Paul Sutton @zleap@social.cleverlibre.org

@zleap LLM = large language model. think chatgpt. you assemble this huge trove of conversational data and pluck out new artificial conversations in a statistical manner

I cringe when people show off their "own AI assistant" that they "created all by themselves"

And it is just a local client using some pay-per-request API

@wikipedia

You better be careful or else Republican states will ban Wikipedia. 😂

Ok, some advice for folks on the East coast, from a few bad forest fire seasons on the West coast, including this one.

Find all the fresh air intakes put air filters on them.

"Air Purifiers" of any types, check filters good time to order spares.

An air particulate monitors from AliExpress will help ($30 9 in1 popular).

Box fan filters with furnace MERV filters work, google "diy box fan filter" or "Corsi-Rosenthal"

Another site you will soon become very familiar with is purpleair.com

@Radical_EgoCom

And what does it even mean to "cost the economy?" As if the"economy" was the workers? The masses? What they really mean is it'll cost the bosses and rulers, that it'll hurt them, but they want us to think it'll hurt us, so we'll have solidarity with the bosses and rulers, instead of our fellow workers.

Class War propaganda!

Facinating to watch a potential #RedditMigration to the fediverse. The #Lemmy and #Kbin teams are dealing with all the same issues that Mastodon and other fedi microbloging sites did - but in even a faster timeframe as much of Reddit appears to be set to go dark on Monday. Questions of how to onboard, questions of centralized vs distributed onboarding, questions of how to explain servers and federation, and deep questions of how to scale if traffic is anyting like it could be Monday...

OK, #RedditMigration here are a few links to help you find a new home on the #Fediverse :

Kbin: https://kbin.social/ , https://kbin.social/register , https://kilioa.org/m/kbinMeta@kbin.social/t/266/A-small-FAQ-to-hopefully-help-new-users-to-kbin

Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/, https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/

...and create a Mastodon account (https://joinmastodon.org/). We are all connected!

#CovidIsNotOver, and the shelf life of your #COVID19 rapid tests may not be over either!

My family is still testing weekly, now by rapid test, since the government is no longer paying for our PCR tests. We had two rapid tests with an expiration date in December 2022.

I checked the website of the United States Food and Drug Administration, and they have extended the expiration on these tests until December 2023!

(I'm also pleased to report that the test was negative!)

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/home-otc-covid-19-diagnostic-tests

@pluralistic has done it again with an incredible piece calling attention to how surveillance tech is often first tried out on the least privileged populations, including prisoners, before being pushed on everyone else.

Tech can be wonderful and solve plenty of problems. But it can’t solve everything, and it’s not magically going to fix horrible injustices in our societies.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model-ee025ad60951

One reason we need to preserve biodiversity: over billions of years, life has accumulated amazing knowledge, which we are scarcely beginning to tap.

For example, 'glass sponges' are sponges living in the mud at the ocean floor which have beautifully optimized skeletons made of glass: that is, silica. This one is called Venus’ Flower Basket. As we zoom in, we see more and more structure. Its lattice of silica has diagonal bracings for extra strength.

But the true beauty of it only becomes clear under a microscope!

(1/2)

@DamienMarieAtHope When we don't legally require the Slow AIs of corporations to be sociopaths?

@GreenFire @sltrib fortunately we are starting to see some independent, publicly funded media spring up in the UK. Byline Times and Double Down News being two good examples.

#Smoke Sends US #Northeast #SolarPower Plunging by 50% as #Wildfires Rage in #Canada https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-08/smoke-sends-northeast-solar-power-plunging-by-50-as-wildfires-rage
"A shroud of smoke has sent solar power generation in parts of the eastern US plummeting by more than 50% as wildfires rage in Canada," reports Bloomberg

When will we evolve beyond the selfishness of capitalism?

Reddit started as a simple website, but they published an API which allowed people to make their own reddit apps.

This benefitted reddit because it increased their userbase and minimized bandwidth usage because users wouldn't have to reload every time they wanted to expand a reply.

With time, third party apps became more user friendly and added more features. Everyone was happy.

A few weeks ago, the CEO, whose reddit handle is "Spez", decided reddit would hold an IPO to go public this year; in preparation, they need to make reddit super-profitable. Third party apps would have to pay per API call. The problem is that the billing was arbitrary and the amount of payment would be in the millions of dollars per year. Because third party apps can't pay, they'll have to close shop.

Third party apps not only helped ordinary users, subreddit moderators depend on them to efficiently curb abuse and spam (because the default app SUCKS. It's slow, overloads you with ads and has zero accessibility features). Some of these mods help maintain marginalized communities such as r/traa (transgender meme community), and the mods stated that without these tools they'll have to close the subreddits.

But Spez still doesn't give a shit, and worse, his replies are blatantly cynical. He admits he doesn't give a shit, is only focused on the money, and if you suffer for the changes, then sucks to be you. (he didn't say that literally, but more or less that's the gist of it). He's also lied, downplayed, accused opposers of wrongdoing and deflected uncomfortable questions.

Spez also accused the author of Apollo (a third party app) of blackmailing him when he just exposed his lies on the internet.

(Also, this is not the first time Spez does something despicable and failed to give a reasonable reply to the community. He once was caught red-handed using his admin powers to EDIT posts made by a disgruntled user.)

Mods of around a thousand different subreddits recently organized a blackout in which they'll close posting to their communities (or make them private) in protest for the policy changes.

Creators of alternative decentralized platforms such as Lemmy and Kbin started advertising and organizing. Some of them were banned for no legitimate reason. People have started to get really angry. Some are threatening to close their reddit accounts. One even threatened suicide because they depend on reddit to cope for their MH issues.

Meanwhile,  lemmy dot ml (the main Lemmy website, akin to mastodon dot social) experienced a spike in new user sign ups and the entire lemmy network is overloaded to the point of failure.

TL;DR: The reddit CEO is a greedy asshole and is incapable of listening to the community. The community protested and the CEO has started to ban people promoting the competition. Now everyone is angry and have started to migrate. Others feel hopeless and trapped in a platform that has disenfranchised them.

#reddit #Lemmy #RedditMigration #Save3dPartyApps

More evidence of the importance of #Mycorrhizal mycelium as a global carbon pool: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00167-7

And of the urgency in transitioning from high input, high tillage monocropping toward more diversified no/low-till systems incorporating perennial crops

Omg: who did this?😱

Between Twitter and Reddit imploding, and Meta soon launching their fediverse-compatible Project 92/Barcelona/Threads, there's a great need to make https://jointhefediverse.net available in more languages.

Would you join me and the rest of the volunteers and help out?

https://github.com/jointhefediverse-net/jointhefediverse.net#translation

#fediverse #JoinTheFediverse #twitter #reddit #meta #project92 #threads #TwitterMigration #RedditMigration #volunteer #translation #internationalization #i18nfellow #volunteers