Notices by John Abbe (aka Slow) (slowenough@mastodon.social)

Role of science fiction in the mindset of tech robber barons, and those enabling them. (I say - more solarpunk!) https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/ #sciencefiction #science #culture

@cwebber Indeed. White House report on invoking the Insurrection Act is due out this weekend. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-to-do-if-the-insurrection-act-is-invoked/

@band @FediTips A URL should do, your bookmarks should show up at:
<instance URL>/bookmarks

Some terms I want to be using more often:

Wiki - as tech, and as social phenomenon. Any archive with an active group of people building or working with it is a wiki.

Blogs & blogging. (Most of what people mean when they say "social media.")

Computer — including your "phone" or pocket computer, personal information manager, etc.

Internet - It still gets used, but without the capital I. So, let's recapitalize the Internet. The Internet is awesome! And very much worth defending.

Free software.

Free story title and idea:

Fifty First Turing Tests

#llm #ai #story #hacking

If I could make one request, it might be to stop putting ONE thing at the center of things.

Even TWO is really not many when you think about it.

What would it would be like if there were FOUR or SEVEN even, what if you didn't know exactly how many things were at the center, at the root of things, at the root of whatever/whoever it is that you are trying to understand or engage? Embrace uncertainty and multiplicity in how you think, if you want to understand the world as it is. #uncertainty

Do DEI workers have a union? #labor #union

@koronkebitch @jonmsterling If you leave a big enough pedagogy hole, it can get filled with almost anything. Seems like everyone knows the solution is to respect kids' awareness of and agency among pedagogies (I know a guy who ran a pre-school using consensus), and yet every wave of reform fails to actually do that.

IMHumbleO it's political and financial perspectives & decisions (at least as much as power-over cultural legacies) which prevent "mainstream" schools from really centering students.

@peterkaminski "LCMs employ a hierarchical structure, mirroring human reasoning processes"

Not a good sign if they think our reasoning is hierarchical.

"reduces sequence length compared to token-level processing, addressing the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers and enabling more efficient handling of long contexts"

Now seeing "concepts" as a kind of compression (of strings of tokens), which I've seen articulated before as a way of understanding much of what's happening with LLMs.

@peterkaminski (There are hierarchies, among our ways of thinking, sure. But ultimately they are not clean or coherent hierarchies, that is they branch in all kinds of weird ways that defy exclusively top-down control, organization, or even understanding.)

@band @anderbill Was it seen in the other 'verses?

These inter-reality gates can be tricky. :-)

@band @iDGS
If I understand correctly, Bluesky uses a protocol which could interoperate across services. Hence in theory it is distributed, but in practice not so much. Sounds like the design so far is for only one global conversation, period, so you can't have different spaces with different moderation rules &/or moderators on different.

The FAQ said, "tooling for independent moderation services is coming soon." So I guess we'll find out more then.

Curious how the algorithms bit works.

@band @iDGS Threads not being it is a gimme, that's just Facebook leveraging their Instagram product to stay in the game.

Bluesky is a B Corporation but that's a minor differentiator. They are a for-profit, so it would be nice to know who the main investors were/are. Seeing Mike Masnick's name there makes me more curious.

Is the code open source? I guess that's not too important since it's an open spec, but it would make starting other servers easier. https://bsky.social/about/faq 1/2

@iDGS @band It's all still in one service, right? They have a theory, but no practice.

@band I hereby give you permission to check just the first seven.

I give myself permission to post the same account more than once. Maybe I'll do fewer if I do it again! Thanks for your response.

People do Follow Friday here?

@AndreaChalupa

@Identitywoman

@evan

@daphnehk

@skry

@internetarchive

@impactology

@labornotes

@fastmailunited

@MarkDilley

@meganL

@seachanger

@igd_news

@kissane

@theslowmusicmovement

@ceciliatan

@EugWklyCamilla

@naceugene

#FollowFriday

@Instrument_Data @sundogplanets @Nichelle Yes, they are built to deorbit on a relatively few years. And break up in the atmosphere, releasing a lot of particulate materials. In the quantities we're now talking about this is likely to affect the ozone layer, among other things.

It's being studied now, but it would be smart for SpaceX to start making plans now for how satellites can be deorbitted less destructively, maybe even reused!

@Instrument_Data @sundogplanets @Nichelle Bezos will be able to start launching his system maybe next year, and then yeah at *least* China will have their own.

We need agreements. Use current understandings and some best guesses, adjust as research comes in. Dark skies, collisions, satellite servicing/retirement, etc. It could be an uplifting international, public/private conference, if done well.

Relevant: Jesse Kate Shingler did a great talk on the commons in space. https://www.ted.com/talks/jessy_kate_schingler_civilization_on_the_moon_and_what_it_means_for_life_on_earth

@band @yvonnezlam As long as you keep asking questions like that, you'll be fine. Finding my way to the world of such inquiries is what hooked me on groups over thirty years ago, with the Center for Group Learning in Oakland.

Consider all the attention on families, the incredible variety of forms they take. Yet they are only one of sooo many kinds of groups in schools, fields, factories, offices, war, worship, games, etc. https://groupworksdeck.org/ #group #facilitation #community #society #culture

@simsa03 @band Thanks, I can see the gnomecore / solarpunk image in my head now.