Notices by irwin (irwin@saturation.social)

The Fediverse will increase in importance over the next four years, particularly for the sciences.

@koantig Don’t discount the possibility that we sometimes post screenshots (to X posts in particular) because we don’t want to give the click machine fuel.

@Ergo42 @eaton My experience on the technical side is orders of magnitude smaller than yours. Just looking at them from a user interaction lens. Level of confidence <— YES. If only once in awhile Claude or ChatGPT would say “Hm, I’m not sure..” or “Take this with a grain of salt…” I mean, they do this currently with date-specific queries that are outside of their training data. But the idea of a meta neural net for UI seems so good I bet someone’s already started doing it? Apple Intelligence?

UX idea for local LLMs:

Speed and responsiveness are highly desirable when chatting with LLMs, but on edge devices we don’t have the same kind of computing horsepower at our disposal. So why don’t we use the same kind of tactics humans use in normal conversation: linguistic fillers, signals we are formulating our thoughts (like the … animation in chat), even asking clarifying questions. These tactics can be used with little computing power while the real answer is formulated in the background.

French left and centrist parties unite to block far-right National Rally | Euronews

Is this what American politics would be like if we had more than two parties?
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/07/02/french-opposition-parties-unite-to-block-far-right-national-rally

I am halfway through @Noupside’s new book and I am finding it difficult not to underline every other sentence.

If you’re online a lot and care about journalism, politics, the dynamics of social networks, influencers and propaganda, this book is like taking a sample, putting it onto a slide, and looking at it through a microscope.

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality https://a.co/d/07TPv4Ya

Yes, Mastodon is more boring than Twitter. And that's a good thing. The same way politics needs to be boring again.

Instead of Explain It Like I’m Five, it really should be Explain It Like I’m 70.

@tchambers Very interesting! Also, I've heard anectdotally that certain communities are splintering to different platforms -- journos to Mastodon and Post, and I've heard some gamers are favoring Cohost. Have you seen other examples of this?

@YoWatShiinaEsq Now I have to know which town (since I go there a lot)

If some rich dude can buy the public square, then it wasn't the public square.

@owasow This thread by @shengokai got me thinking about BlackPlanet (and AsianAvenue and MiGente). We were there doing this before MySpace and Twitter. Granted, those were different times but I wonder the degree to which Black Twitter was made possible by BlackPlanet?

@darius We just migrated to Hometown! What mobile client do you use and does it allow for instance-only posting?

@YoWatShiinaEsq Recipe please?

Wow. This needs to be read by everyone who joined Mastodon in the last week: https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/