
2025-06-17 14:45:43
US lawyers set up own firms to lead legal fightback in face of Trump onslaught;
Several law firms have capitulated to Trump pressure leaving but some lawyers have left to fight government cuts
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/18/trump-administra…
Neither British nor American: how Europeans speak their own flavour of English
New article on #EuropeanPerspective
https://europeanperspective…
good piece from Rafael Behr on Starmer & migration
"The prime minister’s immigration approach follows a now-familiar pattern: letting fear of a difficult argument get in the way of policy that might work"
Starmer once again demonstrating an absence of leadership skills i.m.o.
#LabourParty #KeirStarmer #UKPol
MIT researchers unveil Self-Adapting LLMs, a framework that enables LLMs to keep improving by generating their own training data based on the input received (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/this-ai-model-never-stops-learning/
google: Google internal webpages (2007)
A directed network of webpages from Google's own sites, and the hyperlinks among them. Edge direction indicates that i hyperlinks to j.
This network has 15763 nodes and 171206 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/google
The arts and education — when they are at their best, anyway — have in common this deep root: they ask us to see and to think and to feel, to see with fresh eyes, to be aware of our own seeing, to be •active• in our seeing.
In that way, both the arts and education are antidotes to the AI hype cycle, and similar endeavors of capitalism run amok.
2/
The latest example of AI-hallucinated citations in court cases comes from... an Anthropic employee:
https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/05/13/anthropics-own-data-scientist-submits-de…
Four years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would be the first state to build its own border wall, lawmakers have quietly stopped funding the project, leaving only scattered segments covering a small fraction of the border.
That decision, made in the waning hours of this year’s legislative session,
leaves the future of the state wall unclear.
Just 8% of the 805 miles the state identified for construction is complete, which has cost taxpayers more than $3 billion to dat…
Thoughts from the @braiduk.bsky.social event thus far (shaped through my own interests and thinking)
People's desire to shape AI in society was very present (but I missed a sense of grassroots work eg AI4LAM in GLAMs, other equivalents)
Science fiction and other creative expressions can help society think through potential models for AI
AI is an extension, intensification of existing technologies
Clearly tensions, temptations between values and efficiencies, which lin…
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/mastodon-updates-its-terms-to-prohibit-ai-model-training/
Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training
creating your own booking agreement
#LiveMusic #MusicianTips
https://muz4now.com/2011/creat…
I'm really torn. I love me my @…, great people, great model, love to support and use.
Buuuuut, I'd also love to use my own domain so I can truly own my own social. However I’m concerned about a single user instance not seeing all my current interactions.
Any advice from you self-hosters? I'm trying out
Trump's Own Staff Don't Think He's Fit to Be President (Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/post/196917/donald-trump-think-unfit-president-damning-interview
http://www.memeorandum.com/250617/p131#a250617p131
The libxml2 maintainer is basically shrugging his shoulders and saying "deal with your own fucking security issues; libxml was never meant to be used in your projects" to google and the rest of the giant corporations that are using his labor without contributing back. I'm totally on board with that.
https://
This Github repository conveniently lists and categorizes prime examples of LLM-based agent applications. Each example application features its own repository folder with its source code (Python), and a helpful README.md file describing its installation and use.
Categories include:
1. Starter AI Agents
2. Advanced AI Agents
3. Autonomous Game Playing Agents
4. Multi-Agent Teams
5. Voice AI Agents
6. RAG-Based Agents
"awesome-llm-apps"
@… How do you take a picture like the one in the post?
Place the camera, start a timer, walk back and "pose"? Shout to a stranger to ask them to take a picture using their own phone/camera?
The workers' freedom must be the work of their own hands, the emancipation and liberation of the working class cannot be granted or imposed by external political parties or authorities, but must be achieved through autonomous, collective action and self-organization.
#Anarchism #Syndicalism
Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training starting July 1, and enforces a new age limit of 16 for users globally (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/mastodon-updates-its-terms-to-prohibit-ai-model-tra…
But I owe a duty to Ireland:
I held her honour in my hand,
This lovely land that always sent
Her writers and artists to banishment
And in a spirit of Irish fun
Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.
James Joyce, Gas From a Burner (1912)
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/authors/classic/Joyce_J/Poetry/Gas_Burn.htm
Since I have my own matrix server that we use for all close family chats, with all the bridges I barely use official clients like Signal and stuff. Feel so free and independent.
Now also pretty. What an amazing android client!
https://fluffychat.im/
Duckduckgo is fine for the time being, but that won't last long. MS wants to drive people to AI.
Maybe we need a foundation-run public search index. Something we can all build our own search front-ends on.
https://www.wired.com/story/bing-microsoft-api-su…
#Windows11's new #StickyNotes app (a thinly disguised #OneNote) is fucking annoying. Since it is so-called "smart", and it attempts to provide context around the "source" of your note, its window is…
Whenever her phone rang or her doorbell sounded, Dorothy Parker would say, “What fresh hell is this?” I’ve taken to repeating it under my breath every time I open my social media apps.
This may sound dark, but it reminds me that I can approach the onslaught of news and opinion with my own attitude: with humor and, above all, with curiosity.
Severance fans, rejoice! Now you, too, can join Macrodata Refinement with your very own MDR keyboard
https://9to5mac.com/2025/04/16/youll-soon-be-able-to-buy-this-severance-inspired-keyboard/
Sonnet 001 - I
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And onl…
Mxplainer: Explain and Learn Insights by Imitating Mahjong Agents
Lingfeng Li, Yunlong Lu, Yongyi Wang, Qifan Zheng, Wenxin Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14246
I was handed a bucket full of lego worm gears https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemPic.asp?P=4716 a few weeks ago and came up with this model:
I always wonder what message it sends when countries turn to internet geo-blocks. It doesn't project confidence.
(Israel's "National Emergency Portal", for example, has been unavailable from non-IL IP ranges since 2021.)
https://www.theverge.com/politics/688875/i
AWS says Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 launched on its Trainium2 GPUs, and Project Rainier, AWS' supercomputer built for Anthropic, uses 500K Trainium2 chips (Kristina Partsinevelos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/aws-chips-nvidia-ai.html
From Bytes to Ideas: Language Modeling with Autoregressive U-Nets
Mathurin Videau, Badr Youbi Idrissi, Alessandro Leite, Marc Schoenauer, Olivier Teytaud, David Lopez-Paz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14761
nice coverage of new bus-stop benches kindly installed by some unidentified people!
https://sfist.com/2025/06/09/renegade-transit-activists-install-their-own-guerilla-benches-at-sf-bus-stops-that-do…
The prospect of imminent US involvement in an Israeli bombing campaign,
which is suggested to be in pursuit of regime change,
has laid bare deep divides in Iran’s population -- even among the opposition.
Many are deeply suspicious of the US’s intentions in Iran, which has a bitter history of foreign adventurism gone awry.
Others do not care who is the one to topple the government.
A large portion of Iran’s population is bitterly opposed to the government,
…
Non-Overlap-Aware Egocentric Pose Estimation for Collaborative Perception in Connected Autonomy
Hong Huang, Dongkuan Xu, Hao Zhang, Peng Gao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14180
israel has just announced that your own eyes are antisemitic. Please do not believe your own eyes.
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing
Congress confronts its own trauma (Burgess Everett/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/06/16/2025/congress-minnesota-lee-smith-trauma
http://www.memeorandum.com/250617/p54#a250617p54
recap from my weekend distro hopping (that was severely limited by the good weather):
- tried Hyprland: cool but I still don't care about tiling window managers; terminals have tabs, emacs is its own window manager, the rest can be full screen or half screen.
- cool to learn about "new" things like Universal Kernel Image, a bit about UEFI, etc.
- I don't like the LEGO approach to build a Desktop; I care about this as much as 10 years ago: 0
It's not that I don't appreciate the offer but I can lubricate my own bicycle chain, thank you very much.
I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin
I don't recall seeing much measurement research on mobile carrier identification from client traffic. Didn't find much in a cursory search.
Does this exist? Is it feasible, particularly with branded devices like this?
Can classification be done by address pools unique, IDs, MACs, user agent strings, default start-up apps, default DNS queries/settings, etc.?
Clue, ideas, and pointers wanted.
Here’s a person, Baldur Bjarnason, @…, who thinks I’m really wrong about LLMs and coding. I mostly don’t agree but the argument is well-presented: https://www.baldurbjarna…
Happy #AutisticPrideDay! ♾️💙
I’m proudly autistic, my brain works in its own unique way, full of different thoughts and feelings all at once. Being autistic is part of who I am, not something to fix. 🧠🧠
I’m also queer and genderfluid, and that’s just another part of my colorful identity. Some days I feel one way, some days another, and that’s okay. 🏳️🌈☂️
Neurodiver…
Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training starting July 1, and enforces a new age limit of 16 for users globally (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/mastodon-updates-its-terms-to-prohibit-ai-model-tra…
A break from the norm? Parametric representations of preference heterogeneity for discrete choice models in health
John Buckell, Alice Wreford, Matthew Quaife, Thomas O. Hancock
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14099
Object personification in #autism: This paper will be very sad if you don't read it - PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30101594/
Object personification is the attrib…
Marina Hyde is a brilliant columnist:
Imagine owning the world’s premier shitposting platform – in fact, having spent $44bn on it, specifically so that your magic mirror would tell you each day that you were the fairest shitposter of all – and then shuffling sheepishly on to your own pixels to mumble something about having gone “too far” with your hurty words.
Geez. Sometimes #Connections feels automatic. Other times the solution is off on its own plane.
#Connections736
Puzzle № 736
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
Holy yikes.
The one perm dev on my current contract gave his notice on Monday - which sucks.
The org has just given the project lead his notice too.
I will soon be the only dev left on a system I desperately do not want to own.
Time to update the CV? 😬
Details from Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer’s study of Trump’s cellphone habits have a way of lingering in the mind.
The president’s personal number is “broadly circulated.”
He picks up calls from unknown numbers, and keeps a photograph of his own face on his lock screen.
The Cellphone in Chief is a “portal,” Parker and Scherer write,
but it’s also a mirror, a security blanket, and a vulnerability.
Their short psychological study suggests a man who is occasio…
Stephen Miller is becoming a victim of his own success (Hayes Brown/MSNBC)
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/stephen-miller-ice-deportation-rcna213491
http://www.memeorandum.com/250618/p26#a250618p26
In this post "Consent-Based Computing", I think Heidi Waterhouse is articulating some my own feelings, reflections and choices about the tools around us today and the tradeoffs I'm prepared to make. #linkTuesday
Thanking my own self for backups... I accidentally deleted my Jellyfin media library yesterday!
Luckily the machine it lives on backs up to an external disk and there's also a backup that runs to a NAS in the house so it was an easy restore.
The Reflexive Integrated Information Unit: A Differentiable Primitive for Artificial Consciousness
Gnankan Landry Regis N'guessan, Issa Karambal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13825
RoboBlimp: Enhancing Middle School STEM through Educational Bioinspired Blimps
Alexia De Costa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13844 https://
By its own nature
A sunflower cannot help
But look down on us.
#dailyhaikuprompt - sunflower
#haiku
#poem
Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/mastodon-updates-its-terms-to-prohibit-ai-model-training/
"Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity."
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work."
"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."
Capitol agenda: Members clash over increasing their own security (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/18/congress/lawmakers-politicians-safety-security-capitol-police-00411806
http://www.memeorandum.com/250618/p115#a250618p115
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #JazzTheatre
Coleman Hawkins:
🎵 His Very Own Blues
#ColemanHawkins
"MediaMatters for America" is good to read. ALWAYS. Here's their story about how media is reporting on, and ignoring, our own governments plans to implement NAZI "ethnic cleansing" deportations.
https://www.mediamatt…
TL;DR:🧵
Today I lost 2 hours because TypeORM ESM NestJS is a fragile combo when it comes to migrations.
No migration:status.
No ESM-compatible CLI.
No schema awareness.
Class name must match filename (with timestamp!).
So I wrote my own migration-status.ts script to compare database state with the migration folder.
Lesson: if you need INSERT INTO "schema"."table", don’t forget the schema.
ORMs give you boilerplate — and tra…
These arguments by @… resonate with my own reasons for not using LLMs in my work, and I appreciate these being written up in a clear manner: https://benui.ca/why-i-refuse-ai/
Tooting My Own Horn: Three Years And Counting
Why don't contractors stay in touch with potential customers? And I extended my blog streak to three years.
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/tooting-my-own-horn-three-years-and-counting/
«This is the original sin of software dev: it’s a pop culture where we’re trained to accept gossip as evidence. That’s fine if you’re debating largely meaningless details like “JavaScript, threat or menace?” but it’s very risky when the system in question is a psychological hazard built out of a Jenga tower of biases and Forer effects.»
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/
I can't tell you how weird it is as a manager to go through burnout blossoming and then sinking in to become a morass of emotional exhaustion and feelings of utter uselessness — while, in parallel, hearing feedback from my reports about how I've helped them struggle through and in most cases escape their own burgeoning burnout over the past few months
Just out here using my own body as a stick to pull my reports out of the quicksand of burnout
Calamus 33 No labor-saving machine
Another poem in a style I don't care for. A series of negations, Whitman declaiming all the things he is not doing. On a theme I also don't care for, Whitman talking about his own legacy.
The nice part is what he does imagine his legacy to be:
these carols, vibrating through the air, I leave,
For comrades and lovers.
I love that phrase "vibrating through the air", delicious poetry. And once again Whitman's declares his passion for comrades and lovers, a return to the central gay theme of Calamus.
Is Christianity losing its religion? In the new issue of Reflections, YDS-related scholars and ministers take up this question and declare their own reasons for Christian faith. https://reflections.yale.edu/
My main bugbear with OVH is that they *still* don't offer "failover IP" (where you can fairly quickly move an IP between different dedicated servers) for IPv4, not IPV6.
And, no, they don't offer "Bring Your Own IP" for IPv6 either, only for IPv4.
So when I recently migrated us to a new server I had to do the DNS TTL dance with the IPv6 side of things.
Oh, and it's still only a /64 per server. Not that anything stops you from just using <…
I'm interested in making my own visualizations of weather radar data to display patterns in a region of the US (covered by multiple stations) over longish periods of time (e.g., a month).
Think something like this year of US radar, but smaller & shorter in my case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPuDPxK88g0
I'm familiar with mapping and animation in Python/R, but not weather radar data. I've been looking for tutorials, but haven't been able to track any down yet. Pointers very much welcome
A Compendium of Subset Search Problems and Reductions relating to the Parsimonious Property
Celina Janet Bartlett
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12255 https://…
Gotta drive 50km with my own car (and fuel) in my (would have been) free time because one of my colleagues used an insurance form in the truck but never replaced it.
So when I needed one (hit a wall at a customer while backing truck into the tight ass space without mirrors - sun kept blinding me), there was none so I now have to go back there to get the paperwork sorted...
Lovely...
New York judge allows Trump to sue his own niece while in office | Courthouse News Service
https://www.courthousenews.com/new-york-judge-allows-trump-to-sue-his-own-niece-while-in-office/
By Israel’s own metric, it has wounded over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza alone.
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing
After all, they called Joe Biden, the former Senator from CapitalOne and a devout Catholic, a socialist and communist.
One of the differences between the Right and Left in the USA is that the Right is dedicated to the idea of political tribal solidarity and social binaries, while the Left puts an overriding emphasis on its own diversity, that of the Right, and that of society.
It is part of how they manage to maintain themselves in power.
New study on the effects of LLM use (in this case on essay writing):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four month…
Trump signed an executive order decrying so-called anti-Christian bias in February,
and a hotline was created in April to encourage State Department workers to call in and snitch on their colleagues who might be acting with any kind of “anti-Christian bias.”
The Religious Liberty Commission was established via another executive order on May 1 during a flashy White House event.
Trump has even established his own Christian “faith” office in the White House, seemingly further…
“Using LLMs makes you stupid” is such an emotionally appealing conclusion that I’m going to consciously work — this post is my public commitment! — not to read •too• much into this one study. As the OP says: small N, not peer reviewed, etc.
But I •will• immediately heed the authors’ “concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance.” However the research shakes out, it seems like good practice to double down on helping students keep their own brains awake and active regardless of the technology available to them.
Related, if I am going to have my own instance how would I choose between mastodon, gotosocial, etc?
https://cosocial.ca/@emd/114690337238365051
If you're fortunate enough to have discretionary income, the LA Tenants Union is helping those in LA targeted by LAPD, DHS, and ICE.
I can't give more details, but know that union members have spent their own money to provide food, water, and medical care to those who need it.
https://gofund.me/4f0c850f…
Scientists say your “mind” isn’t confined to your brain, or even your body
http://qz.com/866352/scientists-say-your-mind-isnt-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-bod…
Sonnet 117 - CXVII
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all,
Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;
That I have frequent been with unknown minds,
And given to time your own dear-purchased right;
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down,
And on just proof surmis…
LOL, what?! Germany is now having its own 'Veterans Day'?! 🤦♀️
https://www.dw.com/es/alemania-celebra-el-primer-día-de-los-veteranos/a-72890966?maca=spa-rss-sp-inter-1008-rdf
I wonder if the claim that Iran wants to develop a #nuclear bomb to destroy Israel is not just as bold a lie as the claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.
We know that even the UN - i.e. the world public - is unashamedly lied to if it benefits its own cause.
Powell's lie led to the Iraq war,
It’s authoritarianism and in-your-face grift all in a neat little uniquely American package
That it it’s his personal brand, not the state, is just the cherry on top.
https://bsky.app/profile/scottlincicome.bsky.social/post/3lrqa6jslpy2x
In an Oxford study, LLMs correctly identified medical conditions 94.9% of the time when given test scenarios directly, vs. 34.5% when prompted by human subjects (Nick Mokey/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/just-add-hu
Sonnet 069 - LXIX
Those parts of thee that the world's eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend;
All tongues, the voice of souls, give thee that due,
Uttering bare truth, even so as foes commend.
Thy outward thus with outward praise is crown'd;
But those same tongues, that give thee so thine own,
In other accents do this praise confound
By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.
They look into the beauty of t…
I love communism because of its vision of a society based on equality, solidarity, and the abolition of class and state oppression. The idea of real communism, as envisioned by thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Karl Marx, inspires me deeply. It’s a world where people freely associate, manage their own workplaces, and share resources according to need. This ideal has never truly been realized in history, which makes it all the more important to keep striving for it.
At the same time, I …
Musk's Own AI Claims He Took Miller's Wife and Mocked Him for It (Ewan Palmer/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/musk-trashes-his-own-ai-over-embarrassing-post-about-him-taking-stephen-millers-wife/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p69#a250609p69
“Using this tragedy to push your own political agenda is disgraceful, people are dead,” Democratic activist Nina Turner replied on X.
“Even for MikeLee, this is beyond disgusting,” political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote on X. “Disinformation, beneath contempt.”
“What the hell is Mike Lee doing? Has he completely lost it?” conservative journalist Brad Polumbo also wrote on X.
“It’s Father’s Day, and you’re spending your time tweeting lies about a tragedy to run cover for …
Sources: Mistral AI has closed or is closing a handful of commercial contracts, each worth $100M over three to five years, as it expands its own infrastructure (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/65f79839-d637-48a7-a0f2-3fab8952b315
Karine Jean-Pierre walks away from Democratic Party to 'follow my own compass' (Asher Notheis/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3430892/karine-jean-pierre-walks-away-from-democratic-party-follow-own-compass-independent-book/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250605/p65#a250605p65
Donald Trump admitted on Truth Social that his mass deportations are hurting farmers and the economy.
Those removals are “taking very good, longtime workers away” from farms and hotels, Trump declared,
adding that those workers are proving “impossible to replace.”
To be clear, Trump was talking about his own immigration policies.
That’s a stunning acknowledgment that Trump’s forced mass removals are targeting hard-working folks and that those undocumented immigrants…
There is little about Scott Jennings,
or the words that come out of his mouth,
that corresponds to reality.
A decade into Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, Jennings is the premier crossover enabler.
He is perhaps CNN’s most recognizable face alongside its primetime anchors,
and he is feted on jokey, tough-talk shows like Bill Maher.
But Jennings is a representation of our own malady,
a projection of a country whose political culture is now…