@newstik@social.heise.de"If #AI can do all the things we are promised it will do — hardly a given, but stick with me — then we are left with a question: What does using it accomplish? If you do not have to pay attention or do work to meet your goal, does your goal mean anything at all? In some ways, that throws us back to some of the oldest and most profound questions our species has encountered: What does it mean to l…
@davidaugust@mastodon.online"Conflating the loss of manufacturing jobs with the needs of the working class today is a distraction."
"There’s benefit to our communities and our economy to make things here, but it’s less and less likely jobs will be among those benefits."
"We shouldn’t be talking about manufacturing, we should be talking about unionization."
"Unionization is good for the economy, it tilts it away from inequality."
@cdarwin@c.imThe universe gave rise to everything:
stars and cells, minds and memories, purpose and pain.
But it doesn’t care about us.
It follows its own rules.
And now, according to Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, we finally understand enough about those rules to ask the big questions like we mean it:
Why do we exist?
Are we alone?
How did we get here?
What comes next?
And—perhaps most urgently—is there reason to hope?
Heck yeah, there is!
Dr. Ol…
@jos@social.linux.pizzaI think the number of #WordPress plugins installed isn't always the problem; it's what we do with them over time. Debugging how they interact with our sites has become easier for non-technical users with the help of AI. https://
@thomasrenkert@hcommons.social"Social Media" as such might be truly over, but it has less to do with tribal filter bubbles and vibe shifts due to hostile takeovers, and decisions about content moderation.
What is happening online might be very similar to what is happening offline: the disappearance of third spaces due to (platform) capitalism. The dead internet theory is only an offshoot of what we should call *systemic digital vandalism*, *hostile digital infrastructure*, and *dark pattern megastructure…
@cdarwin@c.imWe have been trained and trained ourselves to lose touch with the magical, life-giving force of stories.
And our life-sustaining love for stories has been beaten out of us by AI slop, by a shitty, commercialized culture industry, by living under capitalism and end-times fascism, etc.
I get why we feel that way, and I feel it, too. But there’s something really, really wrong there.
Like our air and water and soil and atmosphere, I think we have been trained and trained oursel…
@aral@mastodon.ar.al“American Jews’ continued support for Israel is very bad for Jews. We must wake up.
…
Israel’s character is plain: it is a militarist ethno-state, not a democracy. And its only answer to its fundamental problem — what does a Jewish state do with the indigenous Palestinian population? — is to entrench apartheid and ethnic cleansing, passing laws that give Jews greater rights. And waging endless wars with those who resist.
…
My community in its official dimension has demand…
@arXiv_csAR_bot@mastoxiv.pageGateTruth: Auditing the Rigor of RTL Design Benchmarks via Mutation Testing
Meet Bhadra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12635 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12635 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12635
arXiv:2608.12635v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Benchmarks for evaluating large language models on register-transfer-level (RTL) hardware design have proliferated rapidly, yet none reports having applied mutation testing, an established hardware-verification technique for quantifying testbench quality, to ask whether its own testbenches are trustworthy. A testbench that never fails is not evidence of a correct design; it may simply never stimulate the logic that is actually broken. We introduce GateTruth, a mutation-testing engine and methodology for auditing RTL benchmark testbench rigor: inject a deterministic, seeded set of semantic mutants into a reference design and measure what fraction the testbench catches.
We validate the methodology against our own 68-task, dual-track reference suite -- 60 specification-to-RTL generation tasks and 8 agentic-repair tasks, scored through a pinned, deterministic synthesis-to-timing flow with correctness enforced as a strict gate -- certifying that 46 of 60 Track A testbenches kill at least 95% of injected mutants under sequential, reproducible execution; we disclose why the other 14 do not, including a Goodhart effect on testbenches revised to pass this gate. We then point the same engine, unmodified, at RTLLM v2.0, a widely adopted external benchmark: of 46 auditable designs, 72% fall below the 95% floor our own suite is held to, and three score 0% outright.
A comparable audit of NVIDIA's CVDP benchmark is structurally impossible: its public release withholds reference solutions, removing the golden RTL mutation testing requires. Auditing our own instrument also surfaced a second finding: an initially uniform 4096-token output cap silently truncated three of seven evaluated models, and re-running at 16,384 tokens moved one model from fifth place to first. We argue mutation-kill certification should become a standard reporting requirement for RTL-generation benchmarks generally.
toXiv_bot_toot
@drgeraint@glasgow.socialBallotBox Scotland: "It’s time everyone got serious about the Scottish Greens"
Some reflections from BBS, and a little pointer into what we should expect for the next parliament.
"The belief that right wing voters have to be courted and coddled, and left wing voters uncomfortable with that will just have to suck it up because they don’t have other options. It turns out they do, in fact, have other options"
@hex@kolektiva.socialRE: #cybernerics at this...
Capitalism uses markets as an evolutionary algorithm that evolves functions that turn all the complexity of the world into a single variable across a continuum of "line go up/line go down." Everything that can't be translated is helpfully thrown away.
Almost every problem we face in the world today (looking right at you, climate change), comes either directly or indirectly from the lack of verity and the omission of this out of band data.
False scarcity is a capitalist tool to manage externalities, and it doesn't work. I'm not saying this can't help, but there are so many ways to game the solution that it's not even funny.
The market incentivizes optimization that omits (what it considers) spurious data. So if there is a way to abuse the system, the system will find a way to abuse it.
You can't solve this problem inside of capitalism (nor within the apparatus of any state), and trying to do so will ultimately be subverted by markets. Evolutionary algorithms are extremely powerful things, even very simple ones. The problem is that the algorithm lacks the complexity to solve it, so it will evolve systems that find ways to omit extraneous signals.
It's unfortunate, because the problem is right and the solution seems like it could fit. But I don't think it can. It also omits invisible labor, which is just a thing you inherit when you use capitalism (or any implicitly patriarchal system).
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialRandom thought that goes interesting places:
There are a lot of cheap ways to spend money to drastically improve the quality of life for lots of people (UBI, mosquito nets, digging wells, etc.). Those people almost invariably become way more economically productive in aggregate when this happens, far above the costs involved, if you measure from the perspective of the affected group. So for billionaires looking for outsized returns on investments, why not simply spend on some of these programs, then invest in a broad index of socks that are going to go up as a result?
The answer could be "billionaires by their nature are too evil to think of this," which, could be true....
But I think there's a deeper answer, which is that there *is no* bundle of stocks that goes up as humans flourish. This is directly contrary to neoliberal economic doctrine/propaganda, but it also has an explanation that's obvious from the neoliberal doctrine itself: the stock market is a gambling arena for bets on corporate profits. Corporate profits are money taken in in excess of costs. But the value of a corporation is not produced abstractly by the mere existence of the organization; it's produced by the labor of humans working for the organization, with raw materials that the organization purchases. So to make a profit, an organization has to do some combination of paying its workers less than the value the create, and/or paying less for it's raw materials than they are really worth. The more it does these two things, the more profit it can generate.
Notice that these two profit-generating activities directly and indirectly immiserate humans, *and* that reducing human misery by means other than reducing these activities makes them harder. People who have other means of income won't sell their labor for less than it's worth, nor will they sell their resources below their fair value. Only desperate people will agree to terms that corporations require to be profitable.
This is not a "Marxist analysis" by the way; it's the direct application of the basic principles taught in any neoliberal introductory macroeconomics class.
In any case, once we understand that the stock market is "gambling on how much corporations can exploit their employees/suppliers/customers", it's clear why you can't make money from stock investments in companies that profit from flourishing humans: profit is by construction made of human misery.
It also explains a lot of other things, like why private US employers who pay huge amounts of payroll towards health insurance for their employees would be *against* public health insurance that would offload those costs onto all taxpayers: the amount they're able to lower wages as a result of desperation for access to health care is more than worth the direct costs.
This is the central reason why capitalism (defined as: a system where money equals power) is inimical to human happiness: it allows profits built on suffering to be converted into the power to maintain the system of suffering and even extend and intensify it, creating a feedback loop of extractive domination.
Now I'm sure some people might read this and think: what about the good companies? The ones that pay their workers and suppliers a fair wage, and sell their products at fair prices? Even putting aside the fact that such a thing seems less believable than a unicorn these days, such a company by definition does not make a profit. The fair wage for its workers is the value they add to the raw materials it buys, and the fair price for those is the selling price of the finished product minus the value the company adds. The balance sheet will read exactly zero at the end of the day if compensation is actually fair. You can still run a company like this in theory, and even grow it, but of course under capitalism it will just get bought out by an unethical company that is profitable. Could you in some kind of utopian dream world run a tightly regulated series of markets where you have most of what people think capitalism is, without the bad parts? Maybe, but it definitely wouldn't involve actual capitalism, and it wouldn't have a stock market.
#anarchy #capitalism #econimics
@tokensane@mastodon.me.ukI'm told that you can get some very weird behaviour from the latest #ai model from #anthropic. Say "See the below". Then leave a blank or line of dashes, then something maybe hinting at what it shouldn't do. It responds with strange fragments of text.
@sean@scoat.esHad quite an adventure in hardware debugger land at @… Mesh Night, last night, but we managed to get the bootloader onto this board by way of a Pi Pico Zero and the debugprobe firmware (after failing to make the Tigard do what we needed—certainly our fault, not Tigard’s).
Fun little project. Really rewarding to see it work, despite being way out of our depth on …
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgSometimes in science people discourage you from talking about wild ideas because what if someone "steals" it.
But that misunderstands several points: you are rarely the first or only person to have an idea, we are all swimming in the same water, reading the same literature, attending the same conferences. It would be odd if only one person has a given idea.
Maybe someone already tried it and found it didn't work. Discussing ideas might help to stop you wasting your time and resources in that case.
And there are more than enough scientific questions to go round!
Ideas are the easy part. Doing the work is the difficult bit.
And so what if someone publishes similar ideas to you beforehand? It's science, it's supposed to be replicable (odd incentives like publish or perish culture notwithstanding) and there is always a new angle to explore.
Science is a group pursuit anyway. It's rare you do everything by yourself, discussion with other scientists is as essential as oxygen. And sometimes the more discussion you have the wilder and cooler the ideas get
#AcademicChatter
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/117078561059020813
jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net - So. Share your wildest ideas. Not because you want to be praised for it. But because you might inspire other strangers with specific knowledge to build stuff inspired by your idea without even telling you. Ideas want to travel to find new friends. Set them free. They might come back to you or not. Just share. That's what the Real Internet is for ;)
@Lach@social.linux.pizzaWhere do we go from here?
AI can generate images, video and music in just a few clicks. In every imaginable style. I know what we have been telling ourself, that it can't do it with soul, like humans can. But it's still in its infancy, and it will surpass us the next time AI updates it's soul.md.
Will human creativity die, surpassed by our AI overlords?
Are we creating God. Unimaginably beauty and perfection, or are we entering hell with the devil. I don't …
@mia@hcommons.socialLaura Pye: 'Imagine what could be achieved if every museum committed to the simple but powerful goal of 100% inventory-level documentation. Imagine the research opportunities, the increased public access and the ability to share collections nationally and internationally. The sector talks a great deal about transformation. Perhaps one of the most transformative things we could do is return to the fundamentals of knowing what we hold, where it is and why it matters.'
@thomastraynor@social.linux.pizzaOne more item from my work checklist done. With my going on leave for three weeks I documented (with screen shots) what I do for release modules into the various test environments along with where we store the release requests and instructions. I have been meaning to do that for years, but so busy that I didn't have time. Today I made time and the team has a draft they can try out.
Say what you will do.
Do what you say.
PROVE IT!
@yetiinabox@todon.nl#Entomology
Fedimind: what has happened to this moth? Its abdomen is flexed sharply up so that it protrudes from beneath the wings and over the thorax; it has been motionless like this for many hours. We do not use any poisons in our house. I'm guessing it's a Silver Y moth?
@davidaugust@mastodon.online“Art can convert our troubled lives into something that holds the potential for joy. The past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It lives in us and it's up to us what we do with it.” - Paul Duane
https://www.patreon.com/weirdandconfusing/posts/david-milch…
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." — J. R. R. Tolkien
Truly an evergreen quote!
#Quote
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaWhat's ur favorite creepypasta that doesn't quite have the sauce
@frankel@mastodon.top
@grumpybozo@toad.socialThe Fediverse, however, has *all* of the idiots too horrible for X and Meta, but they only federate with each other, mostly. @… https://
@katrinakatrinka@infosec.exchange
@Laur12@social.linux.pizzaYesterday we had a regular message from university about when and what to do.
Today woken up woth 15 replies to that message, apparently some students were lazy to write an email to some workers from uni and just replied to anouncement which goes to ALL groups from uni, one student replied with laugh emoji, while worker replied "Dont laugh youre expelled" )
@cdarwin@c.imWe’ve been dealing with the climate as an isolated, almost linear concept,
where it’s a problem with a fix.
But not a single nation stuck to the Paris agreement.
People are getting solar panels, but we’re all using more carbon-emitting fossil fuels as well
– our habits aren’t changing.
We’re still trapped in the mindset that caused the problem in the first place:
believing in infinite growth, and that we don’t have to change our ways of being.
A ci…
@davidaugust@mastodon.onlineI riffed on the news a bit, hoping it would get the angst out of me. Instead I have this short article and a headache. Oops.
#USpol
@arXiv_csCR_bot@mastoxiv.pageClassical Acceptance Is Not Hybrid Authentication: Measuring X.509 Verifier Semantics in Post-Quantum Migration
Taesung Kim, Boheung Chung, Keonwoo Kim, Yousung Kang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20800 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20800 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.20800
arXiv:2607.20800v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A relying party validating a hybrid X.509 certificate --- carrying both a classical and a post-quantum credential --- must distinguish whether its accepting judgment rests on the post-quantum evidence or only on the classical path. To preserve compatibility, the separable designs place that evidence where classical path validation may ignore it. A verifier can then validate the classical path and accept while the post-quantum evidence never bears on the decision --- a valid classical result silently promoted to a hybrid conclusion it did not establish. We measure this across eight path-validation stacks (seven independent codebases), in nine validation modes, over six certificate schemes. Under a hybrid-required policy, nearly every stack parsing a separable hybrid certificate accepts on the classical path without making the post-quantum evidence outcome-bearing; one enforcing mode instead fractures interoperability over a signature-input encoding not yet interoperably profiled; and stacks that verify post-quantum signatures still do not enforce the binding by default: the gap is structural, not explained by missing primitive capability alone. Under lifecycle desynchronization the downgrade is realized: when a bound post-quantum credential is revoked while the classical certificate stays valid, the default path still accepts, because the bound credential lies outside the decision's scope. Binding success is not authentication success. We contribute a specification-derived verifier model and an executable, policy-parametric reference contract --- what a verifier must recognize, verify, make outcome-bearing, and check before reporting a validation as hybrid --- with a diagnosis of why standards do not require it.
toXiv_bot_toot
@hex@kolektiva.socialRE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/117162698930485347
There was a time, 4 or 5 years ago, when my partner and I had a conversation. We had already fought last time, and now we had kids. We had the ability to leave, so we decided that we would if things got bad enough. We had to make a decision about when that would be, about what the trigger would be. It was Roe being overturned. It had happened in the past. We left as soon as we could.
If you haven't left, or can't leave, you need to make another decision. You need to decide if you're going to fight or hide. I'll tell you now, your best chance is if you fight before it's too late. If you try to keep your head down the best outcome you can hope for is to survive in shame.
If you decide to fight, then you need to decide when. I don't know what your life looks like, so I can't tell you where that line is. But you need to know what it is, because not knowing is the same as hiding. You need to talk to other people and know when they'll fight, because your best chances are together. Everyone should have a breaking point. A lot of folks may have blown right past it and not noticed, because it's all too overwhelming, because life is already too much without adding more. I understand, but without thinking about it you're making a different choice.
This is an extremely common platform for leftists. I remember my old roommate and their autistici email address. I have an account with them for organizing I did in the past. If you've ever listed to anything on the Channel Zero network, you've probably run across someone reading out a noblogs domain. This is an explicit attack on the left, and specifically on anarchists. This provides the legal framework for mass arrests targeting anarchists.
Will they do that? I don't know. They know they're unpopular and they know anarchists are a big part of the fight. Will they use those warehouses? They'll do what they can get away with.
What will you do to stop them? What will you do when they escalate? Figure out your escalation plan. What would it take to get you in the street? What would it take to get you on the barricades? If you don't have a plan, if you haven't at least thought about it, and maybe even talked about it, then you're deciding to let them do whatever they want.
Fascism is like a dying star that gets bigger even as it consumes itself before exploding. It has to have an enemy, so it will make enemies to feed on. You may be used to being safe when the state cracks down like this, but you never really were. Your turn was just so far off it seemed impossible. But now we're at the end. No one will be safe until this is over. So at the very least, make plans for when they come after you.
@pre@boing.worldRE: #ai #programming
@danyork@mastodon.socialYou'll note that most of the site focuses on what people can do. We realized in an era when the Internet is increasingly being clogged by AI slop, scams, and fraud ... we need to build the *human resilience* to find a way through!
I published a post on the @… blog today that goes into more context:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2026/09/a-safer-internet-starts-with-taking-action-introducing-the-online-trust-and-safety-hub/
A great aspect of this work was that we were building it *with* our Internet Society community. I look forward to seeing where it all goes!
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialEarth's futures can be divided into two categories: futures which support human life and those that don't.
The IPCC reports have avoided framing things this way, but burn enough fossil fuels quickly enough and you tip over into the later.
Note that this logic applies to any sub-region of the Earth too: some unknown number of years ago, thanks to ExxonMobil's sales of oil and duplicity about the known risks, the tipping point into "unlivable future" was crossed with respect to a segment of the Trishuli river in Nepal, and just this year that future was realized quite suddenly. In individual apartments across North America and Europe this summer thousands of people found themselves in unlivable futures due to heat waves, and millions more avoided that fate narrowly through the use of air conditioning which could well fail in future heat waves...
What the IPCC reports have been detailing for literally more than three decades is what it would take to tip things the other way. They report this in various forms, but usually at the level of how much CO2 emissions can be permitted on what schedule in order to prevent (locally-)unlivable futures (abstracted as a number of degrees of warming relative to a baseline).
The IPCC reports of emissions and mitigations can be translated into actions: what kind of policy would have to be enacted when by which government in order to avoid an unlivable future. In general however, hierarchical nation-states have proven collectively incapable of meeting *any* of these targets, and so indeed, translating emissions targets into policy actions is increasingly impossible, and has always been an improbable path towards survival. The longer nation states fail to meet the necessary emissions goals (or even accelerate oil drilling), the more drastic action is necessary. We can continue to talk about what kind of national policies might avoid unlivable futures, even as those futures are realized for more and more people, but national policies are not the only kinds of actions that can change the future. Fire example, a national policy shutting down an oil pipeline might avert a certain amount of emissions, but the pipeline owner could also shut it down themselves, or an activist could sabotage it, and the effect would be the same. Lots of different actors have different kinds of actions they can take to create similar effects, and it's the effects that are necessary to avoid unlivable futures.
Effectively, assuming that we will not wind up in a totally unlivable future, this leads to a principle of action substitution. We know what effects are necessary, and if nation states refuse to enact those via policies and companies likewise refuse to make any voluntary changes, then the only actions that remain to be taken are drastic direct actions. Simply put: the longer nations and corporations refuse to do anything to create livable futures, the more people will simply take direct action to achieve the needed carbon emissions reductions, because the alternative for them is death and that alternative is becoming clearer with each climate casualty, so it will be increasingly impossible to threaten them into giving up their lives for corporate profits.
#ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
@tomkalei@machteburch.socialA #math #conjecture posted in a paper means two things.
1. We want to know if that statement is true or not.
2. We want to highlight that area of maths and draw human attention to it.
If you post a conjecture on the arXiv today and you have not checked if the latest AI can do it, you will have an e-mail tomorrow by some dude from the valley saying
"I'm not a mathematician but I put your conjecture into xyz and here is a counterexample, please check it".
So what do we do with this? 1/2
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialI Can See the Babies
---
Whenever I see a person, my mind automatically conjures up an image of them as a baby. It's not really voluntary, nor is it the same as other mental imagery. More like I'm hallucinating a visual echo of their past self, floating in my vision near where I see the person. As if they were haunted and I could see the ghost.
It's all in my head, I'm pretty sure, and the babies aren't necessarily accurate. I checked once with a friend, and the baby I saw had curly hair even though all their baby pictures were bald. After seeing those pictures, my baby image of them changed, too, to match the pictures. So that's why... That's why I'm pretty sure...
But the babies are real, you know? I mean, my images of them might not be right, but all the people I see *were* babies. It's not like one of those stupid prophecy loopholes like "everyone was born of woman", you see, it's a true universal, no exceptions. And these hallucinations won't let me forget about that. Ever.
I tried to play a videogame once, one of those FPS games. My friends were all playing and they needed one more for their group. They didn't know about... this. I told them I didn't think I could do it, but I didn't want to tell them why, so they badgered me into it. I thought maybe I could handle it, I mean the characters were basically cartoons, right? But... well, I think I dissociated a bit and then threw up. Even if they were cartoons, all those babies, shooting and killing and dying, again and again. It's... it's not like the babies got injured, even, or played out exactly what the characters were doing. The babies just kinda floated around doing baby things, and they sort of faded out when their character died. No, what's overwhelming is the knowledge, the constant reminder, of everyone's former innocence.
The worst part, you know, the most horrible thing, is not just the innocence, it's the gap. Like, if you were to force me to watch a torture scene, I would hate seeing the victim, but it's the torturer that scares me. Everybody knows that horrible things happen to innocent people. We're all forced to think about that from time to time. But the thing almost nobody thinks about as much as me, is how innocent babies *become* monsters. How there's a hurricane of hurt and fear and apathy and indoctrination and hatred and prejudice and complicity out there that sucks in babies and twists them into racists and abusers and "business leaders" and soldiers and all sorts of people who hurt and kill others. The worst are the ones who take pleasure in that hurting, because the babies for sure don't. Like, how did that happen? And most people don't think about it, because they just label that person as "bad" and don't think about it any deeper. But you can't do that when you can see the baby right there. The baby isn't bad. The person might be, I'm not trying to say everyone's an angel or people don't deserve to reap what they sow. But the baby wasn't! Something between then and now went wrong, horribly wrong, and now you're stuck with a person that hurts others, and you need a drastic intervention just to stop them, let alone prevent them from doing that stuff again and change their future behavior. But you can *see*, or at least, I can see, that there was always some earlier point, some missed opportunity, where some much easier intervention could have headed the whole thing off. None of those babies are destined to turn into monsters, and that's the gap. The gap between the little baby that was and the monster in front of you on the screen or in real life.
Anyways that's it. That's my statement. I'm not a pacifist or anything, but I think you can see why I can't do it, I just can't. You can lock me up or punish me or whatever, but there's just no way you're gonna put a gun in my hands and give me an order and I'll just follow it, because I can see the babies.
#Microfiction
@tschfflr@fediscience.org"Some designs of emojis are very different for the same codepoint, especially the ones depicting emotions/reactions. Examples coming to mind are 😨, 🔫. What are your thoughts on this?" - The (water) pistol 🔫 was originally a hand gun which looked a lot more real. In response to its frequent use in criminal or other unsavory contexts (e.g., as a threat), most platforms replaced it with the colorful plastic toy gun design in 2018. (In 2024, Elon Musk had it turned back into a realistic hand gun for the Twemoji design 🙄)
I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't think we can stay on top of all potential uses of emojis (or should even try to limit them) and people who want to use emojis for threats probably can still do so. On the other hand, I do find it rather hard to imagine that the green plastic 🔫 could be used as a threat... so... I guess good job, designers/tech firms? #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
https://emojipedia.org/pistol#designs
@pre@boing.worldBurnham has been made leader of the Labour party then. No other candidates got the required number of nominations so it's a coronation.
He has a few things to say.
He's proud. The party is united, he says, and now they'll put that power of unity to give people hope back. And he is ready to build on Kier's foundation. Thanks Kier, for all the NHS work and renters rights and rebuilding the nation's reputation (??).
He does like to name-check all the various towns and unions of the country. Just listing them. They made Labour, apparently.
We must recognize that this generation of politicians, including Burnham himself, have failed. Four decades of neoliberalism have not been kind to all those places he listed.
He pledges to be better, and will do five things.
1) Work relentlessly to build a culture of one Labour team. No infighting. Wants to eradicate the split. End factional politics.
I guess end Starmer's war on the left then? 🤨
2) Work to build a new politics. This is the last chance for change, and we must take it together. Tell people what Labour will do, not just pick fights with other parties. Seek consensus with those other parties instead, to improve the political discourse.
3) Change political direction: know exactly where he stands and set a direction that is distinctively Labour. No out-greening greens or out-reforming reform or wearing tory clothes. Boldly confidently authentically Labour.
Housing, water, energy, transport, all broken due to privatization and concentration of wealth and power.
Four decades of political power draining from regions to corporations and central government ends now.
Take back the slogan "take back control" from the right, who gave away power to corps and quangos.
Life should be more affordable.
4) Be a leader for the north, south, east and west, for Scotland and Northern Ireland (aw, shame for the midlanders 🤣 ).
Gonna do to everywhere what he done for Manchester he reckons.
Kids shouldn't have to leave their home towns to prosper.
5) Take power back from westminster and give it to the place where you live.
More power for regions, to run trains for passengers not shareholders. Improve high-streets, and back shops and pubs, and education, and reindustrialization.
He's gonna be pro-business.
Add all that together and he reckons we'll bring back hope.
Thanks a few people in particular.
He says he knows what he believes and what he wants to do, he has a plan. He wants change, to be close to the people.
He wants it to be Andy 4 us. Labour 4 us. Bring back hope.
#ukpol #burnham #labourParty
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.ioThe gist is though, ignoring the baggage they come with like the investment bubble, the stolen intellectual property, the environmental footprint, economic and social impact, the weird boosterism ("AGI!") and the weird doomerism ("The Terminator!")—
—can what they actually do (using statistics to generate text) be a thing that's useful in the sense that it's better than what we had until now? (If not, why? If so, how?)
@tomkalei@machteburch.socialI think it is an illusion that we mathematicians are all these unicorns with our blackboards who do this mathemagic.
Turns out, 80% of what we do can be automated. Does it follow that 80% of us will be out of our jobs now? I think yes.
Btw, I think this also applies to industry jobs because what we train, to gather all the relevant facts for a problem, structuring, making an excel sheet, systematically going through available information, dealing with uncertainty. AI is pretty good at that.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialSemi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioI happen to know that this is man is quite conservative in a lot of ways. He's steeped in the Foxosphere to a degree that alarms his relatives. I know he was a huge Trump supporter the first time around, and I'm pretty sure he was this time too.
And even stewing in those juices, even •he• is just ready to see the world change for the better for trans people.
I know with all of the horrifying backsliding we've seen these last few years, it feels like there's no hope for trans people. And…yeah, these really are dire, dire times. Dire. It is •horrifying• what's been coming to the political surface. But damnit…beneath the surface, the tectonic plates are moving. Despair, rage, lament, yes…but do not give up hope.
/end
@bencurthoys@mastodon.socialI personally don't mind either film version, but you have to approach them in the right frame of mind and accept that they are different mediums suitable for telling different stories. If you hated the LoTR films definitely don't bother with the Odyssey.
I do wonder what Jackson's Odyssey would have been like though. Much more supernatural, for a start. In Nolan's LoTR we wouldn't even have seen the Balrog, it would just be a shadow.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialThe Short End of the Stick
---
"Well damn! Come see this one!"
"Another inhabited planet?"
"Yeah but they really got the short end of the stick..."
"Let me see... Oh wow, they thought synthetic text had intelligence?"
"Yeah, or that it was like a God or something. Classic mistake. But just a second, let me scroll..."
"Oh. Oh wow. That's really unlucky. They had a language model cult happen at the same time as they were burning fossil fuels? Talk about bad timing, but... Oh god."
"Yeah it gets worse!"
"Stockpiling nuclear weapons? They actually used them?!? All that at once? Jeez this is one of the worst eras I've ever seen. Almost like a species with a death wish."
"You know better than that."
"Okay yeah that's not a species problem, I know. But what the hell was the social structure like? How did they survive all that at once?"
"Let's see... Here."
"Oh. Oh shit this actually makes sense. All that stuff wasn't a coincidence, they got hit by a real big wave of nationalism & oligarchy, one right into the other. I didn't even know it could be that bad before the instability flipped things. They had institutions... Yeah they were basically kept down by a few generations of oligarchs; had them pretty much enslaved and worshipping money at the same time. Serious obedience conditioning. Religions were doing it too. Whew that must have been a shitty time. Only a couple of centuries of the worst of it at least. Wait scroll further, what happened?"
"See here, and then here."
"Oh huh. Yeah I guess that flip had been a long time coming. Wow I definitely take back my comment about a death wish, this species is awesome! They made it through all that, haha."
"Yeah pretty cool, huh? Fuck obedience conditioning."
"Yeah, they had it so bad for a minute there. Fuck that bullshit."
"Hey... Wanna go do an intervention? Find some place that's in the middle of that stuff right now and see what we can do?"
"I was just thinking the same thing! But y'know what? Let's stop by this place first, and see if any of them want to come along. I'll bet some of them would be up for it given their history!"
"Well, it's been a couple dozen generations, so you never know how they'll view the history now, but sure, let's do that. The whole point of history is to inspire action, right?"
#Microfiction
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialPeople who don't mind driverless cars will find all sorts out reason to brush off this kind of news:
https://flipboard.social/@TechDesk/117135628617386440
It was moving slowly already to be safe, it did brake before the collision, the injuries were minimal, the child is at fault, etc.
In the end, a lot of people will shrug and say: human drivers also make mistakes like this, so what's the big deal if a robot does? Maybe the robot even has a better safety record on average than humans. You can't ask for perfection!
Here are three related reasons why you shouldn't buy these arguments:
1. The crash statistics for the "average human driver" include (and are probably significantly driven by) impaired human drivers, like drunk drivers or people on their phones. When driverless car companies put "as good as the average human driver" as the goal, they're saying that they're okay with their systems being just as bad as drunk or distracted drivers sometimes. That's not the right goal at all! We should demand that driving robots perform at least as well as non-distracted human drivers, which is significantly *better* than the average human driver when it comes to things like crashes.
2. Mistakes made by a robotic system are fundamentally different in nature from mistakes made by humans, because the robot mistakes ate *systematic* across all robots in similar-enough situations. If a human looking at their phone slows down too late and hits a child, that's tragic, but it doesn't mean that *every* human driver put into the same situation would make the same mistake. In fact, many of them probably wouldn't be looking at their phone and thus would avoid the accident, *even given the exact same situation in which to react.* In contrast, *every Waymo taxi running the same software* will make exactly the same mistake in that situation. In other words, this kind of event will definitely repeat whenever a similar-enough situation arises around a Waymo taxi. That's why news like this should be scary, even though the accident was a minor one.
3. Some might claim that it's good that a software upgrade could potentially fix the issue that caused this accident. It's sort of true that there's an upside there (although any behavior updates can cause errors in other situations). But the question we should be asking is: why wasn't this already fixed before the vehicle was approved for testing on real roads with real children and people in harm's way? Why wasn't there a stimulation scenario for this exact kind of situation, so that the system already knew what to do? Why should it take a child getting injured for a fix to be developed v(if one in fact will be)? In theory, of course, it's possible that this was a truly exceptional situation where even an alert human couldn't have done better. I'm sure what's what the company is telling the investigators. It's also possible that the designers are following the Silicon Valley motto of "move fast and break things", which reaches an entirely new level of frightfulness when the thing that's moving fast is a car and the thing being broken is a child. "I'll just deploy it now and as test cases when I see what really breaks in production" is an attitude I've been guilty of, but then I make videogames, not deadly robots.
@pre@boing.worldSo, maybe all you really can hope for from an acceptance speech is a bit of empty rhetoric, but that is indeed what we got here.
Unity and decentralization and a promise that he has a plan.
Unity is easy to say, but requires unity to achieve since you ain't in control of all the factions.
Decentralization tends to be fought by centralized powers, and is a tactic really not a strategy. What do you hope to achieve with it? Can end up just remote offices for centralized power.
And that plan he reckons he has? I look forward to hearing what it actually is.
#ukpol #burnham
@rene_mobile@infosec.exchangeI just watched the #BlackHat #OpenAI #HuggingFace talk (#OpenAI understands it themselves. However, emergence is still no indication of actual intelligence, and the talk is again ripe with anthropomorphism.
3. Yes, it is surprising and somewhat terrifying how good these LLM agent loops have become in finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. We are seeing a much stronger version of the earlier next-generation fuzzing leap in tool capabilities.
4. The comparison with fuzzing and other tools is important for another reason: #OpenAI conducted their experiments on the live Internet. No, forcing internal test runs to go through a proxy server is *not the same as running in an isolated environment*. If there is a connection to a live production system, it is by definition not an effective sandbox. What happened to people letting their cool new fuzzers run live on non-consenting production targets on the Internet back then? They were criminally liable. Why should #OpenAI not be held liable for any damages caused by their systems?
Just because you don't understand the complexity that you built doesn't mean you aren't responsible for what it does!
5. The agent loops first successfully started exploited their proxy server on May 26th, discovered July 4th-6th as active exploitation and takeover. Credentials were revoked and the proxy server patched. "At this point, AI training and evaluations resume."
WHAT THE ACTUAL F...? You discovered emergent behavior in your overly complex system that you didn't understand, saw active exploitation of your internal systems to an extent that they were owned with admin privileges, and your response was to patch the uppermost surface holes, and then continue letting the out-of-control complex system run and continue on the same course? You didn't think to, let's see, maybe stop or at least pause the highly irresponsible experiment while figuring out - in detail - what went wrong, why, and how to avoid the same thing happening again on a systematic level?
6. On July 8th, completely unsurprisingly, the LLM agent loops continue to do the same thing and find another surface hole that hasn't been patched yet to take over again. Why should this have stopped? You haven't done any root cause analysis on the system level. Why do you expect that the problem should have stopped?
7. It takes another 11 days to discover that this is happening again. So you turned the system that had broken something back on again without a detailed root cause analysis and then didn't even watch carefully? I can't even...
8. And no, the response is not to fight fire with fire. Complexity on the attacker side (#OpenAI is the attacker, not the defender - they are the guilty perpetrator, not the innocent victim of circumstance) should be fought with *reduced* attack surface on the defender systems. Adding LLM agent loops that the "frontier" companies themselves quite obviously have no control over to already brittle systems with the hope of auto-patching your way out of vulnerabilities does not seem like a wise course of action. You don't mitigate complexity with even more complexity. The next 2 years will be ... exciting - and your best bet is going to be to disable all dependencies and complex interactions that your production systems don't absolutely require.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialWish inspiration hadn't struck right at 1 a.m. when I have to teach tomorrow, but we'll see if I can get back to sleep now that I'm done with a draft of this story. Glad to have my first entry in my "incredulous young historians of the future" series actually written instead of just imagined. There are surely some typos ahead...
#SciFi #Writing #Technology #ShortStory
"The Age of Progress", a short story by Tiota Sram.
"Your assignment", said the teacher, "is to describe why the progressive vision of technology that gives us the name 'Age of Progress' today failed, and why it was actually a pessimistic view of technology. Your study guides have links to a few sources, but as usual you should synthesize information from at least two knowledge systems, and one of those shouldn't be family-based."
"Ugh", said Ye'xik, "this is gonna be tricky. Wasn't the whole problem with the Age of Progress that they were too optimistic about technology?"
"Well, they did talk a lot about the end of the world and extinction, and I did almost happen, right?" said Finan.
"Yeah, that's gotta count as pessimism, doesn't it?" Gedi chimed in.
"Well..." said Hallavia, with their usual deliberate tone, "I think it's not that simple, or at least it doesn't have to be."
The four of them were walking outside to have lunch, pondering the new assignment from this cycle's history and culture teacher. A brief silence fell as they pondered the Age of Progress.
"Maybe we should look at it through another history system?" offered Finan. "I mean, we've been learning about knowledge systems and lenses, and the 'Ages' lens of just one perspective with its own distortions, right?"
"My mab is working with my omeh on an oral history right now", said Gedi, "maybe I can use that as my second knowledge system? I'll see what they have to say about it!"
"We shouldn't all use the same knowledge systems though", said Ye'xik. "I think there's a bit of a thesis/antithesis thing going on here too? Like we were learning in ideas class?"
"Wait, I missed ideas last week", said Gedi, what's an antithesis?"
"It's just an opposite, really", said Ye'xik. "You take the thesis statement and construct any statement that contradicts it. The two form a pair, and then you can try to find a synthesis that combines both ideas."
"I didn't really get that part", Finan interrupted, "like, if they're contradictory, how could they be expressed together? Wouldn't you need to pick one that's true?... wait I guess maybe if you mixed different knowledge systems? But then would they really be contradictory?"
The group fell silent for a moment in thought.
Hallavi spoke up: "Incommensurate isn't the same as contradictory, I think. That's what it would be if you had two truths from different knowledge systems that didn't fit. Plus... not all knowledge systems have a concept of truth, or of contradiction?"
The group pondered this for a bit more.
"I think maybe there's lots of ways to be contradictory, even in a very logic-hungry knowledge system", said Gedi. "Then if your thesis and antithesis contradict in one way, you could find another sort out 'axis' in which they don't, and state your synthesis from there?"
"Oh, that makes sense", said Ye'xik.
"Anyways what were you saying about the Age of Progress, Ye'xik?" said Gedi.
"Wait", interrupted Hallavi, "Did that mashes sense to you, Finan?"
Finan had been silent, looking down at their feet, but replied "Oh yeah, thanks for checking Hallavi! I think I got the part about synthesis now, thanks Gedi. I was just thinking about optimism and pessimism more. Is that where you were going with this, Ye'xik?"
"Haha, yeah Finan, you got it", said Ye'xik. "Since optimism and pessimism can be opposites, does the teacher actually want us to form a synthesis of them?"
"Oh..." muttered Gedi, "that's a good idea."
"I think..." began Hallavi, pausing to collect their thoughts, "I think the teacher would have told us that, though. Obviously it's not a wrong way to approach this assignment because it incorporates pessimism, but teachers usually aren't too tricky. I think it's okay to be literal about the pessimism thing. And I think I have an idea..."
When Hallavi remained silent for a moment, Ye'xik opened their mouth to speak, but then looked at Hallavi and closed it again. Finan and Gedi were looking at Hallavi too. They pushed through the doors out to the meadow, and settled in their usual place to sit, pulling lunches out of their bags. Hallavi finally spoke up while the others were chewing: "The Age of Progress lasted from the Enlightenment to the Dim Times, and they believed that technology would always get better, no matter what. That's the progressive vision of technology our teacher was talking about. They thought it could solve any problem, and they wouldn't have to worry about weapons or extinctions or the climate or pollution or any of that stuff, because technology would eventually come up with a solution. They looked at the technology that solved problems like diseases or overcame engineering challenges and extrapolated too broadly, basically. That's the idea they had?"
The other three were all nodding their heads, knowing Hallavi needed room to think and put words together.
Hallavi continued: "So it seems like it's optimistic, because they thought it could do anything. But they were thinking about technology like I just talked about it: like an 'it' that could 'do'. That's not what we've been learning in our technology class. Invention is a social phenomenon, and technologies have both material and social bases, not to mention communities of practice and knowledge maintenance. So I think the idea of technological progress divorced from social participation is pessimistic, because it mythologizes technology in a way that makes it seem uncontrollable."
"Huh" said Gedi and Finan while at the same time Ye'xik said "mhmm".
Hallavi looked up shyly at the rest of them, but they were all looking back with admiration.
"I think you're right, Hallavi", said Ye'xik. "Or at least, that's probably what the teacher wanted us to puzzle out. Good thing they asked us to include two knowledge systems so we can each have our own perspectives to contribute, otherwise you'd go first and our presentations would all just be 'What Hallavi said'".
Hallavi blushed but Finan laughed "Hah! You're right and that Ye'xik."
Gedi was looking at their sandwich with some intensity. They looked at Hallavi then back at their sandwich. "It's like they thought they were strapped to an out-of-control rocket, when you put it that way", they said. "It must have been scary, really, to believe that technology was almost an entity, changing in an inevitable way. That word 'inevitable' really takes all the human agency out of it, doesn't it. And even though they kept saying that technology would inevitably solve problems, look at what the technologies they invented actually did!"
Finan shuddered. He added, "Really, it was their dominators who were saying it was inevitable wasn't it? Back then it wasn't like today where historians travel and sample all kinds of ideas, so the primary sources we're reading are almost all from dominators, right?"
Ye'xik responded "Yeah, I keep forgetting to account for that. It was such a weird and horrible time, it's kinda hard to believe everything we read and hear sometimes."
Gedi picked up the thread again "That makes it worse, right? All those dominators saying the stuff they're doing is inevitable, and lying to everyone's faces about it being progress and wonderful stuff, meanwhile two thirds of it is the most awful stuff there's ever been, I mean they could have literally killed everyone and ruined the whole planet, and they almost did."
"They did actually crush a lot of cultures beyond recognition so the survivors had to rebuild with only weak ties to their old traditions", said Hallavi with a quiet intensity.
They all were silent for a moment, pondering the horrors of a bygone age.
Finan broke the silence: "That's a terrible kind of pessimism, to believe that technologcal 'progress' is inevitable, at a time when most people are dominators somewhere in a hierarchy and the ones on top constantly talk about how technologies like medicines will 'save' the world while mostly inventing new technologies of violence. Everyone must have understood what they really meant based on the technologies they were actually developing and investing into. I think I still don't understand how the Age of Progress and the Dim Times could even happen".
"Yeah, and the pessimism is only part of our assignment", signed Ye'xik. "We still have to describe why the progressive vision failed, although I think maybe you just did a lot of that, Finan".
A gloom descended briefly, until Gedi said "Well, this assignment is supposed to take a week or two, right? Thanks to Hallavi we've already cracked the crux, I think, so we don't need to ruminate too much right this moment about ancient history, and we know things turned out okay in the end. Let's finish lunch and go climb a tree!"
