Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

For a while now I've been using #Forecastie to display open weather data from;

https://openweathermap.org/

It was, at the time, the best weather app I could find on F-Droid. But while I was Fossify-ing my Simple apps, I decided to see what's available now. I'm quite impressed with Breezy Weather (forked from Geometric Weather);

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.breezyweather/

It seems to be able to use a range of open data sources, but the default appears to be;

https://open-meteo.com/

#weather #OpenWeather #OpenMeteo

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A mistrust of apps is not a bad thing. The majority of them exist only to exploit their access to your device for DataFarming purposes (see my recent post about ZipoApps).

That's why I'm so fussy about installing phone apps only from F-Droid. Where they've been rebuilt from source code and checked for spyware, which they either remove, or at least flag (eg if the app is tethered to a DataFarming remote service).

#FDroid #SoftwareFreedom #DataFarming

@KneeNeart

#ShowerThoughts You don't need to teach or encourage people to hate the Other. Just teach them to fear the Other, deeply, uncritically, and self-protective instincts will do the rest. Especially if you also teach people to view every point of difference as Othering and scary.

A week ago I posted a poll asking;

> How much history is really useful in a messaging app?

Sadly I only got 13 responses, so the results need to be taken with a pretty hefty grain of salt. But ...

Among the responses, there was a healthy majority for 1 month. The longest option was 1 year, so the fact that this didn't win suggests that long term storage of messaging isn't a priority, at least for those who responded.

The poll is closed but still interested in people's thoughts on this topic.

@djsumdog you need to work on both the weak reading comprehension and the paranoia. Neither are serving you well.

If you read that disclaimer carefully, you'll notice that it's a) a joke, b) satire on the way EULAs are usually used, c) not binding on you in any way, unless you're trying to tie the author into bogus "agreements" on behalf of your employer.

As long as you're not planning on doing that, you're perfectly safe to read the article. Then your comments on it might in context.

"Wynn-Williams makes a very good case that Facebook is run by awful people who are also very careless – in the sense of being reckless, incurious, indifferent.

But there's another meaning to "careless" that lurks just below the surface of this excellent memoir: "careless" in the sense of "arrogant" – in the sense of not caring about the consequences of their actions."

@pluralistic, 2025

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

#FaceBook #Meta #SarahWynnWilliams

Just went back to a @peertube video I started watching on my Android, then closed the Firefox-based browser I'd been watching it in. When I reopened the browser and hit play on the video, it resumed where I left off. It's the attention to little UX details like this that make it so impressive.

#PeerTube

@icedquinn
> some of the modern social issues remind me of reading Stafford Beer

I'll have to ponder on it, but systems thinking might well shed some light on this. Are you familiar with #DonellaMeadows' work?

@worik
That's a pretty good summary. Thanks for the discussion : )

"... AI code assistants invent package names. In a recent study, researchers found that about 5.2 percent of package suggestions from commercial models didn't exist, compared to 21.7 percent from open source or openly available models.

Running that code should result in an error when importing a non-existent package. But miscreants have realized that they can hijack the hallucination for their own benefit."

#ThomasClaburn, 2025

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

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#AI #MOLE #AICoding

@worik

"All that's required is to create a malicious software package under a hallucinated package name and then upload the bad package to a package registry or index like PyPI or npm for distribution. Thereafter, when an AI code assistant re-hallucinates the co-opted name, the code will run the malware."

#ThomasClaburn, 2025

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

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"What a world we live in: AI hallucinated packages are validated and rubber-stamped by another AI that is too eager to be helpful."

#FerossAboukhadijeh, CEO, Socket, 2025

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

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#AI #MOLE

"[_Iain] automated the creation of thousands of typo-squatted packages (many targeting crypto libraries) and even used ChatGPT to generate realistic-sounding variants of real package names at scale. He shared video tutorials walking others through the process, from publishing the packages to executing payloads on infected machines via a GUI."

#FerossAboukhadijeh, CEO, Socket, 2025

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

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Was that you @lain? : P

I find it amazing how unwilling people are to accept that current "#AI" tech (including the "LLM" tech that I call #MOLE Training) is not intelligent, by any meaningful definition of the word. The nonsense arguments they use to wriggle out of this conclusion are nothing if not creative.

Most common is the consensus reality wriggle; more people talk as if they think Trained MOLEs are intelligent, therefore they are. So if most people think perpetual energy is possible, then it is? Nope.

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Another wriggle I strike frequently is that although the current MOLE Training tech can't produce intelligence yet, future versions will. Which is equivalent to saying that although current fusion energy tech can't produce cold fusion, future versions obviously can. Nope.

The existence of one body of tech that didn't used to exist, with hard limitations, doesn't prove that tech without those limitations will automatically come into existence in the future.

So much magical thinking.

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@worik
> I can hold a conversation with an LLM, I can correct it, and it corrects me

You are anthromorphising. Like saying a windscreen wiper is clearing the windscreen *for you*.

The algorithm is generating statistical guesses based on your inputs. Like a spell checker autocorrect. There is no conversation. It's not "correcting" you. These terms imply decisions it doesn't make. See;

https://betterwithout.ai/mind-like-AI

> Close enough?

Not even on the same planet, let alone in the same ballpark.

@worik You clearly really *want* machines that think to exist. I'm sorry the inherent limitations of the current language autocomplete algorithms disappoint you so much. But they are what they are.

I asked pi.ai, "are you intelligent?" It's output was;

"I'm not intelligent in the same way that humans are - I don't have consciousness or emotions, and I can't learn in the same way that humans do. I'm just a computer program designed to simulate intelligence!"

@worik
See also this 2020 paper by Ragnar Fjelland, published on Nature.com, entitled 'Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized';

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0494-4

No significant changes have happened in any area of AI tech since then. Just more compute added to existing MOLE Training methods.

@worik
> That was before transformers became known

Which ones?

> aside I now have a machine I can ask questions of, in natural English, it gets my meaning o r I can correct it, and get the information I want

This is not new. Search engines were doing this long before the ChatGPT hype train got started. What I'm disputing is whether elaborate autocomplete is a form of *intelligence*. You can heavily dilute the meaning of "intelligence" to include it, but I don't see any value in doing that.