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Andy H3 reshared this.


Hilarious #xkcd on metrics.

https://xkcd.com/2899/

Don't miss the image description "I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour." 😂

#xkcd

Andy H3 reshared this.

in reply to Matthias Kirschner

😁 ... and next week it's going up already to thousands of metrics per hour!!


Using Google Scholar anonymously seems impossible nowadays.

If you don't sign into Google while deploying basic anti-tracking measures, you will be banished to a perpetual robo-captcha loop.

#surveillance

tyx reshared this.


Andy H3 reshared this.


Mathematically, a first-past-the-post system will inevitably result in a two-party system (perhaps with the occasional success of a regional party).

There is nothing you can do within the system to change that - you can only vote for the party that better reflects your views (and pressure them to continue to do that).

The thing you do to dismantle two-party politics is advocating for other electoral models: proportional representation; single-transferrable vote or approval voting; etc.

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in reply to AT-AT Assault 🏳️‍⚧️

@atatassault I just wish yanks on here would pop their tedious internal politics behind a USpol filter like every other country rather than assuming that they're the only person in the room. It literally doesn't matter who wins the next election outside of the US, we'll still have a belligerent, overbearing, imperialist US to have to put up with
in reply to Araña Grande

Content warning: #USPol


Andy H3 reshared this.


Treated myself to a fancy-pants cast iron teapot, lads! It's a bit sexy.

Andy H3 reshared this.


Andy H3 reshared this.


New research shows that LLMs are better at coming up with techniques to improve generative AI prompts than humans.

So it looks like AI is also going to steal the prompt engineering jobs as well. 😄

https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-engineering-is-dead

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

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Andy H3 reshared this.


A few months ago, I persuaded a client to abandon an external cloud system and use Nextcloud on their own server instead. Powered by FreeBSD and ZFS, it has already demonstrated its strengths on a couple of occasions (such as in the case of a snapshot rollback). This morning, they expressed the desire to abandon the various WhatsApp groups they use for coordination and to use a solution "all on their servers." I was inspired and quickly installed both an ejabberd and a Matrix server (Synapse) - which they will probably prefer, according to the latest news they sent me - on two FreeBSD jails.

Today, we have the awareness and experience of what it means to give our data to large companies, completely losing control over it. We have the tools, so why not use them?
And I'm really happy when someone like them, thanks to their willingness to try "new" solutions, realizes the alternatives to the colorful, advertised, warmly recommended (by salespeople) "proprietary" solutions.

#Jabber #XMPP #Matrix #Nextcloud #SelfHost #OSS #OwnYourData

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Now that we have understood the frequency: Someone should provide a graph of the rise of cost for first class postage over the last 200 years, adjusted by value of currency.

It might facilitate discussion in the public realm more adequately.



The company said that adults typically spent less than £7 a year on stamped letters and people now received two letters a week on average


Wow.

Two letters a week.

That is lower than I would have expected.

(First class stamp price to rise again to £1.35, says Royal Mail)

(UK)




Signal Deb Packages -- Latest routine upgrade of #Signal from 6.48 to 7.0 (via their own package repro) seems to be rather experimental. 😲

Emojis and notification not working properly.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

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Oleg Orlov’s retrial (which today resulted in a 2.5-year prison sentence for “discrediting” Russian troops) is a modern-day retelling of Kafka’s “The Trial” where Josef K. is also reading a copy of “The Trial” in the courtroom throughout the trial. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/02/28/in-a-four-day-trial-here-s-how-russia-sentenced-leading-human-rights-oleg-orlov-activist-to-2-5-years-in-prison-for-writing-that-the-putin-regime-has-become-fascist

Andy H3 reshared this.


Andy H3 reshared this.


Introspection of the great spamegeddon of 2024 (last week).

As bad as it was... the Fediverse instance admins and mods really came together quick. Within a day the issue was contained. It's a testament that the fediverse can really work.

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Friendica Developers reshared this.


Hello !Friendica Developers

I have been running #2024.03-rc for several days now. When I moved from stable to RC, the database and the update versions were correct once everything was done.

Today, I forwarded the RC by running git fetch & git pull and now I got the following mismatch:

The database version is 1553/1554, the post update version is 1550/1550.

Running bin/console dbstructure update -f doesn't seem to make a difference.

What's going on here? The database version doesn't normally change once the RC is branched off. How to correct it?

in reply to Andy H3 Friendica Developers reshared this.

I managed to update it now. All sorted.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

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Students discover that vending machines on campus had a built in camera for facial recognition and profiling of students.

Instead of students coming up to a passive vending machine and making their own choice, the machine uses facial recognition to taylor the menu in order to boost sales.

— Because we all want a world were AI is leveraged to push more sugar to everyone.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/error-message-vending-maching-facial-recognition

Andy H3 reshared this.

in reply to Randahl Fink

I can assure you the facial recognition can’t be disabled, as it’s doubtful that’s an option in the control software.
in reply to Randahl Fink

Our ENTIRE world has become a desert wasteland ... #privacy and #safety are mere mirages 🧐🏜👥

Andy H3 reshared this.


Businesses in the fediverse

I'm writing a blog post about businesses at the fediverse (although it might end up just as a sort-of directory.)

If you run a business with a fedi profile, and are happy for me to include it in my post, please link it below 😀

(If you run a business and use your own personal profile, that's cool too - link me happy!)

Andy H3 reshared this.

Unknown parent

Mark Sellors
no, but I’m a director.
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Neil Brown

I use this personal account to sometimes promote by business: https://tosbourn.com (web dev, tech leader stuffs)

Andy H3 reshared this.


Pretty sure they think of me as their own personal Totoro.

#chickens

in reply to LuciaG

@LuciaG isn't she just? And such a sweetheart! Her name is Temperance.


JabRef wants to develop an AI-powered module that can summarise academic papers via configurable online services. Hmm... but don't most papers already have a summary that we call "the abstract"?

The proposed indexing functionality via locally run LLMs seems interesting tough.

GSOC 2024 ideas list


Andy H3 reshared this.


No, I'm not giving LinkedIn a copy of my passport.

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The value of constructive discussion, regardless whether tense or not.

Barrett has worked on projects like Bridgy for the last 12 years, yet he’s never experienced quite such an intense reaction to his work.
[...]

With the help of constructive feedback from the GitHub discussion, Barrett decided to build what he calls a “discoverable opt-in.”


Andy H3 reshared this.


It turns out there are concrete legal and ethical duties interlaced with moderating content, no matter the bluster from unilateral strongmen like Musk about upholding unlimited free speech by imposing their worldview through rule by decree.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/musk-fucks-around-with-us-sanctions-and-finds-out

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“Every intellectual needs a Viennese cafe. You don’t need a classroom or a seminar. You need a cafe where you can have one cognac too many and really lay it out and have somebody come back at you.” -- Richard Sennett