Mastodawn

Idea: Mastodon should allow adding rel=me links to Mastodon profiles to allow an account to verify other accounts.

(Or maybe a specific rel=trust?)

This can be used to create a web of trust.

e.g., For Gaza Verified, we have verified about ~250 accounts so far using video interviews. But that sort of verification doesn’t scale. And if we trust these accounts to be people from Gaza, we should trust them to verify people they know from Gaza. So Gaza Verified and the 200+ verified accounts become a trust root.

If they could then add rel=me links to their profiles to say “I verify this account is by a Palestinian from Gaza” (which is all we do), then we would start creating a decentralised web of trust.

Thoughts, @staff @haubles and #mastodon and #fediverse in general?

#webOfTrust #federated #decentralised #verification #GazaVerified

Sevoris May 30

Iris May 30

There is something distasteful about people with considerable power telling people with rather less power how much *everyone* will have to sacrifice, especially when the people with less power often don't have enough of anything at all.

Sevoris May 19

Show thread

tante May 18

Sascha Lobo: Ich will, dass deutsche Unternehmen den Tech-Faschismus prägen, nicht die vom Ausländer.

Is okay, Opa. Zivi kommt gleich.

Sevoris May 17

Rationality is in many ways a social construct of which kind of actions don‘t run against the grain of established power structures

Sevoris May 12

Ted M. Young May 12

Once again, if you use AI-generated images (including diagrams), I’m going to be wary of the surrounding writing, unsure if that has been generated as well. There’s lots of free (non-AI) images out tere, and tools to create diagrams.

Sevoris May 12

Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)May 12

Some reflections on frequently unasked questions about stochastic parrots (the phrase and the paper):

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/stochastic-parrots-frequently-unasked-questions-49c2e7d22d11

Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions

It’s been a bit over five years since the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) was published (and somewhat longer since…

Medium

Sevoris May 12

Show thread

the input device is not a TTY May 12

"We're planning to flatten the organization, removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work"

Their MBAs spent the weekend prompting fucking Claude Code didn't they?

Sevoris May 12

RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/116557869072468214

Elsevier are greedy fuckers of assholes who steal billions from the public purse both demanding money so they publish your work and then selling it back for incredibly overpriced access. If you want open access, they demand even more money.

They wanted Universities to put spyware in place. https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/spyware-in-libraries/

https://netzpolitik.org/2020/news-from-elsevier-no-open-access-deal-but-spyware-against-shadow-libraries/

Elsevier is not our friend. Not one bit.

Sevoris May 11

So yesterday I stumbled across these two articles about finite state transducers and what they are useful for and *goddamn* sometimes I love algorithms. There's moments when algorithm theory really becomes useful in of itself:

https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/replacing-a-3-gb-sqlite-database-with-a-7-mb-fst-finite-state-trandsucer-binary/

with further reference to:

https://burntsushi.net/transducers/#the-fst-library

(I learned about FTS as a computational linguist tool. That they make for efficient indices over prefix and suffix matches or fuzzy matches with edit distance I didn't know until yesterday)

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary

Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.”

Sevoris Apr 25

RE: https://timeloop.cafe/@Aleums/116291577938218281

"Dancing in the bones of Altman's god."