I’m coming to love #Mastodon’s boost culture. Everybody’s all like, “Follow everyone! Boost it all!”
In the Blue Place, it felt like we were all competing for attention. Here, it’s more like we’re cooperating for attention.
At one level, that doesn’t make sense—everyone still has only so much attention to spend. But it *feels* better, and without The Algorithm enforcing power law, winner-take-all dynamics, the boost culture does seem to lift a lot of voices that were drowned out over there.
One of the many things that bothers me about white supremacists is their revisionist history of the Civil War. "Ol Bobby Lee" was a gentleman and wasn't "that bad" on slavery. Well, 160 years TODAY the retreating Confederate Army kidnapped over 1000 Black people in PA and MD and took them to Virginia for enslavement. Few know about this, but it was a war crime on top of the tragedy of Gettysburg.
How Confederates Kidnapped and Enslaved Blacks at Gettysburg - Owlcation
A Bad Supreme Court Decision Based on Ersatz Facts https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2023/07/04/a-bad-supreme-court-decision-based-on-ersatz-facts/
In collaboration with Alison Cole and Ulrich Technau we also mapped the peptidergic #connectome of #Nematostella, by linking peptide-expressing to receptor-expressing cells.
In #Cnidaria, tissues are extensively connected via #neuropeptide signalling.
#neuroscience
"Ninth Dedekind number discovered: Scientists from the Universities of Paderborn and Leuven solve long-known problem in mathematics" https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/993662 #Maths #Math #Mathematics #Science @science
Your reminder that I've written a book on the business risks of generative AI. "The Intelligence Illusion"
https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
Stuff I cover (not exhaustive):
- AGI is not happening any time soon.
- AGI and anthropomorphism will cripple your ability to think clearly about AI
- The AI industry has a long history of snake oil and fraud
- These models copy more than you think
- Hallucinations are still a thing and aren't going away.
- AI "reasoning" is quite broken
- Security is a shit show
So, earlier today I published “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con”
It explains my theory of of the statistical illusion that makes LLMs feel intelligent to some https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
I've been a lurker here for ages. Might be time for an #introduction.
In brief: I'm a writer, artist, and occasional coder with a passion for virtual worlds, video games, music, (web)comics, free & open-source software, and lots more. Have mixed feelings about social media in general, but joined Twitter in 2014 (on April Fools' Day) and still cling to it because of #SecondLife and the people there. Been on #Mastodon since July 2017, first via mastodon.technology and then Fosstodon (since 2019).
A short video that I made in #Blender, showing off my terrain model of #SecondLife's Heterocera continent (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Heterocera), with 433 regions in total.
I gathered the elevation data for each region using a combination of LSL, HTTP, and Python, then used Blender's bpy Python API to generate the mesh. #b3d
The "terrain layer" textures, shown toward the end, are available thanks to @tyche_shepherd's Grid Survey API (http://www.gridsurvey.com/api.php).
This is a remarkable ruling, and not in a good way.
"The judge’s order puts limits on a number of executive agencies with a wide range of responsibilities across the federal government, including the #DOJ, State Department, #HHS, and #CDC. It also names more than a dozen individual officials, including #DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Jen Easterly, who leads #CISA."
Diving back into a (slow, inept) parallel reading of the "The Pleasure of the Text" and «Le Plaisir du texte», we come to and let pass unnoticed various sentences which are rather delightful if not obviously true (or obviously not true), and note only
«L'endroit le plus érotique d'un corps n'est-il pas là où le vêtement bâille?»
The most erotic place on a body, is it not where the clothing gapes?
That gets no counterargument from me. :)
Followed immediately by the suggestion that «la perversion» is «le régime du plaisir textuel». Perversion is the realm of textual pleasure?
Some of us would like to think so. But are we really that edgy? 🤔
Posted a brief review of Ligotti's Shadow at the Bottom of the World (which I thought I had finished a while back, but turns out I was not quite done with the last story for some reason).
#books #amreading #ligotti #horror
https://bookwyrm.social/user/ceoln/review/1923910/s/very-good-weird-horror#anchor-1923910
Aha, it is found! Apparently it slipped down between the bed and the wall last night, at the same time my phone and its backup batter did, and I overlooked it when I fished up the phone and battery.
This brings to mind the rumored pirate practice of burying a less valuable chest, and/or a scary skeleton, in the ground a bit above the real treasure chest, so that anyone digging downward there will encounter the decoy chest / skeleton and stop digging, thereby overlooking the real treasure.
We're noticing a lot of movement to Mastodon. To get you started, here's a list of #OpenScience folks who are already on Mastodon 🐘 https://germanrepro.github.io/Mastodon-OpenScience/
A consciousness somehow associated with matter.
Posting about culture, philosophy, politics, AI Art Tools, NaNoWriMo, Software Development occasionally, the relationship of consciousness to matter.
Degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science, once had a US TS/SCI(redacted) clearance, radical-for-the-US politics, ex-Libertarian, zen-buddhist-pantheist-atheist.
Google employee, but I do not speak for Google in any way.
If your profile tells me nothing about you, it's less likely I'll follow you (back).
Header: abstract smoky patterns
pfp: Adorable weird piglet / delirium cultist... thing. In a hoodie.