Tootfinder

"In today’s brief #Mozilla joins a broad coalition of advocates for openness and competition, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, iFixit, and the Digital Right to Repair Coalition. We hope the Ninth Circuit will fix the lower court’s mistake and hold that #interoperability

https://thenarwhal.ca/inside-bc-baby-bear-orphanage/
I have been supporting Northern Lights Wildlife Society shelter in Smithers, B.C. for some time now - ever since I saw their programs on Knowledge Network. They are not streaming right now but I expect they will …

See where 120 orphaned baby bears take shelter as wildfires and drought shrink their habitat
As climate impacts increasingly drive bears into communities, many cubs are left alone and starving. In northern B.C., a small group is dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating the orphans

Daily Inspiration: "Criticism is just wisdom as yet unwrapped!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Criticism. When it's sincere, it can matter.
Criticism is ... a gift.  It's a gift of knowledge that, used the right way, allows you to gain insight and perspective on how to improve. 
Criticism is ... a reward. It's one of the hardest things to take, but with the right mindset, one of the most valuable bits of insight you can be rewarded with - because it means that…

Daily Inspiration: “Criticism is just wisdom as yet unwrapped!”

Measuring Geographic Diversity of Foundation Models with a Natural Language--based Geo-guessing Experiment on GPT-4
Zilong Liu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Kitty Currier, Meilin Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07612

Measuring Geographic Diversity of Foundation Models with a Natural Language--based Geo-guessing Experiment on GPT-4
Generative AI based on foundation models provides a first glimpse into the world represented by machines trained on vast amounts of multimodal data ingested by these models during training. If we consider the resulting models as knowledge bases in their own right, this may open up new avenues for understanding places through the lens of machines. In this work, we adopt this thinking and select GPT-4, a state-of-the-art representative in the family of multimodal large language models, to study i…

Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?
Lin Chen, Jinsong Li, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Zehui Chen, Haodong Duan, Jiaqi Wang, Yu Qiao, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20330

Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved rapid progress, sparking numerous studies to evaluate their multi-modal capabilities. However, we dig into current evaluation works and identify two primary issues: 1) Visual content is unnecessary for many samples. The answers can be directly inferred from the questions and options, or the world knowledge embedded in LLMs. This phenomenon is prevalent across current benchmarks. For instance, GeminiPro achieves 42.9% on the MMMU benchm…

Cursed knowledge thanks to my students: Have you ever thought "This code boring ah hell 💀" at work because if so my good software engineer TikTok-ers someone has made just the extension for you. Finally, we can watch Subway Surfers and Family Guy Funny Moments while we code: https://

Subway Surfers - Visual Studio Marketplace
Extension for Visual Studio Code - The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

This is an important and insightful critique of the Taylor Lorenz story about "what life has been like for LGBTQ people in Oklahoma".
Like so many important topics, our personality-driven mainstream news media fails to center their stories on the right subject.
Thankfully there are writers with first-hand knowledge and lived experiences who do real journalism, as noted in this article.

I Don’t Care About Your Brand
Nex Benedict, Taylor Lorenz, and why trans trauma is not your goldmine.

In 2013, I was laid off from Accenture because they didn’t have any projects that fit my skills and I was “on the bench” for too long. I had to go to the SF office to return my laptop to the IT desk. The person in line in front of me was seeking help with a laptop that wouldn’t boot.
The IT person plugged it in, and it booted right up.
The *senior manager* didn’t realize that they had to charge the laptop.
Sounds like that person wasn’t an edge case…

This is a rambling reaction. I'm still trying to find language for relationality, because it cuts against the grain of our culture right now. Naturalism and embodied knowledge are both out of fashion. Community as a core need of humans is coopted by work, by conservatives trying to rework it into an ahistorical system of control, by an economy that yokes us as individuals, and by sexism and racism preventing us from forming families and communities of equality and justice, instead privileging parts over others.

Sprung
It's a "dating game". In fact, it's a "choose the correct response from this limited list and we'll let you progress" game. It's dull and poorly thought out and overly random. The thing is, though, you get the idea it's going to be quite short, so it's worth just trying each choice until you get the right one in the knowledge it's one step closer to the end of the game. I want to complete it, even if it is really quite crap.
…

I am not going deep into the conversation on #H5N1 because my educationa/lprofessional background gives me enough knowledge in the field that I can only offer uncertain optimism, while the people most freaked out by this HAVE EVERY RIGHT to their concern because “knowledgeable experts” so badly handled #Covid wi…

You might be an elitist if you value ideas based more on who than on what.
BTW for a people so enlightened (based on all the "right things" they say online), tech sure seems to have a lot of elitists. 🙁
#elitism #society

I’ll say the podcast Knowledge Fight is one of my favourite listens. They are always trying to debunk the lies of the Right and make it fun.
The episode I’m listening to now is Tucker’s Twitter show. This should be a fun listen with breakdowns on how everything Tucker says is wrong and why.

I finally setup a robots.txt to prevent my site from being scraped by AI bots:
http://idbrii.com/robots.txt
(Hopefully I got everything right.)
Not totally against AI, but I post my stuff free and without ads to spread knowledge. Scraping the web to create closed models behind paywall…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13682 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

Threats, Attacks, and Defenses in Machine Unlearning: A Survey
Recently, Machine Unlearning (MU) has gained considerable attention for its potential to improve AI safety by removing the influence of specific data from trained Machine Learning (ML) models. This process, known as knowledge removal, addresses concerns about data such as sensitivity, copyright restrictions, obsolescence, or low quality. This capability is also crucial for ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as the Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF). Therefore, strategic knowledge remov…

You might be an elitist if you value ideas based more on who than on what.
BTW for a people so enlightened (based on all the "right things" they say online), tech sure seems to have a lot of elitists. 🙁
#elitism #society

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10678 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

Distilling and Retrieving Generalizable Knowledge for Robot Manipulation via Language Corrections
Today's robot policies exhibit subpar performance when faced with the challenge of generalizing to novel environments. Human corrective feedback is a crucial form of guidance to enable such generalization. However, adapting to and learning from online human corrections is a non-trivial endeavor: not only do robots need to remember human feedback over time to retrieve the right information in new settings and reduce the intervention rate, but also they would need to be able to respond to feedbac…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00550 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Numerical simulation of endovascular treatment options for cerebral aneurysms
Predicting the long-term success of endovascular interventions in the clinical management of cerebral aneurysms requires detailed insight into the patient-specific physiological conditions. In this work, we not only propose numerical representations of endovascular medical devices such as coils, flow diverters or Woven EndoBridge but also outline numerical models for the prediction of blood flow patterns in the aneurysm cavity right after a surgical intervention. Detailed knowledge about the po…