Notices by Prof. Catherine Flick (catherineflick@mastodon.me.uk)

If you are an EU citizen please look at this official EU petition to ban conversion practices in the EU. They need a very large number of signatures before the end of tomorrow. Get your family and friends to sign too! https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home

@derek Plenty of time to reflect now!

These two paragraphs in the BMJ are just such an indictment of the current US regime.

https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r253

Same. Good luck everyone
https://omfg.town/@dansinker/113857295699582668

So we have a LeapStart book for the preschooler. I haven’t managed to work out how it works. It has a stylus that you touch things on the pages of books that you set into the leapstart. I can’t work out how it knows what page it’s on, they are too flimsy for any electronics in the pages. Any ideas? As far as I can see on the stylus it has a pressure sensor and some sort of visual sensor up by the pressure sensor.

This is an excellent post by Abigail Thorn which all cis people should read to understand how the NHS approach for “treatment” of trans people is completely unfit for purpose at a very fundamental level. Abigail is a philosopher and so perfectly placed to push back against the structures she was asked to reinforce. I’m so sorry it is this way and desperately hope that increasing visibility and understanding amongst the people who make these decisions will improve things.
https://masto.ai/@transworld/113712458707101446

“We’ll beat Reform by defeating their arguments rather than changing the rules to stop them getting money from Elon Musk” - oh my god they have learned absolutely nothing, haven’t they

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/dec/21/ministers-resist-calls-to-block-musk-donations-to-farages-reform-uk

Thanks America, I just got 20% off parking due to a Black Friday code. I’m bemused but pleased.

Oh my gosh this whole article about people who have invested all their savings or who are relying on bitcoin for their kids’ inheritance is just terrifying. Some of these people are even worse off, they’ve been burned but bought back in again!! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/30/crypto-investors-trump-pump-bitcoin-dogecoin

@glynmoody 😩

Thanks, bing search, this is a new avenue of computer ethics I hadn't even thought might exist.

Yep, we’ve all been saying it, now they’re finally admitting it. LLMs are not actually intelligent and this method is not sustainable in its growth. Finally seeing diminishing returns; thank goodness we can all move onto the next grift now
https://sigmoid.social/@garymarcus/113455684170107190

American friends, I honestly have no words. I am so devastated for you, us, the planet, everything right now. I can’t even find it in me to be angry, I’m just so sad for us all

@cstross @jeffjarvis @gnoll110 I thought that was maggots 😅 don’t leeches just draw blood?

This is the most horrifyingly unethical research I have seen in a long time. How on earth is the University of Wisconsin's IRB allowing this sort of thing to happen? Getting all of this data without consent from students at a university, even working out who their minor-age friends are?

https://bsky.app/profile/nberpubs.bsky.social/post/3l6xhwie6rh24

Ah yes “respect for the academic tradition”, that’s what we should be prioritising over EDI, more like “respect for the backward opinions of old white men in academia for whom the advent of EDI is the first time they’ve ever been challenged on their prejudices”.

Richard Stallman is a repulsive human being and I honestly don't understand why the FSF & community has enabled him for so long. (I recognise the excellent work of several in the community who have stood up to him but he seems to be very difficult to dislodge, and that's because he still has enablers.)

https://stallman-report.org/ (cw discussions of defences of child sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sexual assault)

I was quite active in the FS/OS community back at the turn of the century but ended up getting out because these creepy vibes were pretty much everywhere at the time. You just sort of put up with it in the moment, but it really did become "death by a thousand cuts" - constantly being hit on, constantly having to deal with graphic, "joking" discussions of sex or pornography, being undermined because how would women know anything about tech, etc. It got very very tiring.

This is apparently doing some numbers so I want to make it clear that I think this paper is purely part of a strategic move by Apple to save face and gracefully exit from the genAI hype cycle. Hopefully other companies will do the same.

No shit “this decline [in the capability of LLMs to perform logical reasoning through multiple clauses] is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data.”

Paper from Apple engineers showing that genAI models don’t actually understand what they read but just regurgitate what they’ve seen like a puppy wanting to please its owner:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229