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Something to look forward to! 🥳

Enjoy your weekend everyone. 👯

#teaser #theme #design #comingsoon

The “free” WiFi at the mall won’t let me connect unless I give them my:

- email
- home address
- phone number
- full name
- date of birth
- gender
- annual household income

This isn’t feeling so free to me…

While Mastodon has been moving slowly in this direction over the last year or so, nothing (here or elsewhere) has managed to replace before-time Twitter for breaking news, local emergency alerts, or a getting a quick general sense of what's going on in the world.

Yes, I know there are some people who don't want real-world information here, but I think this is a real, significant loss.

I’ve never understood the “Sellout Singh” moniker. From the position of having (only!) 25 seats in a Parliament of 338, the NDP has seen real substantial action on key elements of their platform: national dental care, pharmacare, and childcare programs. This seems to me like a job well done!

It’s only a ‘sellout’ to ideologues who don’t want these things. So every time PP launches that phrase he’s telling Canadians that their health and wellness are not his first priority.

#CdnPoli #ABPoli

The term you are looking to dislike is "Generative AI". AI/ML has been used for decades and continues to be used for many useful, ethical, and not at all wasteful purposes.

It's what makes your low-light photos less noisy, it's how OCR works, it's how speech recognition works, it's how low-cost motion capture works.

Remember the original Kinect? That was powered by ML (paper).

GenAI, specifically, is the grift.
hackers.town/users/calcifer/st…

calcifer

2024-09-17 16:54:35

Please stop demonizing “AI”; the stuff you have a problem with isn’t AI research or AI tech, it’s a very small subset of that domain that (a)has ethical issues with training data sourcing and (b)is being horribly misused/way overly trusted

AI research is valuable and important, and MOST of it doesn’t have these problems. It’s doing things like increasing the reliability of cancer screenings, helping astronomers make better observations, improving assistive technology, accelerating medical research, etc.

Not all AI is “train a chat bot” or “train an image generator” for nefarious or stupid purposes

“what if we just stopped having AI, because it’s bad and I don’t like it”

is magical thinking that makes the horoscope look rigorous, and gets posted here three times an hour as though it’s a revelation. The toothpaste will not go back in the tube because you will it.

If a thing is bad and it harms us, the solution is a POLICY REMEDY

How will we make AI more expensive, limiting its wasteful application? What regulatory burden will you place on industrial consumption of energy and water?

had a desire to do some cryptography today and I'm very grateful for Cryptographic Right Answers latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/c…

looks like there's also a 2024 post-quantum version here latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/c…

Google have really stolen an accessibility march on Apple with image descriptions with rich detail, built right into Talkback.
No more sharing to other apps, just focus on an image, single tap with three fingers and select Describe Image.
Browsing images on social media has never been so interesting or easy.
Here is an example, taken at Bewdly safari park:

A rhinoceros is standing in a grassy field in front of a wooden fence. The rhinoceros is facing the left of the image, its head is down and its long horn is visible. The rhinoceros is gray in color with a large, bulbous body and short, thick legs. The grass in the field is a vibrant green. The fence is made of brown wood and has a wire mesh on top. Beyond the fence, there are trees with green foliage. The image is taken from a slightly elevated angle. The time is 11:29.
Thank you Google. As a totally blind person from birth, I never thought I would be interested in pictures, I love them now.

This thread highlights one of the things I don’t like the most about people on the fedi: the insufferable arrogance of people (usually tech folks) who think this place should stick to their narrow vision and openly disparage anything that deviates from from that.

The beauty of the fedi is we can literally do anything we want here. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other. There is enough space on the internet for us to have our own special little places.

The dogma I see from people complaining about not wanting ads, when you are literally promoting stuff in your bio or not wanting influencers when we boost the sentiments we agree with and saying everything should be free when being on the fedi costs money is so ridiculous it’s beginning to border on straight up bigotry. It’s ok if one doesn’t like these things, but fighting to keep them out of the fedi because of that is replicating the centralized environments we say we allegedly one to get away from.

Not having these things is not what differentiates the fedi from centralized platforms. Giving people the tools to build whatever experience they want safely is what is going to put this place over the top.

Anything less than that and it’s just recreating less featured versions of stuff we already have.

Mekka does a good job of laying out why basing the direction of the fedi based on what we don’t like is a losing game, especially when those dislikes are based on shallow and myopic points.

hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113…

Just learned about Emissary, the social web toolkit.

At first glance, it looks like an extensible server that lets you define/extend ActivityPub types with your own, or with custom workflows/access rules.

Now I have to keep myself from going down a million rabbit holes with this. Tempted to dust off my old federated Steam/Itch game/digital project distribution idea, seems a whole lot more doable with something like Emissary than entirely from scratch.

Im being told that its too early for any keyboard for a #caturday

#uConsole

I don't think people fully grasp just how expensive this AI nonsense is. Each simple Chat-GPT inquiry uses on average a half liter of water and 0.14 kWh.

If one of ten Americans make a weekly inquiry, that's enough water to cover Rhode Island's consumption for a day and a half, and enough electricity to power DC for 20 days.
washingtonpost.com/technology/…

Neválí se vám někomu za rozum plonková grafika od #AMD? RX 6600 nebo něco podobnýho okolo 3k?

Moje letitá RX 560 už má svý nejlepší roky za sebou :D

#bazar

Awesome to see that message hammered again and again: digital tools have become infrastructure!

#matrixConf

The sheer size of that crowd! The community is excited to see what authentication is going to look like in Matrix in the very near future

#matrixConf

Think it's got a bit of a problem knowing what language I want.

[deangelisdf/write2audiobook: A powerful tool designed to convert text-based documents into engaging audiobooks. Perfect for anyone looking to make reading more accessible, whether for people with visual impairments or for those who simply prefer listening on the go.](github.com/deangelisdf/write2a…)