🌟Hello #AcademicMastodon🌟

I'm Hannah and currently working on the research project to understand the role of #Mastodon in #academia during my internship here.

If you haven’t done so already, please consider participating in the project. I would love to hear from you:

🔗https://rug.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9M1VEyMQ8k4xv94

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has already participated in the survey! It is really insightful to read your opinions and experiences.

#AcademicChatter #OpenScience #Plushtodon #SocialMedia

Yay! John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics Nobel for their work on neural networks... work that ultimately led to modern-day machine learning.

Some of you are wondering why they got a *physics* Nobel.

In the 1980s, Hopfield invented the 'Hopfield network' based on how atomic spins interact in a chunk of solid matter. Each atom's spin makes it into a tiny magnet. Depending on the material, these spins may tend to line up, or point opposite to their neighbors, or interact in even more complicated ways. No matter what they do, at very low temperatures they tend to minimize energy.

A Hopfield network is a simulation of such a system that's been cleverly set up so that the spins store data, like images. When the Hopfield network is fed a distorted or incomplete image, it keeps updating the spins so that the energy decreases... and works its way toward the saved image that's most like the imperfect one it was fed with.

Later, Geoffrey Hinton and others generalized Hopfield's ideas and developed 'Boltzmann machines'. These exploit a discovery by the famous physicist Boltzmann!

Boltzmann realized that the probability that a chunk of matter in equilibrium has energy E is proportional to

exp(-E/kT)

where E is its energy, T is its temperature and k is a number now called Boltzmann's constant. When the temperature is low, this makes it overwhelmingly probable that the stuff will have low energy. But at higher temperatures this is less true. By exploiting this formula and cleverly adjusting the temperature, we can make neural networks do very useful things.

There's been a vast amount of work since then, refining these ideas. But it started with physics.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/in-stunning-nobel-win-ai-researchers-hopfield-and-hinton-take-2024-physics-prize/

I never use Caps Lock, so I disable the Caps Lock key completely with xmodmap, to avoid hitting it by accident.

Occasionally my X server gets into caps-lock state anyway. (Usually some complicated stunt was involved, like attaching x11vnc to the display remotely.) And then I can't turn it off again using the Caps Lock key.

So I wrote a tiny X client that lets me type 'xcapslock off' at a shell prompt …

… and then I had to make an alias to it, called 'XCAPSLOCK OFF'.

#Ventoy Security Concerns (please boost for visibility)

Ventoy is a popular utility for making USB drives containing multiple operating systems in the form of bootable image files. While very useful in theory, the source tree contains numerous binary blobs without source code. This issue has been brought up to the authors multiple times, have not been corrected, and have even gotten worse (more blobs have been added to the code over time). This is a potential malware vector, similar to the "test files" in the xz-utils backdoor catastrophe.

Recently the author has ignored a very lengthy thread raising security concerns because of these binary blobs. Given the amount of attention the thread has gotten, this seems strange, especially given that the authors have been active since then. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

Stranger yet still, a video by Veronica Explains (@vkc) on how to create bootable USB flash drives got flooded by comments heavily suggesting the use of Ventoy and even being somewhat accusing because Veronica didn't advertise Ventoy. This is... not anything I've seen users of ANY open-source project do, and it feels similar to the social engineering done against Lasse Collin that convinced him to add Jia Tan as a maintainer, thus compromising xz-utils. See the comments of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiSXClZauXA&t=3s

If you're using Ventoy, you may want to consider ceasing its use for the time being out of an abundance of caution. If you truly need its functionality, you might look into something like the IODD SSD Enclosure (https://www.iodd.shop/HDD/SSD-Enclosure) which can emulate an optical drive and allows you to select an ISO saved to the drive to boot from.

#linux #boot #security #malicious #backdoor

I want to self-publish a book called "Tweets on Entropy" - but I need a cover. Do you have suggestions for a good cover? Some rules:

1) It can't be a joke There are lots of jokes about entropy but I don't want them on the cover of my book. I want the cover to be artistic, inspiring, maybe even secretly teach some deep fact about entropy... yeah, I'm like that.

2) It can't have equations in it. I like equations, but my book is full of equations already.

3) It can't be a picture of Shannon, Boltzmann or Gibbs. I admire these guys immensely, but I don't want the cover of my book to be a picture of someone.

Here is a cover I made in less than 10 minutes. There could be something better.

It may help if you know what topics my book actually covers. Check out part 2 for that!

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