate, though I try hard not to hate. They are the vampires of our world ..."
@hex@kolektiva.socialRE: https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/116386013892596738
@… 's "The Sound and Fury of a Collapsing Order" hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the time that things can change. The ways in which they change matter.
Petroleum is the primary pillar of the global order, and weakening it's grip weakens that order. As an anarchist, I'm obviously more focused on direct action but there are absolutely local policies that are also important.
Attacking car-centric infrastructure as a political issue makes it easier to change other things.
@arXiv_csLG_bot@mastoxiv.pageReplaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[6/6]:
- Fast-ThinkAct: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Verbalizable Latent Planning
Chi-Pin Huang, Yunze Man, Zhiding Yu, Min-Hung Chen, Jan Kautz, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Fu-En Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09708 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115898618760721320
- Universality of Many-body Projected Ensemble for Learning Quantum Data Distribution
Quoc Hoan Tran, Koki Chinzei, Yasuhiro Endo, Hirotaka Oshima
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18637 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_quantph_bot/115967001797773134
- FROST: Filtering Reasoning Outliers with Attention for Efficient Reasoning
Haozheng Luo, Zhuolin Jiang, Md Zahid Hasan, Yan Chen, Soumalya Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19001 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115972068838908815
- Analysis of Shuffling Beyond Pure Local Differential Privacy
Shun Takagi, Seng Pei Liew
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19154 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115971701218309765
- CryoLVM: Self-supervised Learning from Cryo-EM Density Maps with Large Vision Models
Weining Fu, Kai Shu, Kui Xu, Qiangfeng Cliff Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02620
- XtraLight-MedMamba for Classification of Neoplastic Tubular Adenomas
Sultana, Afsar, Rahu, Singh, Shula, Combs, Forchetti, Asari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04819
- Flow-Based Conformal Predictive Distributions
Trevor Harris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07633 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/116045671088130364
- GOT-Edit: Geometry-Aware Generic Object Tracking via Online Model Editing
Shih-Fang Chen, Jun-Cheng Chen, I-Hong Jhuo, Yen-Yu Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08550 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/116046486984991360
- UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report
Venus Team, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09082 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/116050980295461008
- The Wisdom of Many Queries: Complexity-Diversity Principle for Dense Retriever Training
Xincan Feng, Noriki Nishida, Yusuke Sakai, Yuji Matsumoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09448 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_bot/116051022881293649
- Intent Laundering: AI Safety Datasets Are Not What They Seem
Shahriar Golchin, Marc Wetter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16729 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/116101884238965526
- The Metaphysics We Train: A Heideggerian Reading of Machine Learning
Heman Shakeri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19028 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCY_bot/116125225694943789
- Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks
David Schmotz, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20156 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/116125330557447048
- A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite
Maijunxian Wang, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20159 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/116125664801070747
toXiv_bot_toot
@arXiv_csLG_bot@mastoxiv.pageProbing Dec-POMDP Reasoning in Cooperative MARL
Kale-ab Tessera, Leonard Hinckeldey, Riccardo Zamboni, David Abel, Amos Storkey
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20804 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20804 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20804
arXiv:2602.20804v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is typically framed as a decentralised partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), a setting whose hardness stems from two key challenges: partial observability and decentralised coordination. Genuinely solving such tasks requires Dec-POMDP reasoning, where agents use history to infer hidden states and coordinate based on local information. Yet it remains unclear whether popular benchmarks actually demand this reasoning or permit success via simpler strategies. We introduce a diagnostic suite combining statistically grounded performance comparisons and information-theoretic probes to audit the behavioural complexity of baseline policies (IPPO and MAPPO) across 37 scenarios spanning MPE, SMAX, Overcooked, Hanabi, and MaBrax. Our diagnostics reveal that success on these benchmarks rarely requires genuine Dec-POMDP reasoning. Reactive policies match the performance of memory-based agents in over half the scenarios, and emergent coordination frequently relies on brittle, synchronous action coupling rather than robust temporal influence. These findings suggest that some widely used benchmarks may not adequately test core Dec-POMDP assumptions under current training paradigms, potentially leading to over-optimistic assessments of progress. We release our diagnostic tooling to support more rigorous environment design and evaluation in cooperative MARL.
toXiv_bot_toot
@pre@boing.worldWent to see Stuart Goldsmith doing his work in progress stand up show about the climate at the local theater.
He's a funny man and has a good friendly personality (or stage-persona at least I guess) and is terrified and anxious and angry about the way the people are treating the world without out even being their fault.
It's a good show, he's a good guy, you should go see him do it at Edinburgh or whenever he's in your town.
No action you can take as an individual really makes much difference to the end of the world stuff. You should be vegan perhaps, ethical banking perhaps. But really the only thing that works is mass social pressure, so talking about it is the best thing you can do. If you can't be vegan, at least say you are.
Perhaps telling everyone on linked-in to book him for their climate sessions is best he reckons 😆 but I don't do corporate social media at all really, so Mastodon and cross post to Bluesky is the best thing I can do perhaps.
Stu's a friend of a friend, we've met before. Don't think he recognized me sitting in the front row without context against the stage lights though. Maybe a little at the end with some context when he's rushing to get home.
Still love that Captain Pike hairdo.
#comedy #climate #stuGoldsmith #pleasance #london
