RE: https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/116103936616513460

We are looking at growing the Mastodon team with two new backend developers. We are starting some ambitious projects and need help!

You need to have a significant experience with Ruby on Rails as this is our framework of choice, but we are also looking for experience in search algorithms, protocol specifications, Rust or Go and project management (this one to assist me in tracking everything we are working on).

If you are interested, please apply using the form provided in the job description.

Profits go down: We regret to announce that we have to destroy the world.

Profits go up: We're delighted to announce that we have to destroy the world.

Linux is good now. The author had enough of Windows and Microsoft shenanigans. I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/im-brave-enough-to-say-it-linux-is-good-now-and-if-you-want-to-feel-like-you-actually-own-your-pc-make-2026-the-year-of-linux-on-your-desktop/

Highly recommended reading. A great framing of how far biomedicine has come in a short time, and how we’re still striving for more progress every day

https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-breakthroughs-in-2025

Europe is betting big on open science and collaboration.

In 2026–2027, Horizon Europe will put €14 billion into research that matters:

🌱 Clean tech for real climate action
🧠 Ethical AI and better healthcare
💡 Support for startups and innovators

Participation is simpler, talent is welcome everywhere.

Science for people. Progress we share.

Here's how: https://link.europa.eu/wVttRj

The EU wants to kill cookie banners by moving consent to your browser

The EU wants to end cookie pop-ups by letting users set their consent once in their browser. If passed, websites will have to respect those choices.

https://www.simpleanalytics.com/blog/the-eu-wants-to-kill-cookie-banners-by-moving-consent-to-your-browser

This two-dimensional image (https://x.com/tomaspueyo/status/1993360931267473662) has been circulating recently as an metaphor for the current state of AI technology. It is admittedly an improvement over one-dimensional narratives in which AI development is presented as a linear (or exponential) progression from sub-human to super-human intelligence. However, it is still a significant oversimplification. The space of cognitive tasks is not well modeled by either one or two-dimensional spaces, but is instead extremely high-dimensional. There are now indeed many directions in this pace in which AI tools can, with minimal supervision, achieve better performance than human experts. But, as per the "curse of dimensionality", such directions still remain very sparse. Also, human performance is also very spiky and diverse; representing this by a single round disk or ball is also somewhat misleading.

In high dimensions, the greatest increase in volume often comes from taking combinations of smaller, spikier sets. A team of humans working together, or humans complemented by a variety of AI tools, can achieve a significantly greater performance on many tasks than any single human or AI tool could achieve individually, particularly if they are strong in "orthogonal" directions. On the other hand, the choice of combination now matters: the wrong combination could lead to a misalignment between the objective and the actual outcome, in which the stated goal may be nominally achieved, but at the cost of several unwanted secondary effects as well.

TLDR: the topic of intelligence is too high-dimensional for any low-dimensional narrative to be perfectly accurate, and one should take any such narratives with a grain of salt.

If you're at #NeurIPS2025 tomorrow (Dec 3, 11:00–14:00 PST), Brown Ebouky will present our new work:
“Eliciting Reasoning in Language Models with Cognitive Tools” where we combine cognitive architectures with #agentic workflows to enhance #LLM reasoning 🧠

Check it out here: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2025/loc/san-diego/poster/119804