At least one of the New York Times’ “Biden didn’t do perfectly at the debate, he must now drop out of the election” hit pieces was, according to the date in its URL, written days before the debate and then was post-dated.
"There is a strange discrepancy there, because people living in encampments are protesting in their own way the lack of housing," says founder of Resilience Montreal.
For nearly all of my life, I've known how I was going to die. Not from cancer, or diet, or drink, but by being crushed under a car. I will be mangled and bleed out painfully. The driver, distracted on their phone, will say that I "came out of nowhere". The police and the DA will call it an "accident". There will be no consequences of any kind. Except for my death, of course. [...] jwz.org/b/ykV3
non-cyclists that are confused by activism think that activists are attracted to cycling, when the reality is that becoming a cyclist very quickly radicalizes one into becoming an activist. Nothing crystallizes strong opinions as being frequently threatened with death by at best indifferent and at worst aggressive and antagonistic people.
People make fun of my NEON ORANGE sneakers (I walk a lot of places and am frequently crossing the street at poorly-marked intersections) but for me it's just one more chance to talk about road safety and how much dicier it's getting for all but the car and truck drivers.
@not_benis It is our understanding that the folks who had been developing Dendrite don't have the funds they need to continue development at this time. We hope to see that change!
@not_benis No, they're not employed by the Foundation though we too are facing funding challenges.
Like other FOSS foundations, we host many projects that are key to the ecosystem on our infrastructure. Our limited R&D funds are currently focused on Trust & Safety and bridge maintenance.
@not_benis FOSS foundations provide all sorts of infrastructure to the projects they steward on behalf of their respective ecosystem: version control, CI/CD, open governance, accounts receivable and payable, etc. Obviously we don't run GitHub but we pay for their services on behalf of the projects we host.
@not_benis Yeah, sometimes using a foundation's infrastructure is about sharing cost burdens, but _every_ time it's about having a neutral space within which to collaborate.
Dass Christian Lindner jetzt dem milliardärsfinanzierten Desinformationsportal „Nius“ ein Interview gegeben hat, passt ins Bild. Der Mann ist eine Schande für die Bundesregierung. Was kommt als nächstes? „Epoch Times“?
Christian Lindner lebt seit er 21 ist von Steuergeldern, damals wurde er Abgeordneter. Davor war er Geschäftsführer eines Start-ups für “komplexe Softwarelösungen”, das ihn zuerst entließ und dann trotzdem pleiteging, was etwa die KfW 1,2 Mio kostete.
You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation
Since it’s come up again - if you use new Outlook and Mail in Windows 11, it automatically syncs all your email and contacts into Microsoft’s cloud - even if you use a third party mail provider.
For more than 85 years, Tractor Supply has been focused on one thing…serving Life Out Here. Every day our 50,000 Team Members take care of our customers like family.
El laboratorio de Patrick D Hsu ha descrito en Nature un nuevo sistema de edición genética basado en un elemento móvil IS110, compacto, que funciona con una pequeña recombinasa y un ARN bifuncional complementario al ADN de origen y destino, lo cual permite programar deleciones, inserciones e inversiones limpiamente, complementando las #CRISPR. Te lo explico en Science Media Centre España. sciencemediacentre.es/desarrol…
Dos artículos publicados en Nature describen una nueva técnica de edición del genoma que permite la inserción, inversión o eliminación de secuencias largas de ADN en posiciones del genoma concretas.
oh my! 😅 😭 Yes it definitively has show a PovRay aestetic, with all those transparencies and metallic sheen. I was so fond of #povray when I still used #Amiga in the 1990s! I even gave a little speech at last Ipisa (it.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPISA sorry, no english version) @luna
I used to run it on a 2nd hand Amiga 1200 with 50mhz 68060… it seems millions of years ago instead it's just a generation. Well I do feel old. Let's pray I won't turn into a whining, nostalgic, grumpy #xgeneration oldies. 😄
Over the last eight months, Israel has killed at least 37,765 people and injured another 86,429, according to the ministry’s latest figures. theintercept.com/2024/06/27/co…
This is a really good summary of what happened with Polyfill. Great work by the researchers uncovering this. Note that:
The security research group warned that the combined impact resulting from these other three services is likely to have a much wider impact than initially anticipated.
Just recently, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince stated that "tens of millions of websites (4% of the web)" used Polyfill.io, dubbing the incident "extremely concerning" as is.
Nullify, an Australia-based forensic investigator and security researcher has now made an even more worrisome observation.
References to the 'check_tiaozhuan', a function that represents the injected malicious code exist on "Chinese forums dating back to June 2023.
Is the "fail on top" GitHub action setting you mention opting in-to something you can do yourself in settings, or was that done administratively by GitHub staff?
> I don't know how long it takes our friends in Redmond to react to this.
I usually ingest your upstream changes within a day of release, and get them into a Windows branch within a week. After that it’s up to the build gods… but I have it on good authority that 8.8.0 is already checked in and starting to pop up on customer machines. :)
AweSIM: We register your number under our name. Your personal and financial data stays private, away from those who'd sell it. True privacy in mobile service. #DataPrivacy #Purism #AweSIM puri.sm/products/librem-awesim…
Today our digital identity contains a lot of private data that should be protected. In this guide, the Tuta Team share their three best practices to protect yourself online.
"Bei unserer ersten Anfrage hatte die Staatsanwaltschaft den Fall noch als Tötungsdelikt behandelt, am 6. Juni wird die Tat dann als "gefährliche Körperverletzung" bezeichnet."
Der Angriff auf einen Italiener in einer Stralsunder Bar bleibt rätselhaft. Laut Staatsanwaltschaft hat sich der mutmaßliche Täter, ein 64-jähriger Deutscher, schon zuvor mehrfach ausländerfeindlich geäußert.
Warum erkranken manche Menschen nicht an Corona, obwohl sie dem Virus ausgesetzt sind? Forscher haben herausgefunden, dass bestimmte genetische Faktoren, wie das HLA-DQA2-Gen, eine entscheidende Rolle spielen. Diese Erkenntnisse könnten die Entwicklung zukünftiger Impfstoffe revolutionieren.
C’est la classe, ou bien ? Notre collègue @agon a imprimé des porte-clés Access42 et des planches d’alphabet #braille en 3D à l’aide d’un bioplastique à base d’amidon de maïs.
Très sympa, ces cadeaux de séminaire faits maison ! 🥰
Cyklistika není jen o radostech. Po týdnu se těším, že vyrazím, a po 30 km nejde přehazovat. Samozřejmě z kopce, a zůstalo přehozeno na nejrychlejším převodu. S vypětím všech sil jsem dojel do Milíkova, kde mi tchán půjčil nářadí a aspoň se mi podařilo řetěz přehodit na 4. kolečko. Přijel jsem do Kynšperka, kde je servis, a tam zjistili, že lanko je v pořádku, ale rozbila se páčka na přehazování. Lze koupit jen set a cena je kolem 5000 Kč, bez práce. Heute ist nicht mein Tag.
Můj praděda jezdil na kole co si pamatuji, a to až do svých 90 let. Tomu kolu se říkalo Ukrajina (do teď vlastně nevím proč). Je fakt, že 30 kiláků na tom asi nikdy neujel (možná v mládí), ale zase si vystačil s jedním převodem. 🙂 Tak to zkus vzít jako výzvu. Kolik toho dáš na tenhle jeden převod. 😉
1/3 NV Access is pleased to announce that we are using a new code signing certificate for our builds. This will give users additional peace of mind in the authenticity of NVDA builds.
In the interim, those running new Alpha / beta builds may see a warning from Microsoft that Windows Defender prevented an unrecognised program from running. It is important to be wary of unexpected warnings like this, however in this case, the warning is expected, as the certificate is new.
To allow NVDA to run, press tab to "Run anyway", and press enter to run the snapshot. This will help us get through this period until Windows considers our certificate "trusted":
3/3 For those interested in learning more about the code signing process, and this warning, please see: answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wi…"
and if you would like to test out Alpha builds of NVDA, head to: Please feel encouraged to run the latest snapshot from nvaccess.org/files/nvda/snapsh….
If you do have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at info@nvaccess.org.
JA, ich bin etwas spät dran, hatte aber erst jetzt die Möglichkeit den Dienst zu abonnieren. Nun also hier eine etwa 5 Jahre jüngere Kopie von mir, die sich an einem künstlich generierten Aufsatz über die Programmiersprache Python versucht. Bis auf einige Aussprachefehler und seltsame Atemtechnik klingt es gar nicht mal übel. Als Quelle dienten meine eigenen Podcasts.
Ich war ja nie ein guter Englischsprecher, aber auch das ist bekanntlich kein problem mehr. Ich versuche es mal mit dem Einführungstext zur Konferenz-Software TeamTalk. 🙂
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#alttext #ai #accessibility #websites #socialmedia https://youtu.be/CHCK43D0jJ0An Alt-Opinon On Alt-Text. In this conversation, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece...
One thing they didn't mention which I'm kind of surprised the other guy didn't bring up is the issssssue of reliability. We all know AI has rather a complicated relationship with the truth. That may not really be an issue for social media posts as such, and for what it's worth I do actually agree with the main thrust of the argument, but the fact remains that we can't completely, 100% rely upon these things until AI companies figure out how to make them understand the difference between fact and fiction.
You're looking at it far too simplistically. What they do essentially is recognise patterns, which is more or less what we ourselves do when learning languages. What they don't have however is any sort of frame of reference through which to understand context, which we get from every day lived experience. Context sizes in these models are getting larger and larger, so maybe this problem will more or lessss take care of itssssself in a few years, particularly as new training data comes along. Of course it'sss probably also the case that large language models are only the beginning in terms of AI technology, who knows where we'll be in a decade even.
Because they generate output from training data input, they will never be able to ascertain truth because, to even get that output, they need to compare other training data that was imported into them. No image is going to be exactly alike. Even an image that is taken three minutes after the initial image, that’s gonna be slightly different even though it might appear to be the same angle. The LLM will extract likenesses from all the images, and it will compare those likenesses, but it’s never going to understamd that’s what’s in the image and that’s not in the image. it literally can’t reason like that
Just ask yourself how you arrive at literally any conclusion. Usually, you'll draw upon your own lived experiences, lessons you've learned in school or elsewhere, ETC, and the conclusion you come to will be influenced by all of those things. AI has serious blindspotss right now in large part because it can't draw upon past mistakes. This is part of the problem I have with this debate honestly, many people just seem to fundimentally misunderstand even their own minds and just assume there's something undefinable but utterly unique about the human condition which means that AI will never be able to compete on the same level. Music is perhaps the easiest case in point, people were saying AI couldn't do it for years, yet now it can, and it can do it rather well too, you should see what Suno is like these days.
This is rather missing the point of my entire argument. I’m not saying that the human brain works like a computer, in point of fact we still don’t really know a whole lot about how the human brain works, but in any case you can’t really compare a living organism with something man-made. The point I’m making is that the process by which we learn and the process by which AI learns are much more similar than you’d probably like to admit.
@weirdwriter@tweesecake while I am on the side of Robert here, I guess you made many good points. The fact that LLMs being seen as the entire AI thingy can be reductive, as symbolic computing and other strands of cognitive sciences are creating this huge field of AI. and, probably, by few years, this tech can be a good tool with its own flaw to assist us in specific, measurable tasks. I am just worried that AI as an academic field would be narrowed due to the proffit-making intent of capitalism.
Even with LLMs, we need to look beyond training data as most of it right now is a web-scraped images which most of it are without good alttext, and have a very low resource value on ASIAN context, cultures and nonhuman context, like various animals, plants etc, so, it is hitting its peak already. The funding is so much congested on letting the LLM game goes well, and its not good to begin with.
Other strand of AIneed to be more expanded, and this process of converting research into capital needed to be stop. if we need a real intelligent system that can contribute to the understanding of complex system, cognition and how intelligence work. It's sad when a field that is full of potential becomes a hyped product. I follow the AI spaces both from the developer and also from the Academic route, and I feel we need to have more nuanced, grey-hat argument on the potential of AI.
Let's steer the discussion very narrowly to the task at hand, which is image description, the vision language model are trained generatively to be good at multiple image evaluation task, describing it is only one of them. By listening to the talk description to me podcast, I learnt how much of an expertese goes into describing a scene well, I don't think so a vision model deployed by big companies want to train a model that can do only that work best.
what we need is a good vision language models that can be fined-tuned with thousands of human-curated Q&A of Blind people queering about an image. It needed to be additionally refined with many millions pairs of poor images, good image and descriptions this is to let the model learn many facet of one image, that may come from phone camera, or poor lighting etc. we also need and eval system that is specific to AltText making or for the task of describing image to the Blind people.
from what I am seeing right now, @letsenvision is the only research and AT company that can under-take this stuff. LIke it or not, at the moment, Vision language model, is just average in describing images, it is worst in describing bad images. The overrepresentation of filler words, descriptives etc, makes the technology overhyped. Until we have a blind-focused AI Eval on image description, we are only at step 1 of the development process.
I feel like many players are steering the users into territories that need less accountability. like, giving AI a personality? I don't think so we need personality, we need our work to be done! We need more autonomy to steer the system to describemore granularly,, sometimes very short, sometimes longer but meaningful. The personality aspect, while sounds like a system prompt, it just add lots of unrequired aspect to it. I guess we do not need a chat bot to begin with!
As you rightly pointed out, the audio and speech AI Study have progress much stronger and crisper, very much development and truly under-appriciated space, I guess it has many research and also daily use value for it.
I feel weird for saying this, but I honestly wonder if Meta might just be our best hope here. For whatever reason, they seem to have committed themselves to a path of open source AI models at this point, and people are already doing amazing things with it. Given how quickly these things have been optimised to run on consumer hardware, I can only imagine this process will become even more efficient, or the baseline of processors will become more and more powerful as we transition away from X86 / 64. A company with the time / resources to dedicate to a project like the one you have outlined may well find itself on fertile ground very soon, if it isn’t already.
I am not sure if a big company may do this well, I am more open to either a small company like envision, or any research centers or even community centered approach towards this. we first need a constitution-like principles to ground this vision AI that is by itself is complicated. We need AI build from ground up that knows how to describe an image to a blind person just like the expert audio and image describer.
an small local model that is build just to describe images, and, fined-tuned with human curated data contributed by Blind, Low Vision and human describers. the AI principles or constitutions are there to guide the fine tuning process, like be helpful, be brief, be concise, but this is just a wattered down example. to create a constitution, we need to answer questions like, what does a good descriptions entailed? how to describe dressings? how to describe humans?
other questions can be more like what is important? what is les important? how to contextualise better? what are the guidelines to perceive an image from various typoligies? how to frame human visual standard? see the compoication? we as humans, do all this in magical second, and the copious data that we have now do not account for even little complexity! the AI system that we have now is too general, if we need a true describer, I feel we need to work for it as community!
I guess all this insights is not original, I think about it more after listening to the talking description to me Podcast, shout out to @ChristineMalec
The problem is that you need a pretty huge context size in order to do what you want to do, I’m actually not sure what the hardware requirements for large context models look like at the moment. I know they were pretty bad a year ago, but these things move quickly so I’d have to check at this point.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to somecanuckchick • • •