Onno (VK6FLAB)

“In other news the local distribution centre has restructured its operations to streamline customer synergy and unfortunately has had to let its administrative assistant go to persue other interests.”

The thing about this is that I just made that up, no source, nothing to verify and given that the article identifies a person with full name and place, as well as their role and industry is likely to be uniquely identifiable and a prime candidate for being fired…

… unless the story was made up or the intent is to assassinate either the company or the person.

Ask yourself, who is the intended audience, what does the author of this article intend to achieve and will this article achieve that?

A Statement From Linda Ronstadt

Sept. II, 2024

San Francisco

Donald Trump is holding a rally on Thursday in a rented hall in my hometown, Tucson. I would prefer to ignore that sad fact. But since the building has my name on it. I need to say something.

It saddens me to see the former President bring his hate show to Tucson, a town with deep Mexican-American roots and a joyful. tolerant spirit.

I don’t just deplore his toxic politics, his hatred of women. immigrants and people of color, his criminality, dishonesty and ignorance although there’s that.

For me it comes down to this: In Nogales and across the southern border, the Trump Administration systematically ripped apart migrant families seeking asylum. Family separation made orphans of thousands of little children and babies, and brutalized their desperate mothers and fathers. It remains a humanitarian catastrophe that Physicians for Human Rights said met the criteria for torture.

There is no forgiving or forgetting the heartbreak he caused.

Trump first ran for President warning about rapists coming in from Mexico. I’m worried about keeping the rapist out of the White House.

Linda Ronstadt

P.S. to J.D. Vance:

I raised two adopted children in Tucson as a single mom. They are both grown and living in their own houses. I live with a cat. Am I half a childless cat lady because I’m unmarried and didn’t give birth to my kids? Call me what you want, but this cat lady will be voting proudly in November for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

Link Ronstadt

Sounds like Darwinian selection in progress…

Is it just me who is sceptical about anything new from Intel at the moment?

Mind you, this is not the first time that this feeling has existed, there was a standing joke amongst IT professionals in the mid 1990s that the sticker “Intel Inside” was actually a warning label, referencing the Pentium FDIV bug.

And many of them are heading to BlueSky…

It’s worse when you realise that one manufacturers XL is different from another, and even worse when you realise that it even differs within a brand.

It’s gotten to the point that you should only ever buy fashion online if you can return it and even that is fraught, since plenty of customers wear an item for an occasion and then return it.

If you do buy something, make sure that you wash it before you wear it.

If it walks like a duck…

Back propagation happens during the creation of the model, not after it’s deployed.

The underlying issue with an LLM is that there is no “learning”. The model itself doesn’t dynamically change whilst it’s being used.

This article sets out a process that gives the ability to alter the model, by “dialling up” (or down) concepts. In other words, it’s changing the balance of the weight of concepts across the whole model.

Altering one concept is hardly “learning”, especially since it’s being done externally by researchers, but it’s a start.

A much larger problem is that the energy consumption is several orders of magnitude larger than that of our brain. I’m not convinced that we have enough energy to make a standalone “AI”.

What machine learning actually gave us is the ability to automatically improve a digital model of things, like weather prediction, something that took hours on a supercomputer to give you a week of forecast, now can be achieved on a laptop in minutes with a much longer range and accuracy. Machine learning made that possible.

An LLM is attempting the same thing with human language. It’s tantalising, but ultimately I think the idea applied to language to create “AI” is doomed.

Until I read your post, I hadn’t even clicked on the link. Wow, that’s a whole lot of rubbish.

This information is ancient in terms of solar activity.

At this time the geomagnetic storm arrived four days ago and finished a day ago. We’re all still here.

Sunlight has NOTHING to do with this phenomenon.

This is what happened - note also that this is a wrap-up and is at this time a day old:

• https://youtu.be/kFTbtRdBTyY

The vast majority of companies don’t start by being publicly traded. They begin life as a good idea, an itch to scratch, or how to make money fast.

The public trading happens when the founders run out of money or get stars in their eyes about “the fortune” they’re sitting on.

That’s where the wheels come off, but the process is well and truly in motion by that stage.

I don’t believe that it’s the root cause.

Enshitification is about monetization, getting more money from the same customer base.

If the product you are providing isn’t paying for itself with a sustainable margin then the prerequisites are in place for the wheels of enshitification to start moving.

Putting the foot on the accelerator is achieved by going public, selling the company, or pivoting to some random marketing weenie wet dream.

Most of this is fuelled by “free” products that become “fremium” when companies realise that monetizing you isn’t nearly as sustainable as the marketing department would have you believe. “You just need to grow!” - nevermind that the costs of running the infrastructure grow faster than the income generated by new customers. This is exacerbated by the silo mentality exhibited in many companies, the marketing department has no insight into the costs of the infrastructure team.

I think that we’re going to see much more of this before it gets any better. What better looks like is yet to be determined, since much of this is driven by the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM.

I mention IBM in that list because it’s been buying up “free” software companies and changing their business models.

We live in interesting times…

Given that it reached number 2 in the charts, wouldn’t the answer be: Billboard?

You do know that the USA is also a signatory to the Christchurch Call?

It agreed to (among other things):

“Counter the drivers of terrorism and violent extremism by strengthening the resilience and inclusiveness of our societies to enable them to resist terrorist and violent extremist ideologies, including through education, building media literacy to help counter distorted terrorist and violent extremist narratives, and the fight against inequality.”

Law works by mutual agreement. This is how our global system hangs together. Just because this is being spearheaded by an Australian process, doesn’t make it apply only to Australia.

This same process happens every day across the world. The only difference here is that the person on the other end is pretending that this is about free speech.

Where’s the hue and cry from all the other platforms who just took it down? Are they perhaps more aware of how this works?

Edit:

Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but the Christchurch Call came into existence after a terrorist massacre was livestreamed from Christchurch. It’s not a random website, it’s the New Zealand government response to that event.

Mutual obligations, agreements and treaties are what bind us together legally. Within the legal framework in Australia, CSE and terrorist video are the same, both considered Class 1. My reference to CSE was deliberate. From an Australian perspective they’re one and the same. Different countries can argue that they’re not, but that process is ongoing.

Finally, courts making decisions that affect others happens all the time. Just look at the abortion mess currently playing out across courts all over the USA, not just from the SCOTUS down, but between states as well.

This is the very same thing, it’s just happens to be a country border, not a state one.

Edit 2:

It’s not like the USA hasn’t done this to others either. Right now it’s making laws to force a company in another country to sell an asset, TicTok.

I think that the specifics matter. Specifically this video on that platform. I am fairly sure that the court will say the same thing. Again, I’m not a lawyer.

Xitter is pretending that this is about free speech and censorship.

It’s not.

The eSafety commissioner hasn’t asked to remove an objectionable cat video, it’s asked to remove a terrorist video.

If this was a video depicting CSE the world would not even take a breath to demand its immediate removal.

Xitter is being disingenuous in its argument and its signature to the Christchurch Call just serves to further highlight that the individual in charge doesn’t believe that rules apply to him.

Well I’ve heard commentary here from at least half a dozen legal professionals and experts that the order made by the eSafety commissioner here is legal and appropriate.

One pointed out that this means that representatives of the organisation visiting Australia could end up behind bars.

Others point out that this could result in a ban of the platform.

Fortunately I’m not a lawyer and I don’t pretend to be one on the internet. I guess we’ll both see how this plays out…

Uh, the text goes on to say:

“including its immediate and permanent removal, without prejudice to law enforcement and user appeals requirements”

In other words, if law enforcement asks you to take it down, you will. That does not appear to have occurred here.

Looks interesting. Has anyone used this?

X (twitter) is a signatory to the Christchurch Call set-up by Jacinta Adern. Signatories agree among other things to suppress the dissemination of terrorism. Nobody is talking about this.

Signatories: https://www.christchurchcall.com/our-community

I checked the Christchurch Call website which clearly shows Xitter as a member of the community that agreed to:

“Take transparent, specific measures seeking to prevent the upload of terrorist and violent extremist content and to prevent its dissemination on social media and similar content-sharing services, including its immediate and permanent removal, without prejudice to law enforcement and user appeals requirements, in a manner consistent with human rights and fundamental freedoms. Cooperative measures to achieve these outcomes may include technology development, the expansion and use of shared databases of hashes and URLs, and effective notice and takedown procedures.”

Full text: https://www.christchurchcall.com/about/christchurch-call-text