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19 posts total
jonny (good kind)

i love this paper
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2414

(Edit: yes @ futurebird has already been tagged plenty of times ♥)

El Duvelle

@jonny Yes! Incredible!!

Here's a video from the paper.. Ants rock!
#ProblemSolving #Ants

jonny (good kind)

One underrated lesson Luigi taught us is that transit privacy is necessary for a free society and ebikes are the transit modality of a free people.

jonny (good kind)

Read your bike history. Bikes have been a radical technology everywhere they exist. From a materialist perspective, you dont just invent the most energy efficient means of conveyance by an order of magnitude and have it not be revolutionary. You dont invent a technology that dramatically reshapes people's relationship with space and have that not be revolutionary.

Ebikes are an evolutionary step in that history. To be able to gain access to the City with a stolen BMX bike and the cost of a single Uber ride in parts is revolutionary. To not need government identification and an elaborate system of regulation to interact with space is, for now, revolutionary. To be able to avoid automated plate readers and move freely in a surveillance state is not a luxury, it is necessary.

Read your bike history. Bikes have been a radical technology everywhere they exist. From a materialist perspective, you dont just invent the most energy efficient means of conveyance by an order of magnitude and have it not be revolutionary. You dont invent a technology that dramatically reshapes people's relationship with space and have that not be revolutionary.

jonny (good kind)

some genuinely sick scenes in here... and then it's also star wars for some reason!

jonny (good kind)

i know this has been said and will be said no fewer than infinitely many times forever, but i do wonder how much of an effect twitter/X had when something like a third of all people in the US access basic information about the world via a platform bought and solely owned by a billionaire for the explicit purpose of advancing fascism.

jonny (good kind)

we thought surveillance capitalism was bad before but i imagine we are in for a different kind of adversary when infocapitalists go mask off in lockstep with an avowedly fascist government

jonny (good kind)

Bsky raises $15m from Blockchain Capital, the VC's press release hints at what they're interested in:

blockchaincapital.com/blog/blu

Bluesky [is] designed to foster a new ecosystem of applications. [...] It is interoperable with existing internet protocols and blockchain-based systems, opening the door for a more connected, less siloed social experience. Since its launch in April 2023, over 100 clients have been built on the AT Protocol, and users have created more than 50,000 custom feeds. And the best part of it all? By building on top of the AT protocol, these developers have access to Bluesky’s 13M users worldwide.

The VC firm sees bsky and their ownership of the relay as being a potentially very lucrative chokepoint, where the users of bluesky are the asset to rent to platform developers who want "access" to them. I've written before how atproto's decentralization is effectively meaningless with the relay system, where it's decentralized in the same sense as google alerts is decentralized - sure you can host your own PDS, but it's only useful because the main relay crawls it, and then either bsky or someone else who (inevitably) pays for access can send it back to you.

edit: here's why i think the relay is a chokepoint and why there will never be a second: neuromatch.social/@jonny/11336

#bsky #bluesky #atproto #ChokepointCapitalism

Bsky raises $15m from Blockchain Capital, the VC's press release hints at what they're interested in:

blockchaincapital.com/blog/blu

Bluesky [is] designed to foster a new ecosystem of applications. [...] It is interoperable with existing internet protocols and blockchain-based systems, opening the door for a more connected, less siloed social experience. Since its launch in April 2023, over 100 clients have...

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can

@jonny can people also host their own relay or what would be the Mastodon equivalent?

Dan Goodman

@jonny it'll be interesting to see how fast this will all unravel. I was kind of expecting them to be a bit more stealthy for a while longer before showing their hand, but maybe not.

jonny (good kind)

just took a look at about a month of atproto firehose i have just been accumulating, and it looks like it's time for an update to the ol "is it becoming a communication medium yet" and the answer is even more no than before.
1% of accounts receive 72% of interactions (up from 44% last december when the network was a fraction of the size),
1% of posts receive 56% of all interactions, and
almost 90% of posts receive 0 interactions.

the distribution is steep too in the high end of that tail. Scrolling through the default feeds rn on a secondary account following zero people and with zero interactions, posts are averaging in the ~hundreds up to a tens of thousands of interactions. on my actual account where i have interacted with people, i receive the fixed proportion of low-interaction mixins from my network which is like 30-40%. Think about how common seeing a post with hundreds of interactions is tho in the default feeds - 0.01% of posts receive 470 likes, and 0.0001% receive 6300. That's how much the algorithmic amplification makes a monoculture.

I have been taking samples of fedi while developing fetch all replies and backfilling, and the distribution on AP fedi is... not like that... but i haven't taken a systematic sample.

one prior post, i'll find the other later:
neuromatch.social/@jonny/11165

Edit: to be clear, this a month sample of all likes and all accounts that were active in that month. So not all accounts from all time

just took a look at about a month of atproto firehose i have just been accumulating, and it looks like it's time for an update to the ol "is it becoming a communication medium yet" and the answer is even more no than before.
1% of accounts receive 72% of interactions (up from 44% last december when the network was a fraction of the size),
1% of posts receive 56% of all interactions, and
almost 90% of posts receive 0 interactions.

Powersource

@jonny "Telegram says it will now share IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities in response to valid orders" oopsie. I guess this makes a lot of sense coming soon after the CEOs arrest

jonny (good kind)

alright, after like a year of halfheartedly trying on and off, #FetchAllReplies is pretty much finished - the problem of not being able to see all replies to a post is one of the largest complaints that people have with mastodon in particular but also the fedi in general. It is an especially potent problem for smaller servers, making them feel lonely, and making the whole fedi seem quiet. It is also a large contributor to the 'reply guy' problem where a moderately popular post will get the same replies over and over again and people won't even know they're doing it.

This patch recursively fetches replies using activitypub collections. it does it respectfully, only when someone is explicitly looking at a post (rather than fetching all replies for everything all the time) with some debounce, and spaces out the recursive calls to the other servers in deep threads.

the only thing left is to make the posts get inserted into the web client as they are received, currently you need to refresh to see them.

trying it locally now and it is a game changer.

i'm not "good at ruby" so if you ever wanna see this upstream, kindly spare a code review?

github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/m

#FediDev #MastoDev #UnFuckTheFedi #PubSubIsCoolButPresentsPrettySeriousUsabilityProblems #JustSmallInstanceThings

alright, after like a year of halfheartedly trying on and off, #FetchAllReplies is pretty much finished - the problem of not being able to see all replies to a post is one of the largest complaints that people have with mastodon in particular but also the fedi in general. It is an especially potent problem for smaller servers, making them feel lonely, and making the whole fedi seem quiet. It is also a large contributor to the 'reply guy' problem where a moderately popular post will get the same replies...

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Dawn Ahukanna

@jonny thanks for sharing. ActivityPub is a protocol like TCP, where you have to check packet hits and misses rather than REST API over HTTPS 1.1.

Duncan

@jonny sounds like something pretty essential that should be rolled into base Masto if it's good enough with resources.

I'm aware people have very different ideas of what Masto should be (and changes/projects often end up in a half-way house that please neither).

This should please everyone - it solves a long-standing moderation problem *and* makes Masto look more lively. So well done.

jonny (good kind)

Mozilla holding everyone for ransom and saying they will post everyones bookmarks and browser history in public unless we all paid $50 to fund Firefox development forever would genuinely be a better business decision than giving in to adtech. Literally the only thing anyone who uses it wants from them is an uncompromised browser. Value goes to zero otherwise

Bas Schouten

@jonny There's no such thing as an uncompromised browser. And PPA actually will allow advertisers to get specific click through information -without- tracking users, which they are currently doing, with or without the browser's help.

In other words suggesting this is 'giving in to adtech' is incorrect. This is offering advertisers a capability to get some meaningful data without having to track users.

jonny (good kind)

You wont believe the number of stormtroopers theyre deploying against unarmed students unless you see it. This is just one side: at least 7 police departments with at least two layers at every point of egress, with several layers in back for rear control and rotation. They've got the army out against your kids for having the audacity to do whatever they can to stop a genocide

#UCIrvine

jonny (good kind)

everyone i have figured it out, cats just have unchecked integer operations

graph of cat enjoyment of petting vs. duration 

enjoyment increases linear from 0 to +128 and then goes vertically downward to -128, continuing to rise at the same slope as before afterwards. 

biting happens at the drop to -128, as indicated by an angy cat, or when the enjoyment bar experiences an integer overflow
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ralph_himself

@jonny my OCD is kicking hard: the chart should only go to +127, not +128.

Thinks Deer Are Cool

@jonny ...okay but in my experience this is close to literally true, they bite when they start getting sensory/emotional overload

jonny (good kind)

Compare figure 3 here in the #atproto / #bluesky paper
bsky.social/about/bluesky-and-
To the diagram here:
bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-202

The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.

Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.

Compare figure 3 here in the #atproto / #bluesky paper
bsky.social/about/bluesky-and-
To the diagram here:
bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-202

The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable...

jonny (good kind)

They describe another real weakness in the protocol on page 4 that also makes the single relay indispensable: fedi has backfilling problems, but its possible to solve them because you can at least know who does have the complete picture - the OP server knows of all interactions (that it wants to). Since there are no backlinks, and PDSes are not dereferenceable by username, the only way the whole thing works is if someone has a relatively complete picture of the whole network - otherwise eg. you would have no idea who to deliver a post to.

They describe another real weakness in the protocol on page 4 that also makes the single relay indispensable: fedi has backfilling problems, but its possible to solve them because you can at least know who does have the complete picture - the OP server knows of all interactions (that it wants to). Since there are no backlinks, and PDSes are not dereferenceable by username, the only way the whole thing works is if someone has a relatively complete picture of the whole network - otherwise eg. you would...

millennial falcon

@jonny that over my head, but all I need to know about blsky is it is designed as wrongly as is possible on purpose. which I suspect is another way of saying what u said.

jonny (good kind)

Helping someone debug something, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Edit: too many ppl reading this as "this person bad at programming" - not what I meant. Criticism is of deceptive presentation of LLMs.

Helping someone debug something, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

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AdeptVeritatis

@jonny

Thanks for your post and a special thank for calling out the gatekeeping (in the edit).

Androcat

@jonny I hate these LLMs, and I hate the in-industry hypemonkeys that lend their clout to the absurd misconception that LLMs are any kind of intelligence, or that they are actually doing anythign else than autocorrect applied at scale.

Trip

@jonny My evaluation has ultimately been that the fundamental problem with these LLMs, at least in terms of the output the give, is that they are designed to give a satisfying answer to whatever is posed to them, even if they can't. So rather than say "I can't answer that" it will instead just invent something that sounds good. Because it may not know the answer, but it damn well knows what an answer *looks like*, and appearing to answer is preferable to giving a disappointing result.

jonny (good kind)

Hey any journalists on here plz turn your public post indexing on, because most of you haven't and thats why people looking for public information cant find you.

Go to settings > public profile > privacy and reach, select "include public posts in search results"

Not all the fedi wants to be a public space, and thats fine, but some parts should be right now.

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Brandon Starr

@jonny Thanks for the info! I'm not a journalist but didn't realize that was not on by default. Going to my podcast accounts and updating those, too!

tsk

@jonny Good advice.

Unfortunately, discoverability w #Mastodon servers is so bad that you can click on a users busy profile and it may appear empty "for reasons". This happens a lot.

And there's nothing to suggest new people to follow based on existing activity and follows.

This paradigm hasn't even figured out a decent way to provide URL links to content. I still end up on other M. websites (where I don't reside) when I click on links to toots. How does a news website even cope with that, when they consider adding "share on fedi" icons to their own pages?

@jonny Good advice.

Unfortunately, discoverability w #Mastodon servers is so bad that you can click on a users busy profile and it may appear empty "for reasons". This happens a lot.

And there's nothing to suggest new people to follow based on existing activity and follows.

This paradigm hasn't even figured out a decent way to provide URL links to content. I still end up on other M. websites (where I don't reside) when I click on links to toots. How does a news website even cope with that, when they...

jonny (good kind)

I think in the future if I am ever writing a code paper I am just going to take the list of contributors and copy paste that into the authors list with links to a git blame (with consent). If we're going to have a credit assignment system as broken as authorship, we can at least err on the "include everyone" side of the brokenness - I want the person who submits a PR to fix a typo in the docs to get credit for helping. People being incentivized to make lots of little contributions is good, actually.

It should be the same way with regular papers too - put your lab techs and undergrads on the paper! Put on the grad student/postdoc who isnt explicitly assigned to this project but ends up helping out anyway. Its literally free! Authorship inflation is a made up problem thats not even a problem!

I think in the future if I am ever writing a code paper I am just going to take the list of contributors and copy paste that into the authors list with links to a git blame (with consent). If we're going to have a credit assignment system as broken as authorship, we can at least err on the "include everyone" side of the brokenness - I want the person who submits a PR to fix a typo in the docs to get credit for helping. People being incentivized to make lots of little contributions is good, actually.

gaytabase

@jonny this is good, but it might be easier just to take your name off the paper if you're going to be a lazy fuck 😂​

Dr. Robert M Flight

@jonny I've seen a couple of people do this previously, if I remember C. Titus Brown did so, and took a lot of flack from some corners for it at the time. I'd hope that attitudes have changed, especially around software. But yeah, in general we need to be more open about offering authorship for any kind of contribution to the project.

Stephan Saalfeld

@jonny 100% to the general sentiment, but like every lazy system, this incentivizes unwanted behavior, i.e. to maximize coauthorship through mundane contributions that perfectly follow protocol.

jonny (good kind)

Academics: stop being coy about #SciHub and start treating it like basic research infrastructure. If you dont include it in your syllabus already as a normal way to access research, you should start. No more winks and nods, just link directly to it and accept no criticism for doing so from the researchers that necessitate its continued existence by their publishing practices

mastodon.social/@eff/111075817

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Kate Nyhan

@jonny
Would you say that the category "researchers that necessitate its continued existence by their publishing practices" includes
- people who publish paywalled papers in journals that don't allow green OA, on the reasoning that everyone can just use SciHub to read them
- people who published in paywalled journals that allow self-archiving, but don't bother to do it

Julio J. 🀲

@jonny talking of which, I just released @scihub , a bot that posts the latest working domains for #SciHub

hachyderm.io/@j3j5/11108732599

Tobin Baker

@jonny Sadly, if the new Cold War ever ends, sci-hub will probably cease to exist.

jonny (good kind)

tip for new fedis: the way the fediverse works is there is a chipmunk that comes by and puts all the posts in his mouth and goes and stashes them in his tree and only some of them hatch but that is the cost of federation

jonny (good kind)

The #LLMs aren't just weird text generators, and when these companies talk to investors they don't talk about whether they're sentient or not. They talk about "understanding intent" as a synonym for matching search queries to ads. They're parsing your email and calendar and docs and matching them to entities in their knowledge graph to predict your likelihood of clicking an ad. They don't talk about generated text as thought, it's to optimize ad content and give better clickthrough rates to advertisers who pay to embed in the answers of "LLM-type experiences"
abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20

The #LLMs aren't just weird text generators, and when these companies talk to investors they don't talk about whether they're sentient or not. They talk about "understanding intent" as a synonym for matching search queries to ads. They're parsing your email and calendar and docs and matching them to entities in their knowledge graph to predict your likelihood of clicking an ad. They don't talk about generated text as thought, it's to optimize ad content and give better clickthrough rates to advertisers...

First, Google Al. It's important to recognize that our advertising business has obviously
benefited over the past decade from the transition to mobile. More recently, we had outsized
growth in advertising revenues during the pandemic, with 2022 advertising revenues $90 billion
higher than in 2019. Going forward, we're focused on growing revenues on top of this higher
base through Al-driven innovation.
Sundar highlighted the incredible opportunities underway with Al and the transformative impact
it will have on businesses. Already breakthroughs in everything from natural language
understanding to generative Al are fueling our ability to deliver results that drive meaningful
performance for advertisers and are useful to users
Take Smart Bidding, which uses Al to predict future ad conversions and their value, helping
businesses stay agile and responsive to rapid shifts in demand.
bidding performance, allowing us to move advertiser outcomes down the funnel to drive better
ROI and use budgets more efficiently.
In search-query matching, large language models like MUM match advertiser offers to user
queries. This understanding of human intent of language combined with advances in bidding
prediction, are why businesses can see an average of 35% more conversions when they
upgrade exact match keywords to broad match in campaigns that use a target CPA
Google Al also underlies our Creative products, like text suggestions in Google Ads and
creative optimization in responsive search ads. We're excited to start testing our Automatically
Created Assets Beta, which uses Al to generate headlines and descriptions for Search
creatives seamlessly once advertisers opt in
We have already deployed - if you look at the impact of things like BERT and MUM have had
on search quality, making search multimodal, driving the usage of products like Google Lens,
feel like we've been scaling up well.
In Google Cloud today with Vertex Al, we've already been bringing Al APIs to Enterprises, and
they are on a pretty healthy growth path.
So we do see secular opportunities ahead, both in terms of putting these APls out, making sure
every developer, every organization in the world can use it. And as I said earlier, we're in very,
very early days. And I think there's a lot of room ahead.
In terms of Search, too, now that we can integrate more direct LLM-type experiences in Search,
I think it will help us expand and serve new types of use cases, generative use cases. And so I
think I see this as a chance to rethink and reimagine and drive Search to solve more use cases
for our users as well.
So, again, early days. You will see us be bold, put things out, get feedback, and iterate and
jonny (good kind)

I'm not saying LLMs are magic and can do all the things they promise to investors, I'm saying these companies don't care about whether the bots can think. they won't work and that's worse: what they certainly will do is deepen the logic of surveillance that drives their application in advertising and provide a lot of flimsy, bias ridden, nonfunctional LLMs as platforms to data consumers like governments, cops, and insurance companies to make use of surveillance data under the cloak of LLM datawashing.

jonny (good kind)

apparently you can check where the browser window is relative to the screen that it's on, so I had this very cursed idea and that is to make a webpage that has a fixed position on your screen (rather than in the browser window) and the browser window is like a magnifying glass that you have to decrease the size of to bring the page in focus, and then you have to move the window around to find the different sections of the page like a point and click adventure.

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