floof.org
"Brits blame Brexit more than Covid for public services decline, study reveals"
;)
Satisfaction with public services is falling and Brits see Brexit as a top cause, says Ipsos studyAlicja Hagopian (The Independent)
Slightly out of date, but one of the big reasons that our media is so out of touch with what the majority of us want is in my opinion because we no longer provide the majority of their funding.
I'm not suggesting that I know how to fix this problem. I'm just sad that the fossil fuel industry and their co-conspirators like Toyota are the major funders of what news they report.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24183641-drilleddesmog_mediagreenwashingreport
🔗: How it feels to get an AI email from a friend via Neven Mrgan #Tech #AI #Email
Recently I received an AI-written email from a friend. It wasn’t sent to test AI, or to show it off, as in “ha ha check this out”; my friend had a question to ask me, and the email asked it over the course of a few paragraphs. It then disclosed that, oh by the way, I used AI to write this.
https://mrgan.com/ai-email-from-a-friend/
Recently I received an AI-written email from a friend. I'm trying to understand why I had the reaction to it that I did.mrgan.com
Today is the day! Fursuit commissions are now open, for the next week or so ;3
http://jaycostumes.com
At a time when fascism & authoritarianism are creeping into the global politics of the developed world, it’s useful for uskottke.org
Complete List Of Everything I Use Voice Siri For:
1. Setting timers on Watch when brewing tea or doing laundry
2. Begrudgingly, when getting navigator directions and the car stereo safety features won’t let me type onscreen
3. …
That’s pretty much it. 🤷♂️
Did you know that #XScreenSaver (yes, the collection of screensavers for X11) is available on Android?
And that #Google requires it to have a privacy policy in order to be available in the Play Store?
And that the maintainer chose to crowd-source a privacy policy where every item starts with "Unlike Google"?
It's become a great list of all the privacy violations Google did and still does. And I thought that it's gonna be long, but it's even longer than I imagined.
https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/google.html
I've realised what ChatGPT is!
It's Yahoo! Answers (rip, gone too soon) combined with Google's 'I'm feeling lucky' button.
A taxonomic proposal:
#AI = Artificial Intelligence
Using tools such as neural networks and machine learning on deliberately curated training data to perform specific tasks, such as Cornell University's Merlin app for bird identification.
#AM = Artificial Mediocrity
Mediocrity by definition: using large language models to generate the statistically most average/representative text/code response from an input, trained on a ginormous grab bag of data, under the assumption that the most common response in the training data is the best response, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.
Uncertainty quantification (i.e. providing error bars or alternative answers) seems to be addressable to some extent, but it is not trivial to implement and has some extra computational cost.
Explainability (explaining why an ML system gives a certain answer) is an open research area. There are some partial solutions, but ultimately you run into the fact that what counts as an explanation is a philosophical question with a context-specific answer. It requires a lot of engineering and UX work to get right, and we don't know how to address the question in all circumstances.
Extrapolation (dealing with pictures different from the training data) is a huge unsolved problem, and I'm not sure how well it can be solved, but if Merlin's training data is big enough, it might only be a problem for very rare birds.
"eBird has always been great at accumulating large amounts of data, but bad at managing the human component of the process."
This seems to be true of almost every crowdsourced database now.
@wuweiwolf Rare birds are indeed a problem. Merlin does some sort of pre-filtering by looking at location and date to somehow weight the answer based on what's likely in that location that time of year. It will even highlight its own answers as "rare" when it's confident enough to provide an answer.
What would be most helpful is to prompt "what next" in these cases. Suggest additional verification needed before reporting. Show similar species to compare against. The latter would clearly be a more complicated computational task.
For song ID, bird mimics (catbirds, mockingbirds) are a particular challenge! I don't know if their training data deliberately includes mimic songs to try to tease them apart.
#Asbestos can be found in talc, therefore it is in most makeup.
The big companies get around this by saying there is no ‘detectable’ asbestos in their products. That’s not the same as saying there is ‘no’ asbestos in their eye shadows, mascaras, bronzers and face powders.
As tens of thousands of lawsuits related to Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder flood US courts, many women are coming forward claiming that talc-based makeup gave them asbestos-related mesothelioma. Why is talc still present in almost all cosmetics?Anne Karpf (The Guardian)
*EU far right parties go from super low position to less low position*
Press - EU under threat from Nazis. They’re all Nazis now!! No point trying to fight it, Here Come The Nazis!!! Read our 20-pages of interviews with Marine Le Pen for balanced reporting!!
(Centrist parties still by far the largest groups in EU Parliament and national governments, not that you’ll read that headline anywhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Lots of people seem to say "I am not inherently against AI tools".
Well, I would like to say I AM INHERENTLY AGAINST AI TOOLS.
Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck them for using up resources like water we cannot spare so tech bros can live lives of irresponsibility and mindless destruction.
Are you Type-O (RH +ve or -ve) and permitted to give blood?
A ransomware attack on an outsourced pathology provider has left some NHS hospitals unable to type patients' blood fast enough for critical care; therefore, more Type-O than usual is needed for emergency transfusions.
Type-O donors are being encouraged to donate.
https://www.blood.co.uk/news-and-campaigns/campaigns/blood-donor-appeal/
London hospitals struggling to match patients’ blood at usual speed – and O-type safe to use for all patientsGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
@M0YNG I’m an o pos platelets donor, but Scotland having its own nhs probably makes everything better here.
Tories have committed a crime against the people
@tj @M0YNG >330,000 deaths linked to austerity and the jury is still out on their mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research comes as government signals fresh round of public spending cutsPatrick Butler (The Guardian)
'mkdir -p' lets you make a deeply nested subdirectory like a/b/c/d, making all the intermediate directories on the way to it. So if even 'a' doesn't exist, it'll make that, then a/b, etc.
But you can also get it to make multiple _non_-nested directories, because it accepts '..' in the path and doesn't treat it specially:
$ mkdir -p alpha/../beta/../gamma
$ ls
alpha beta gamma
$
[Edit: to be clear, I'm pointing out an amusing edge case, not giving advice!]
So far I’ve made 12 Amiga related costumes. I made the first one, Giana, 10 years ago already. Currently I’m focusing exclusively on Amiga/retro game cosplays and have plans to make several new ones as soon as life gets a little less busy.
#amiga #retrogaming #cosplay
Giana, Jumping Jack’Son, Chris Huelsbeck, Aarbron, Blue Queen: photos taken by void256.
Turrican suits: photos taken by Joni Halonen
Razor, Bubby, genderbend Lester, LeChuck, Bobbin Threadbare: photos by TLF
human moderation on social media has stopped existing
outside of fedi it's non-sentient algorithms
on fedi it's therians, catpeople and sentient robots
Bluey, Reanimated. 100 artists did quite an amazing job!
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/933838
This is a reanimated project of the Bluey episode SleepytimeNewgrounds.com
Completely forgot this premiered yesterday! My first video from ConFuzzled 2024 is now up! #CFz2024
> https://youtu.be/srI9J6YdBw8 <
Day 1 of ConFuzzled 2024 which took place on the 24th - 28th May at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole.YouTube
When you see protestors wearing masks, a big reason is COVID.
The right lies that it's only to hide identities, so they can ban masks and make protesting illegal.
Leftists need to stop repeating right-wing talking points. Always point out mask wearing is also due to COVID!
When we look back at this globally critical election year in 10 or 20 years time, will we remember the individual absurdity of right-wing politicians or will we acknowledge the truth of what #Vonnegut said in one of his final pieces of writing?
“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective’
I like this optimistic post largely because this assumes we will have straight (free) convos like this in 10-20 years and not be killing each other or dying but the boatload...
(Provided the fashies/oil companies are successful, and you can take that statement for GW or politics)
Is it actually worse than that?
It is very cost effective..
...but we still won't do it.
The idea of "rugged individualism" is so absurd when your food is grown by someone else, your home was built by someone else, your roads were paved by someone else, your electricity is generated by someone else, your illnesses and injuries are healed by someone else, and virtually everything you know was taught to you by someone else.
We depend on other people. That's an enormous strength, not a weakness.
Thank you @actupny for this amazing COVID-safer Pride Guide!
It's incredible seeing so many organizers stepping up and centering COVID, public health, and accessibility, as part of their events and protests. More of this please!
You can read the full COVID-safer Pride Guide here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7-BaWduahH/?img_index=1
4,310 likes, 74 comments - actupny on June 8, 2024: "Now presenting: the ACT UP NY COVID-Safer Pride Guide!! Variants continue to evolve and wastewater detection levels are on the rise in NYC...".Instagram
I posted a video on YouTube 8 years ago that uses clips from Star Wars to Michael Jackson‘s Smooth Criminal.
The shots are in story order, match the lyrics, and are cut on beat. It was so high effort. And I often feel it doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but then I see comments like these and I feel okay about it. Real people know.
If after all this time you finally want to watch it: https://youtu.be/0-MaHMJKGZI?si=OKEDiltq9NI89I8G
Are You Okay, Ani?A story of a slave turned knight who experiences significant emotional trauma.YouTube
Apparently the SORBS DNS blocklist has closed down for good. There was an announcement to that end on the mailop mailinglist recently, and I've seen articles on various tech newstickers today: https://jort.link/www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg22064.html
(I wasn't aware that SORBS was sponsored directly by Proofpoint.)
If you still have references to dnsbl.sorbs.net anywhere in your mail server or antispam configuration, now is the time to remove them.
UwU, finally a new summoning for the nyaa.
#ef27 #fursuit #kemonofursuit #fursuiteveryday #kemono #furry #furryfandom #fursuiter #fursuiting #kemonosuit #fursuitphotography
