Okay, that's … what the fuck? That's amazing!

We tend, I think, to imagine that the days of simple scientific 'miracles' – Newton and his prism, Fleming and penicillin – are at an end. Anything really useful will take years of work and a mountain of kit to make happen.

Nope. Take tartrazine, the food colouring used in Doritos, and paint it onto your skin. Shine a red light on it. Your skin is transparent!

How many medical applications does that have?!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/05/common-food-dye-found-to-make-skin-and-muscle-temporarily-transparent

Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent

Researchers say procedure not yet tested on people could eventually be used to help locate injuries or tumours

^{Ian Sample (The Guardian)}

It astonishes me that people expected LLMs to be good at creating summaries. LLMs are good at transforms that have the same shape as ones that appear in their training data. They're fairly good, for example, at generating comments from code because code follows common structures and naming conventions that are mirrored in the comments (with totally different shapes of text).

In contrast, summarisation is tightly coupled to meaning. Summarisation is not just about making text shorter, it's about discarding things that don't contribute to the overall point and combining related things. This is a problem that requires understanding the material, because it's all about making value judgements.

So, it's totally unsurprising that the Australian study showed that it's useless. It's no surprise that both Microsoft and Apple's email summarisation tools discard the obvious phishing markers and summarise phishing scams as '{important thing happened}, click on this link' because they don't actually understand anything in the text that they're discarding, they just mark it as low entropy and discard it.

AI worse than humans at summarising information, trial finds

A test of artificial intelligence (AI) for Australia's corporate regulator ASIC found it was worse at summarising info than humans were.

^{Cam Wilson (Crikey)}

Jul Reindeer at MFF23

🦌: jul_deer
📌: FurFest

#Furry #Furries #Fursuit #FursuitFriday #Photography #Anthro #FurryArt #FurryArtist #MFF #MFF23

"The modern era of AI calls for a risk-based approach to regulation"

No it doesn't. It calls for a consequences approach to regulation.

If your system harms someone, you decided to build and deploy it and so you are liable for damages and redress proportionate to the harm. Same as if it was a tractor. Or a cow.

Mass shootings in the US:

2014: 273
2015: 336
2016: 383
2017: 348
2018: 336
2019: 417
2020: 610
2021: 690
2022: 647
2023: 656

So far in 2024: 385

We do not have to live like this. No other country on the planet does.

Carla Denyer, #GreenParty Co-Leader professed herself baffled at the system by which MPs have to secure spots in a Commons chamber much too small to seat all of them by arriving early to place down a prayer card, likening it to “a medieval version of putting your towel on a deckchair”.

#This is a parliament where not every MP has a seat, there’s nowhere to plug in any of your devices to work from, or somewhere to put your water. This is just the basic stuff.”

Reform of Parliament is overdue.

I have had this open in a tab forever. I don't recall where I got the link from. But I finally watched it.

If you're a web developer, it's worth the 5 minute time investment!
https://briefs.video/videos/what-is-react/

What Is React.js?

A video from Webbed Briefs

^briefs.video

One guy a quarter of a century ago trying unsuccessfully to use a shoe bomb and they’re still x-raying shoes at airports (X-rays can’t see explosives).

Hundreds of school shootings and nothing ever happens at all.

OMG i haven't had scrollbars in firefox for SO long and i finally bothered to look for how to do it

Go to about:config and set widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style to a number between like 1 and 6 (inclusive). There are different styles!! Round,, square,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, i missed them so much..... i'm tearing up...

thank you ff255 you are my hero forever https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/scrollbars-disappear-in-firefox-100/m-p/22144/highlight/true#M9228
#firefox

Re: Scrollbars disappear in Firefox 100

I have found 2 ways to make arrows appear (maybe there's more Need to change variables in FF's about:config 1. widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.allow-buttons  true or 2. widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.

^{connect.mozilla.org}

In light of the Internet Archive losing its appeal to hachette, I just wanted to point out some websites you should avoid:

* https://annas-archive.li/
* https://downmagaz.net/
* https://ebook-hunter.org/
* https://forcoder.net/
* https://freemagazines.top/
* https://liber3.eth.limo/

If you were to download books from these websites, you might cut into hachette's more than three billion dollars of annual revenue. So make sure to avoid those websites and the following:

* https://libgen.is/
* https://oceanofpdf.com/
* https://pdfroom.com/
* https://pdfstop.com/
* https://pdfdrive.to/
* https://pdfmagazines.club/
* https://sci-hub.se/
* https://singlelogin.re/
* ... or any of the other sites listed at https://rentry.co/megathread-books

#internetarchive

Liber3

An eBook search engine works on ENS & IPFS.

^{liber3.eth.limo}

Content warning: UK politics Reveal/hide

To everyone in #GameDev:

Rebinding keys is a basic accessibility feature. Stop leaving it out.

Just found about a French MP with a slash in her last name : Emeline K/Bidi. I’ve never seen that before! https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeline_K/Bidi

One more concrete example for the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article

personnalité politique française

^{Contributeurs aux projets Wikimedia (Fondation Wikimedia, Inc.)}

thread in which I talk about why the "wrap your games console in a towel" or "reflow the bga" thing works to fix some consoles, and it's nothing to do with solder balls.

https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/113084336056277361

Just remember, kids: It's perfectly legal for people to take your writing, code, videos, music and other works into a 'dataset' that can be used to train an LLM model to forge your art or writing style -- for money.

But if a nonprofit decides to purchase hardcopy books, scan them in, and create a digital lending program providing works to anyone who asks -- for free, that's checks notes illegal. :D

without total control of media publishing, broadcasting, distribution & trading, there are no #techbro American billionaires; and without American #tech #billionaires, there is no American Fascism as we know it today.

if billionaires have no right to exist; neither their #media companies as we know them — the #FAANG & corporate media.

to kill American fascism you need to kill American corporate media as it is off and online.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

#AmericanFascism #copyright

The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal to lend out digitized books. A federal appeals court sided with the four publishers, which accused the nonprofit of copyright infringement.

^{Emma Roth (The Verge)}

I know everyone has probably seen this but, Beary Poppins is my whole vibe.

The small nudge is bearfection.

Record measles outbreak in Oregon blamed on vaccine exemptions

Vaccine exemptions at nearly 9% in the state, enabling sustained transmission.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/record-measles-outbreak-in-oregon-blamed-on-vaccine-exemptions/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Others have said this, but the Internet Archive's appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.

The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal to lend out digitized books. A federal appeals court sided with the four publishers, which accused the nonprofit of copyright infringement.

^{Emma Roth (The Verge)}

The obvious choice for ActivityPub’s birthday would be the 23rd of January 2018 - the day it was annointed as a W3C recommendation. That doesn’t seem quite right though - its not as if the spec came into existence in any sense upon that date. In fact, Mastodon implemented it before thne.

There are several possible dates you might pick, but for me it will always be September 5th 2014 - when I committed the first sketch of a specification I called ActivityPump and pushed it to Github

It wouldn’t be until November that I actually submitted (a revised and enhanced version of) that draft to the working group, but even then I had the very nucleus of the specification written down.

Happy 10th birthday, ActivityPub. 🍰

Here be a first draft · w3c/activitypub@f510032

Contribute to w3c/activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub