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.
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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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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. 😄
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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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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.
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 — Meduza
Long-time human rights activist Oleg Orlov is going to prison for the next two and a half years, following a retrial that raised his punishment from a 150,000-ruble fine to incarceration.Meduza
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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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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?
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
Students Horrified When Error Message Appears on Vending Machine, Revealing Something Dark
The college students discovered that the facial recognition software was part of the vending machine's "demographic profiling" feature.Frank Landymore (Futurism)
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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!)
Tosbourn – Belfast based Ruby developers
Tosbourn are a Belfast based Ruby development team who care deeply about the web.Tosbourn Ltd
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.
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Morning Fediverse!
📸 Ricoh GRIIIx
📍Rockingham Beach, Western Australia
#fediverse #mornings #beach #photography #Nature #NaturePhotography #RicohGRIIIx #perth #WesternAustralia
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.”
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media | TechCrunch
As decentralized social networks become more popular, the way different protocols interact could set the stage for the future of the web.Amanda Silberling (TechCrunch)
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
Musk fucks around (with US sanctions) and finds out.
Musk’s X sold checkmarks to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, report says After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk started charging users for checkmarks that were previously intended to verify that an account was notable and authentic.Joan Westenberg
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Richard Sennett: ‘I’ve always felt like a fish out of water in academia’
The feted urban sociologist Richard Sennett tells Matthew Reisz about how his former career as a cellist inspired his latest trilogy of books, why his ideal university would be more night school than Oxbridge college and why it helps him to imagine h…Matthew Reisz (Times Higher Education (THE))
carstenraddatz
in reply to Matthias Kirschner • • •