Tootfinder

I get moving off of WhatsApp, but Signal is E2EE. I think they are trying to find ways to add backdoors to communications.
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-civil-servants-new-messaging-services/

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Just finished "Future Home of the Living God" by Louise Erdrich. It's a beautiful and entrancing novel in many ways, but I couldn't bring myself to like the ending. I think in one of my most recent book posts I complained about a deus ex machina, so it's ironic that in this case as the pages dwindled I was fully prepared to accept and even welcome one, especially with all of the deus-related stuff going on already. I am left profoundly unsure as to whether Erdrich imagines a positive future beyond our current oppressions, or just futility, when for most of the book it seemed like the former, which is something I seek out in earnest these days. It is of course impressive that a book about innocents being hunted through the streets of Minneapolis & Saint Paul, while a volunteer citizens network organizes to keep them safe, could be published in 2017. There are strong echoes of Octavia Butler here, and in both cases I think it's a marginalized position which allows authors to see with clarity that most mainstream authors miss or don't even attempt.
I think I will seek out more of Erdrich's writing, but only after a bit of a break.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

I find a form of active de-computing is one of the best ways to cope with the current exceeding world pain exhaustion & LLM brain drain around, i.e. doing more things offline, with your hands/body, being more present in your world, getting into crafts/materials, creating/fixing/mending things and sharing your lessons learned with others (in that sense quite in the spirit of open source culture).
To some this is may be just another form of entitled escapism, though I see it as activ…

If you set limits for a scale (e.g. x-axis) in ggplot, how would you like data outside of that range be handled? There is the oob parameter for that and a set of functions to use with it: https://scales.r-lib.org/reference/oob.html

Unregulated markets maybe create significant threats to well-being in ways we are only just starting to recognize. How many other #ZoonoticDiseases are we going to learn about? (#WHO knows?)

Unregulated markets maybe create significant threats to well-being in ways we are only just starting to recognize. How many other #ZoonoticDiseases are we going to learn about? (#WHO knows?)

Just realized that the fact that newer large language models keep getting bigger in terms of parameters is kind of a tell about how they work, even as it's also kind of a requirement from the investment standpoint.
Very roughly, models develop complex functional internal state about some sub-domains, and merely memorize many examples in others. In reality it's more complicated than this and even in this simplified metaphor it's a mix between memorization and "real" "understanding" in each domain. But the point is that if companies were really working towards AGI, they'd be feeding more data into models with *fewer* parameters (that's how you force a model not to memorize) instead of building bigger and bigger models (expands the illusion of competence through increased capacity to memorize).
But being the only ones with the hardware to train an even-bigger model is one of their few competitive advantages, and signing new deals for even more hardware is one of the only ways they can signal to investors that they'll retain their advantage and thus not be destroyed by a food of competitors. That's also how they can convince the hardware dealers like NVidia to continue with circular investments. So they have to run in that direction, regardless of the scientific merits.
This is why someone like LeCun would leave that side of things.
#LLMs #AI

Primaries are tomorrow, #Tennessee!
(Please don’t DM me if your voter registration is messed up, images are from a third-party social post)
#TN #Vote

Buddhist Ways of Being Human in the Age of AI
https://ift.tt/6imDOHM
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 8.1 is now available Intellect is happy to…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

Wrongful Conviction, Qualified Immunity, and the Cost of Being Forgotten
A mistaken identity, an AI-driven arrest, and the long shadow of wrongful conviction—this post explores how easily lives can be upended and how little accountability follows. Even after release, the damage lingers in ways money alone can’t repair.

Wrongful Conviction, Qualified Immunity, and the Cost of Being Forgotten – Bob Mueller
Wrongful conviction, AI misidentification, and qualified immunity collide in a system that fails the innocent—and rarely makes them whole.

@… Hello, Evan.
We're considering ways to prevent the URL of an ActivityPub Note object from being a URL of a completely unrelated third party, as this can be undesirable.
Do you know of any resources that describe the specifications …

One small thing I wasn't aware of.
For car plates the renewal process is automatic unless you have outstanding fines.
You can also subscribe to reminders about your car plates, license (or photo ID) and health card before they expire. I signed up for that. I will still put a reminder in my personal calendar for that, but two ways of being told I have to renew something is a good thing.
Now to do the same for my wife.

Trump’s constant
self-aggrandisement,
his grudges against political adversaries,
the fury at being challenged by the press,
the revenge he promises to wreak on the Iranian regime.
All are ways to erase and avoid what is a permanent terror of humiliation and obsolescence.
“Think of Benito Mussolini,”
wrote the journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in the LA Times,
“jackbooted,
lantern-jawed,
squeakily bombastic,
posturing from…

I'm guilty of being a "competitive pessimist" from time to time... Are you?
"Pessimism is more accurate in the short term - almost always, I'll give it that. Things do go wrong in roughly the ways people predict they will. But optimism is more productive over decades. Optimism is the thing that generates attempts, and without attempts nothing changes.
...
I would rather be wrong about what we're capable of than right about why we shouldn't bothe…

Optimism is not a personality flaw
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told

This simple habit could help seniors live longer and stay independent #health

This simple habit could help seniors live longer and stay independent
Cycling might be one of the simplest ways for older adults to stay healthier, longer. A 10-year study in Japan found that seniors who rode bicycles had lower risks of needing long-term care and dying—especially those who didn’t drive. Continuing or even starting cycling later in life still delivered noticeable benefits. The results highlight biking as a surprisingly powerful tool for maintaining independence and well-being.

Are governments properly supporting the digital commons? Many adopt open source software but don't fund the upstream projects that maintain it. This amplifies a "tragedy of the commons" rather than being part of the solution. Governments have historically invented ways to shape the playing field - patents, public universities, copyright, taxes ... They can do it again!

Governments need to adopt Matrix responsibly | Anais Concepcion
Are governments abdicating their duty to the digital commons? And no, this isn't another "pay up" post. The solution is bigger than money. Element astutely highlights a troubling pattern: A government adopts open source software, deploys it, and pays nothing to the editors maintaining the upstream project. Upstream editors, receiving no revenue from their largest users, face a rational but painful choice: build proprietary features that force payment, or shut down. I think it's worse than th…

Buddhist Ways of Being Human in the Age of AI
https://ift.tt/Hr6BG3D
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 8.1 is now available Intellect is happy to…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

Just finished "Starfish" by Akemi Dawn Bowman. It was gripping (I basically barely put it down and finished in in a single day) but also feels flawed in some ways.
Things I liked: a protagonist that I really strongly rooted for, and a resolution that landed with a bit of complexity.
Things I'm feeling a way about: complete lack of depth in interrogating heritage, despite that being a huge theme, some tinges of deus ex machina in how the central conflicts are resolved, and a real lack of good messaging around consent.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Dear generative AI enthusiasts,
Look, I know the tokens you're burning right now don't actually use *that*much energy (even though it's somewhat substantial already and disastrous when we take into account the quality of the crap it's being used for) but what's more important is the appearance (or not) of that token spend on the quarterly earnings report of OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. lays the foundation necessary for those companies to go ahead with their plans for datacenters on a truly ridiculous scale, and those datacenters, if built, ate indeed a climate nightmare which *my kids* will have to live through even if they never benefit from any of it at all. That's (one of many reasons) why I personally need you to stop using generative AI right now.
The fact that the output is crap, the way it erodes your intelligence, and the ways in which it plagiarizes and actively undermines good citation practices are among many other practical reasons not to use it, but what's personal to me is the way that your frivolous sloperation is making the future worse for the baby I'm feeding blueberries to as I type this, and half the time I interact with people like you the conversation begins with some form of "putting aside the ethical issues..."
#AI #GenAI #LLMs