I’m sure directors imagine everything they produce will be experienced at full theatrical immersion by the viewer, but mostly you just want to sit with family and enjoy something, you know?
At 3 pm UK time November 16th 2023 I'll talk about combinatorial species and their generating functions. And I'll use these ideas to count binary trees with 𝑛 leaves! We get these famous numbers:
1, 1, 2, 5, ...
This is fun because we go all the way from category theory to a very concrete problem.
My talk will be in Edinburgh, in the James Clerk Maxwell Building room 6206. You can also join here:
@Edent I've thought about this for a good few minutes now. At least, like 40.
In general, I understand your frustration. However, I think you are asking people to be different. People on mass aren't very good at that.
What is a thing that does get changed are systems, here, a system of consultation and deliberation.
In this case, the system isn't being very good at having a decent open dialogue with concerned or expert people and nurturing that open dialogue and wanting to see a best possible outcome.
Perhaps, largely, because some people in charge of the system probably see little value in that, would be my guess.
Anyway – the end result is that I can see why people haven't engaged, even though it would likely to much more effective.
Sorry if this is an extremely obvious point, or just stupid. But I tend to find it helps. And I'm trying to read the report.
… does it apply to, basically, any kind of electronically based communication? I don't really see how it could target only social media style broadcast and not also group chat / messaging.
Some of it seems pretty reasonable, but it also sounds like intent here would matter a lot, and it would be nice to see guards in place that, Eg, CSAM scanning can't_ever become more widely used.
@Edent Mind you – I think probably "petition" web sites are maybe often harmful. Some kind of larger tool to enable people to engage and consult could perhaps be far more useful?
@Edent :-) Citizen's assemblies are absolutely the sort of thing I had in mind.
I'm imagining you can have some of that as an online tool that could replace poll sites. Help people engage, understand and respond to / form policy, instead of clicking away their anger.
Right. There's been a lot of talk about #AltText and it's place here on the fediverse of late.
Whether you're blind, deaf or sighted, I'd be curious to not only have you fill out the relevant choice, but feel free to respond to this with more detail if you like.
Do you make use of, benefit from or even find alt-text useful, whether for images or audio?
@FreakyFwoof I've voted sited + benefit here, but I think I should be clear that the benefit I get so far is enjoyment of reading and comparing the crafted replies.
if you're an infrequent command line user -- what text editor do you use if you need to occasionally edit a file on the command line (other than vim/emacs)?
curious about what people use to edit a git commit message etc
if you picked 'other', I'd love to hear what you do in the replies!
@b0rk I'm using this tiny mac editor by a mate called cedar because it boots extremely quickly and does very little, but does support the native mac good stuff.
I'd like something better though. I'd like a command line editor that feels like a native UI editor. Or even better, I'd like a richer command line that makes extensive use of "real" native ui, including an editor.
A submission to your garden of folks' git confusions…
One that gets me so regularly (probably more than every week) is how the stage lets me be selective about which file modifications are added to a commit. But it doesn't (I think?!) let me be selective about which file renames / moves are added to a commit? They're always in, as far as I can tell?
My work patterns often includes me making various changes and then adding a few at a time with a meaningful name.
I always forget, and it's quite disconcerting, that file renames / moves don't seem to be compatible with this workflow.
@b0rk hmmm … I’ll have to try… but when I do a file move it seems to already be added to the stage by default instead of needing to be added… but perhaps I can upstage the move without undoing the move? … I’ll try it out, thanks!
I do think that generating a track from existing songs to create a "new" Beatles track does create a Beatles song. Just a very boring one that probably wouldn't have made a b-side.
Artists do often have a certain style (at a point in time) which these statistical systems can reproduce to a degree. So yeah, the song is based on the artists' patterns and if done by the artists could be considered their work.
It just takes away everything from the work of artists we care about. There's no reflection on the real world, on lived experience, no social interaction or communication, nothing new to say about anything.
It's pretending as if the album by an artist you like that is kinda boring because it sounds like all the old ones is relevant work. It's the definition of cashing in on one's reputation with worthless content.
@tante I was under the impression the “AI” here wasn’t generative really? I was more stuff like blind source separation to let them recover the individual performers from the recorded scraps they had so as to fix / mix them properly? But I could definitely be mistaken!
I like a bunch of the Beatles because we had some albums on vinyl and I liked putting them on / enjoying them with parents.
When CGI started to be used in films it was often hyped (by misdirection) that all the Fx was CGI, even when the vast majority was still practical and CGI was being used scarcely for a few shots.
Now that CGI is so regularly and consistently used, the opposite happens: any use of practical Fx is highlighted and CGI use downplayed.
… I think a similar process will happen with AI 🙂 "Oh, no no no, we're not using AI! Just signal processing."
@wfaler I think those are reasonable points, but also that the UN’s high commissioner for human rights probably ought to have a reasonable sense of what is and isn’t genocide, and ought to be unbiased — assuming this is an accurate resignation letter anyway!
Link via @psilocervine on Cohost: Some investigative journalism inside Unity's road to briefly introducing a company-destroying "install fees" policy last month.
The most interesting takeaway here is the whole disaster really was just IronSource, who merged with Unity last year, puppeting the company into destroying IronSource's competitor AppLovin at all costs. An entire art form is a pawn to be sacrificed in a fight between two adtech companies you've never heard of
@mcc@JetForMe@gsuberland they shluld probably have bought it and made it OSS, or bought it and made it independent. Having the tooling for your platform wither is a big deal.
I like ActivityPub and the decentralized social Web as much as the next person but we all know that scalability is a massive problem and I haven't seen too many convincing approaches to fix that. So let's not pretend this is just a magic silver bullet.
Blogs and the web didn't scale to actual web traffic (which admittedly many blogs never needed), centralized caches and services were necessary for this stuff to work. Which is exactly why we got so much centralization.
Solving that for decentralized social networks is the core issue.
@tante torrent like solutions seems to scale okay? If huge numbers of people follow someone that’s a huge number of possible peers able to repeat a (signed) message?
The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
Wait, what?
Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.
We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...
The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.
It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.
In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."
PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.
The most energetic particles (protons or heavier nuclei) that reach our planet are called Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs).
The most energetic of them ever recorded (1991, Utah, the "Oh My God" particle) had a measured energy of 3e20 eV.
Which really seems a lot: before collision it had a velocity identical to the speed of light, except for a 1e-23 part (Lorentz factor ~3e11).
This looks tremendous:
but how big is this, in human terms? #Astrodon
