Notices by Arjen P. de Vries Timmers 🕊️ (arjen@idf.social)

Today is Aaron Swartz Day:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/celebrating-life-aaron-swartz-aaron-swartz-day-2024

Can we together build free Internet as he envisioned it: a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz

And, the #internetarchive features the documentary The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz

@redstarfish isn't it fun!

Did you know:

You probably used more distinct instructions than you strictly need to express your program!

Why?

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator

Intel's Chris Domas once build the M/o/Vfuscator to compile programs into "mov" instructions (only), inspired by Stephen Dolan's paper "mov is Turing-complete".

(While not meant 100% seriously, I have always thought this is a very nice example of the beauty when theoretical computer science thinking meets empirical tinkering. )

@Iris good question indeed!!

A similar one applies to researchers using Web search engines, or, until last year, those using the Twitter API. I guess in all these cases, these researchers view such online resources as black boxes that are there to use and study, without really wondering how that box might change over time, or from user to user, and/or exhibit biases uncalibrated for.

@evan we're faster than the bot :-)

Just believing that an AI is helping boosts your performance
https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/just-believing-that-an-ai-is-helping-boosts-your-performance

Researchers discover an **AI placebo effect** where task performance improves when people believe an AI helps them.

"The results also pose a significant challenge for research on HCI, since expectations would influence the outcome unless placebo control studies were used.

‘These results suggest that many studies in the field may have been skewed in favor of AI systems,’ concludes Welsch."

@hongminhee thanks, I understand now! You do not always want to use a "real" account for debugging purposes. Really like your project btw, very useful.

@hongminhee makes me curious, what is an ephemeral inbox? Is it different from a normal inbox?

@evan Wordle 951 6/6

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Kinda a struggle :-)