Tootfinder

RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115737870313508332
Been afraid of similar knowledge for many years myself & still hoping to make the world a better place, at least a teensy bit... But yes, the right to "use for any purpose" has always been the weakest point…

"The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders of the past, they use their platforms to project the claims that suit them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting right and far-right movements, which defend wealth and power..." -- George Monbiot.

Series A, Episode 05 - The Web
CALLY: [Moves to stand next to him] Why?
AVON: All knowledge is valuable.
CALLY: [Touches her temple as if listening] Which are the forward detector links?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/105/40 B7B6

Leon Panetta on New Yorker Radio Hour: asked to express his greatest worry explicitly given his broader and deeper knowledge of foreign affairs, he names the dysfunction of American Democracy.
That’s after having mentioned all the external crises we currently face overseas. He made the excellent point that our inability to handle our own business (e.g. immigration, health care, taxation) in a responsible way threatens our global credibility & security.
(He’s right)

Does LLM Focus on the Right Words? Diagnosing Language Bias in LLM-based Recommenders
Bohao Wang, Jiawei Chen, Feng Liu, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Canghong Jin, Chun Chen, Can Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10978

Does LLM Focus on the Right Words? Diagnosing Language Bias in LLM-based Recommenders
Large language models (LLMs), owing to their extensive open-domain knowledge and semantic reasoning capabilities, have been increasingly integrated into recommender systems (RS). However, a substantial gap remains between the pre-training objectives of LLMs and the specific requirements of recommendation tasks. To address this gap, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is commonly performed on specially curated recommendation datasets to further enhance their predictive ability. Despite its success, SFT…

VizCopilot: Fostering Appropriate Reliance on Enterprise Chatbots with Context Visualization
Sam Yu-Te Lee, Jingya Chen, Albert Calzaretto, Richard Lee, Alice Ferng, Mihaela Vorvoreanu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11954

VizCopilot: Fostering Appropriate Reliance on Enterprise Chatbots with Context Visualization
Enterprise chatbots show promise in supporting knowledge workers in information synthesis tasks by retrieving context from large, heterogeneous databases before generating answers. However, when the retrieved context misaligns with user intentions, the chatbot often produces "irrelevantly right" responses that provide little value. In this work, we introduce VizCopilot, a prototype that incorporates visualization techniques to actively involve end-users in context alignment. By combining topic …

We distinguish "personal unfairness",
-- the view that one’s own economic situation is unfair,
from "social unfairness",
-- the view that the economic situation of others in society is unfair.
Uncertainties associated with the transition to a globalized knowledge economy heighten people’s feelings of personal unfairness
Feelings of personal unfairness increase support for the "populist right"
and feelings about social unfairn…

Left-Wing Populism vs. Right-Wing Populism - What's the Difference? | This vs. That
What's the difference between Left-Wing Populism and Right-Wing Populism? Left-wing populism and right-wing populism are both political movements that aim to...

This has allowed me to make clear something that's been at the back of my mind. Something that is at the heart of so much blind stupidity in big tech.
It's the assumption that we will change one thing and all else will be the same.
In this case, we will fire lots and lots of employees all over the world and we will make lots of profit. We're smart enough to make the AI, and we're dumb enough to think that there will only be one consequence. 1/n

"I know it's not right, but that's what it said to do": Investigating Trust in AI Chatbots for Cybersecurity Policy
Brandon Lit, Edward Crowder, Daniel Vogel, Hassan Khan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08917

"I know it's not right, but that's what it said to do": Investigating Trust in AI Chatbots for Cybersecurity Policy
AI chatbots are an emerging security attack vector, vulnerable to threats such as prompt injection, and rogue chatbot creation. When deployed in domains such as corporate security policy, they could be weaponized to deliver guidance that intentionally undermines system defenses. We investigate whether users can be tricked by a compromised AI chatbot in this scenario. A controlled study (N=15) asked participants to use a chatbot to complete security-related tasks. Without their knowledge, the ch…

Kouji Kozaki and Anna Lisa Gentile are opening #ISWC2025 with almost 400 participants this year. Despite the popularity of generative #Ai the largest topic here is still knowledge representation and readoning
#semanticweb

"A key principle of PKM is that no one has the right answer, but together we can create better ways of understanding complex systems. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked organization, economy and society."
@…

Explainable Deep Learning for Cataract Detection in Retinal Images: A Dual-Eye and Knowledge Distillation Approach
MohammadReza Abbaszadeh Bavil Soflaei, Karim SamadZamini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22696

Explainable Deep Learning for Cataract Detection in Retinal Images: A Dual-Eye and Knowledge Distillation Approach
Cataract remains a leading cause of visual impairment worldwide, and early detection from retinal imaging is critical for timely intervention. We present a deep learning pipeline for cataract classification using the Ocular Disease Recognition dataset, containing left and right fundus photographs from 5000 patients. We evaluated CNNs, transformers, lightweight architectures, and knowledge-distilled models. The top-performing model, Swin-Base Transformer, achieved 98.58% accuracy and an F1-score…

The annual fundraiser support for Wikimedia from the richest man in the world is a dystopian right-wing infused parody site of #Wikipedia.
So if you‘d rather support free access to the sum of all human knowledge instead of billionaire tech bros, you get a chance to donate out of spite.

Day 7: Brenda Romero
I hinted yesterday I'd be moving beyond a narrow definition of "author," so of course that means I'm going to include game designers. I'll definitely get back to some more traditional authors before I hit 20, but I wanted to mix things up early.
Brenda Romero is something of a celebrity in the niche culture that is the Game Developers Coherence, I like to imagine. Of course the misogyny there likely means many just pay attention to who her husband is, but she's a terrific designer in her own right, if not prolific.
Content warning: the Holocaust
To me her most outstanding game has always been "Train," which is an exhibition tabletop game in which players collaborate to load and unload cargo and move train cars around a board, with the stated objective of efficiently delivering cargo to meet certain collective goals. However, through both physical cues and in-game reveals, it becomes clear to players that the game they are playing stimulates the Holocaust, and the cargo they're moving is people being brought to extermination camps. The actual goal of the game is for the players to stop playing and walk away, or perhaps to play against the stated objective and gridlock the trains. Romero supervised play at the expos where it was presented, and intervened to stop the game if the players continued too far (in some cases not picking up on the hints offered because they had very little knowledge of the Holocaust as a historical event). I've never played the game myself; just heard Romero give a report about it, but the sheer genius of designing a game meant not to be played to help educate about a system within which defying the rules was the only ethical action earned her instant respect from me. Romero has a whole series of games in this vein about didn't historical events (not necessarily all designed to not be played), although last I checked in most are just at prototyping stages.
I've got other non-man game designers that will appear on this list, but Romero stood out to go first because she's a good example that you don't need to be someone prolific or widely-known to do great work; I'd bet most people have an author or two they respect who is not widely known (and I'll include at least one more from that category on this list).
#20AuthorsNoMen