Tootfinder

Für die breite Verwendung von #KI, speziell im Kontext #Schule, muss sichergestellt sein, dass #LLMs user:innen nicht zu selbstgefährdendem Verhalten animieren.
Das Nonprofit Transluce arbeitet an verschie…

Surfacing Pathological Behaviors in Language Models
We train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to craft realistic natural-language prompts that elicit specified behaviors in frontier open-weight models (Llama 3.1/4, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek-V3), using a proposed variational lower bound to guide the search.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Amyl and the Sniffers:
🎵 Doing In Me Head
#AmylandtheSniffers
https://amylandthesniffers.bandcamp.com/track/doing-in-me-head
https://open.spotify.com/track/4QDEpb3g04PA7JqcgJ4XdX
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thank you, satan

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Judi Jackson:
🎵 Peel Me A Grape
#JudiJackson
https://open.spotify.com/track/2M9M7iOki5mRT0ZdVKT7PK
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(1/3) Please join me today on Zoom at 12pm ET / 11am CT / 10am MT / 9am PT for "Beyond the Algorithmic Feed," a free MediaEd Club webinar for the Media Education Lab:
https://mediaeducationlab.com/index.php/events/beyond-algorithmic-feed
While som…

I #AmWriting
I am #writing through brain fog.
I am writing through gut-wrenching pain.
I am writing through the unexplained chaos of my digestive system.
I am writing without being able to eat.
I am creating through it.
And for some reason, I want—I need—"…

I've been using ClickUp for a few months now...and like every other productivity tool I've used over the last number of years it has its pros and cons.
It's got a lot of features but sometimes pretty basic features don't "just work" - and that makes me unhappy. 🙁
For example, right now I have some recurring tasks that will not allow an update to their due date manually. If I set a new date it resets back to the original date. Even more concerning is that this isn't clear from the UI.
The UI acts as if the change was successful but a page refresh reveals the change didn't save.
But the real reason I wanted to post wasn't about ClickUp particularly but about chatbots in general. They verified that my issue was an actual bug and created a ticket for it but the way I've been instructed to view the ticket status is by opening the chatbot, telling it I want information on my ticket (pasting in the ticket ID) and after doing all that I get this
5/6: Umm, no. I want to see an actual ticket please. I don't want to have to talk to a chatbot to see it. Chatbots really are great for a lot of things (during the free trial of ClickUp I found the chatbot quite helpful in learning how to do things without searching through docs) but this sort of "there is a direct record", please no. Or let me paste it in and do the lookup immediately - and provide a permalink so I don't need to chat every time!
I'm sticking with ClickUp at the moment, but one of these days when I magically get a large amount of free time, I'm going to write my own solution...I've only been saying that for a few years now. ;-)
#clickup #productivity #chatbots #projectmanagement #tasks

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Me: "Would you like something healthy to go with those awful nitrate-ful hot dogs? Maybe an apple?"
Her: "Butt cancer!"
Me: "🎶butttttttttt cancerrrrrrrr 🎶"
13yo: "can you both please SHUT UP and let me eat???"
#parenting

Two rather different implementations of a V10 engined car, today at the Down Royal Motor show.
There was a nice selection of cars on display, and as usual at these things, some gems in the visitor car park as well. https://timfoster.smugmug.com/Events/Down-Royal-Motor-Show-20…

Down Royal Motor Show 2025 - timfoster
All of the photos under timfoster.smugmug.com are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please contact me if you want to use any of these photos for commercial purposes. You're welcome to print any photos you like for your own use.

My #trans friends are hurting and in pain. Whenever someone comes to me that way, I ask them to also share some joy. For those of you who would like, please share some #trans #joy here. Let’s lift each other up…

Hey, folks who understand alt text and limited vision accessibility:
I have need to write alt text for the diagram below. The alt text needs to be comprehensible to somebody who is encountering this kind of diagram for the ••very first time••. I could describe the images using the relevant jargon, but that would only serve people who already know the thing this activity is teaching them!
Any suggestions for how I could write good alt text for something like this? Is it possible? (The horizontal black bars are minus signs, i.e. subtraction. This is clear from context in the text, but probably not clear in the image.)
PLEASE NOTE: I am looking for people with ••relevant accessibility expertise••, not just random best shots from people who (like me) don’t really know much about this kind of problem.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #Glastonbury
Amyl and the Sniffers:
🎵 Doing In Me Head (Glastonbury 2025)
#AmylandtheSniffers
https://amylandthesniffers.bandcamp.com/track/doing-in-me-head
https://open.spotify.com/track/4QDEpb3g04PA7JqcgJ4XdX
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🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Roadhouse
Harry Nilsson:
🎵 Me and My Arrow
#HarryNilsson
https://wetbridgerecords.bandcamp.com/album/ty-segall-loch-lomond-gotta-get-up-me-my-arrow-harry-nilsson-cover-7inch
https://open.spotify.com/track/5KjRITicSHJM88w3U9LwLM
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🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #LateJunction
Nik Rawlings:
🎵 I was in the tide, the tide was in me
#NikRawlings
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Honestly I’m really disappointed. Why releasing a new model if it’s worse than the previous one?
Fairphone 5 always seemed like a miracle, a phone that actually cared about being fair and that had good postmarketOS support while still having good modern specs compared to other companies phones out there. Fairphone 6 had me excited since the obvious assumption would be even better hardware, but then that’s what we got? Damn, is the dream of a fair phone with good specs over?
As it is today, I’d probably buy a Fairphone 5 over a Fairphone 6. But then once that became outdated, which will happen eventually, it seems that I’d just be orphaned without a phone to upgrade to…
I hope they revert this when they make the Fairphone 7.
Please tell me that the dream of a postmarketOS phone with great specs isn’t over…
#Fairphone #Fairphone5 #Fairphone6 #postmarketOS

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

Home and dry now - there was a bigger turn out than you'd have thought, but at least we all got home in time to watch Le Mans 😃
A few photos at https://timfoster.smugmug.com/Events/Stormont-Car-Show-2025

Stormont Car Show 2025 - timfoster
All of the photos under timfoster.smugmug.com are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please contact me if you want to use any of these photos for commercial purposes. You're welcome to print any photos you like for your own use.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #MorningShow
Brittany Davis:
🎵 Change Me
#BrittanyDavis
https://brittany-davis.bandcamp.com/track/change-me
https://open.spotify.com/track/4Jqy5smJP4wFgu7IBpcgnJ
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