@tomstoneham@dair-community.social
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

tomstoneham

@tomstoneham@dair-community.social

Academic philosopher at a UK university.

Likes: #Linux, #GrapheneOS and #e2ee

Cares about: #DataPrivacy and #ProportionalRepresentation

Learning: 🇩🇪

Currently thinking about value alignment, data privacy and the digital divide.

Would like to ground ethical critique of tech in political consensus at local levels (as opposed to global approaches like human rights).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

aral, to DuckDuckGo
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

“Choice.”

Qwant search for foo at 09:18: Qwant is temporarily unavailable.
Ecosia search for foo @ 09:17: There was a problem loading search results for “foo”
Two astronauts staring at Earth from space. Front astronaut: “you mean it’s all just Bing?” Rear astronaut, aiming gun at front astronaut: “Always has been.”

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@aral
Do you know @Mojeek which is genuinely independent. And about as private as you can get.

tomstoneham, to ai
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

"Yet again, LLMs show us that many of our tests for cognitive capacities are merely tracking proxies."

Some thoughts on genAI 'passing' theory of mind tests.

https://listed.to/@24601/51831/minds-and-theories-of-mind

glynmoody, to climate
@glynmoody@mastodon.social avatar

One person dies after severe turbulence on London to Singapore flight - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/21/severe-turbulence-london-to-singapore-flight "More than 30 passengers injured as Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 is diverted to Bangkok" likely another consequence of ...

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@glynmoody That's how it starts ...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/

tomstoneham, to random
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

I thought I would give this 24 hours to settle, but I'm still shocked.

"we have to think of ... the future of our children. ... for the protection of their future wealth it makes a lot of sense for them to leave and for us to leave."

WTAF? Even if he paid 50% wealth tax, his children would have more money than any human being could ever conceivably need. Plus they will have all the privileges to exploit everyone else for their own gain.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/may/02/i-am-moving-tycoon-bassim-haidar-non-dom-tax-status-super-rich-exodus

tomstoneham, to linuxphones
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

My feed is enticing me to try again. Last was on an under powered tablet.

Question for hive mind:

If I am going to get a new (used) device to try it, what should I go for?

tomstoneham, to random
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

'Banning' TikTok in the USA will be a very effective way to teach a new generation of teenagers about jailbreaking, sideloading, VPNs and proxy servers.

Which are probably a lot more useful skills in our dystopian future than prompt engineering.

If only 10% of the 170m users in the USA explore the technical means of getting round a ban, that would create a significant change in how the controlling app marketplaces work.

trochee, to random
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

This article is one enormous [citation needed]

> “I’m more optimistic because we have been using the tool a lot, and some of the insights we’re starting to get from a scientific standpoint are things that none of our scientists were aware of,” he added.

Moderna CEO says AI will help scientists understand ‘most diseases’ in 3 to 5 years | Semafor
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/18/2024/moderna-ceo-says-ai-will-help-understand-most-diseases-in-3-to-5-years

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@trochee
Also 'most diseases'? Like there is some God-given list of diseases and we just need to work our way down that list crossing them off and when we reach the bottom, everyone lives happily ever after?

Accusing this one of Dunning-Krueger is giving way too much credit.

tomstoneham, to random
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

It is important to be clear that this is about not harassment. Journalists regularly - and literally - harass politicians (and others) at their own homes. They are not arrested under Section 42 (afaik).

And the emotive language of 'home' is being used to protect here but attack when it comes to the harassment Angela Raynor.(*)

(*) Trawling through old social media posts to try to work out the details of someone's personal life and living arrangements.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/09/we-cant-tolerate-this-sunak-condemns-protest-outside-starmers-house

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

I hope journalists get into the habit of reporting what happens to t hose arrested on protests.

One form of politicisation of policing is pressure on police to use powers of arrest to stop something happening which is politically awkward or embarrassing even though those arrested are later released with 'No Further Action'.

Police powers of arrest are literally a licence to use force (aka violence) against citizens and should not be subject to political influence.

happyborg, to web3
@happyborg@fosstodon.org avatar

What if there was a #Web3 project that doesn't use #Blockchain, and will be useful to everyone with a computer or mobile device?

Autonomi is coming.

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@happyborg
Well that's a teaser for sure! Any hints about what Autonomi is going to be?

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@happyborg Interesting. How does it relate to Solid?

Could you use it for p2p 'serverless' implementation of data pods?

https://solidproject.org/about

tomstoneham, to ai
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

I am at a conference about AI in doctoral education. Was moved to turn my question into a short blog post (warms me up for my talk tomorrow).

https://listed.to/@24601/50729/the-problem-of-second-order-bias

Loukas, to random
@Loukas@mastodon.nu avatar

Daylight saving time is just god's way of reminding us twice a year how time is actually a social construction.

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@Loukas
And one - as David Graeber pointed out - designed to create a labour market where we sell our time to employers to do what they will with.

tomstoneham, to ai
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

Anyone know of any data comparing the energy and water usage of a human being performing a cognitive task - like reading and summarising an article - to genAI doing the same thing?

I suspect the latter would be guesses because these companies are deliberately trying to hide the true costs. But my guess is we will find at least an order of magnitude difference.

OK, the AI is faster, but is that worth it?

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIHype

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@emilymbender Thanks! I will have a look but not sure why ill-formed?

I was quite deliberately avoiding issues around training and only asking about energy use of models once released, if that is what you had in mind. I.e. suppose we accept the direct comparability of a human performing a cognitive task and an LLM doing the 'same thing', which is what all economic predictions seem to be based on, then which is more energy and water efficient?

Or have I missed something?

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@emilymbender Great - I will listen.

But I was fully aware of that point and I don't see why it makes the comparison spurious rather than certain uses of the comparison.

FWIW I had a specific dialectical context in mind.

tomstoneham, to random
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

This question raised at the Turing Institute conference this morning.

We are there, but on the sidelines and rarely allowed onto panels. Instead scientists are allowed to have opinions about the matters they don't fully understand.

Yesterday the Chief Scientific Officer answered a question about bias in such an ethically adolescent way that I nearly shouted.

glynmoody, to random
@glynmoody@mastodon.social avatar

Extremists trying to tear us apart, says Rishi in impromptu No 10 speech - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/01/extremists-trying-to-tear-us-apart-says-rishi-sunak-in-impromptu-no-10-speech "PM condemns ‘shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality’ in wake of Gaza war, in sometimes rambling address" painfully desperate, totally useless

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@glynmoody
@glynmoody
The 'us' being torn apart are the two big political parties. That is what this week has shown.

So the solution is to move away from two party politics and bring the extremists into the open, surely? Then people know what they are voting for.

b9AcE, to random
@b9AcE@todon.eu avatar

It seems appropriate that the spark was stolen from humanity by corporations to give to their "AI" instead.

The worst thing about the current "AI" leap is probably not even that it will be, is already being used to build the near total coverage constant surveillance, a scaffolding ready for any totalitarian to construct their oppression system on, as well as disabling the mischievousness that is essential to healthy mental development by social exploration and cutting the bonds enabling adulthood independence from parents.

It is instead probably that with live "AI"-generated fake video indistinguishable from reality, we will not be able to trust any evidence of anything having happened, as the watermarks promised as solution can easily be removed or not applied.
No person will be able to trust anything they're told by any other person that it happened and no one person can personally witness every important event in the world.

This breaks humankind's ability to cooperate over long social distances and our networks of trust, the sparks that has been keeping our "survival of the fittest" of ability to wide ranging adaptation to habitats aflame.
Reassigning the sparks emoji to mean "AI" generated content was appropriate, probably more so than Samsung or whomever committed the theft realized.

video/mp4

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@b9AcE This is really interesting.

It is worth taking an historical perspective when thinking about how this will change the future.

Trustworthy public information is a fairly recent thing, dependent on specific technologies like radio and TV and not universal.

Before that, trust over "long social distances" (nice phrase) required personal knowledge of the source and evidence the letter was from the source. And it was still regarded as fallible.

We need to relearn

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@b9AcE
messages from verified contacts seem to replicate the process.

Apps like @briar and @simplex are good for this because they require you to use some form of handshake outside the app in order to set up a chat with a known person.

I also think we need an information version of banking's Know Your Customer protocols.

Frederik_Borgesius, to tech
@Frederik_Borgesius@akademienl.social avatar

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) emphases that encryption contribute to ensuring the enjoyment of privacy and other fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression. Case of Podchasov v. Russia (no. 33696/19).

https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/?i=001-230854

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@Frederik_Borgesius @markhughes
Wow! Given that the UK's has pretty much exactly the same requirements, we can conclude that it also violates Art. 8.

(Given the hedging in Art 8 about "national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals," I wasn't sure until now.)

tomstoneham, to random
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

Can someone remind me what I am meant to think about ? I can't be bothered to get an account and work it out for myself.




tomstoneham, to random
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

Long story, but ended up buying a Vodafone SIM card to use as a hotspot for four days. It has masses of data left (~100gb) which I have no use for. Expires 22 Jan.

Happy to post anywhere in UK to someone who genuinely needs it (do you know a refugee or homeless person who could use it?).

DM me.

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@simonvarwell I hadn't! What a great organization. (So long as the Home Office hasn't illegally confiscated their phones ...)

But we still need the power of social media to connect my SIM to someone! Please keep boosting

gamingonlinux, to random
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social avatar

People and SEO Spam like this are ruining the internet. Fuck this shite.

image/jpeg

tomstoneham,
@tomstoneham@dair-community.social avatar

@happyborg
True. I guess I didn't focus on the fact that the OP was complaining about the existence of some behaviour rather than engaging with the person.

I do think it is worth engaging with someone who proudly describes - in public - what they are doing as stealing. Even if it isn't illegal (yet), they are conceptualising it in ways that should give them reason to reflect on their behaviour.

The journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step 🙂

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