Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

Hmm, I haven't seen the Forbidden Gummy Bear cross my timeline on Mastodon yet, as it regularly did in the other place. Guess I should start it myself then.

A bear shaped amber amulet of exceptional beauty and exquisite craft skills, found in a peat bog near Slupsk, Poland, and dated to about 3,500 years ago. Now in the Szczecin museum in Poland.

@kevlin @cwebber described ChatGPT as Mansplaining As A Service, and honestly I can’t think of a better description. A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures at an instant with unflagging confidence in it’s own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or awareness even of the level of expertise of it’s audience.

Some #sacred #moss traces the words carved into this recumbent gravestone outside #SelbyAbbey #Church in #EastYorkshire. I suppose that the moisture held in the carved depressions that form the letters has encouraged the moss to do its stuff. #Mosstodon #gravestone #memory #writing

@afewbugs I was going to post this very question yesterday. At the very least, when an image is uploaded the edit dialogue should appear. There are soooo many excellent posts on Mastodon that I'd like to boost but I refuse to do so if there isn't a good description.

So one of the major problems with #ChatGPT is that it's deliberately opaque about the basis for the claims it makes. What happens if you explicitly ask it to cite its sources?

Turns out the answer is - it will just spit out citations for non-existent papers and falsely attribute scientific discoveries to people who didn't make them!

(local differentially private mechanisms have existed since at least the 60s, and have been studied by that name since at least 2008: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.0924.pdf)

#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, PhD student Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.

Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's using it to set up a foundation to improve diversity in STEM.

#WomenInSTEM #Histodons #ScienceHistory

Did you know you can tell the age of a fake Christmas tree by counting the rings of tape?

@kjhealy Next generation of GPT bot rumored to be so realistic that when you ask it how the writing is going it bursts into tears

To be honest, this seems worse than having the road blocked by #climate #activists for a few minutes.

This explains the ongoing degradation of the West Pier, Brighton UK. Giant seagulls pecking it at dusk.

I follow back, and really appreciate boosters.

#WestPier #Seascape #Seaside #Brighton #Sunset #WestPierBrighton #Silhouette #Beach #Landscape #LandscapePhotography #Sussex #BeautifulEngland #pebbles #PhotoOfTheDay #PicOfTheDay #ImageOfTheDay #Photgraphy #Landscape #Pier #Coastal #Seaside #Boardwalk #BrightonPier #Seagull #Moment

From top to bottom, the media is laser focused not on the threat of a growing fascist movement but on debating whether that movement's targets and enemies, LGBT+ and trans people specifically, should even be allowed to exist alongside "normal" people.

Seasonal Reminder !

The #SalvationArmy is not a #charity. They are an evangelical protestant church that uses donations to oppose #LGBTQ rights.

Give them NOTHING.

@dave @Bam @thetitanborn

1) Don't ask Black users to CW discussions of their own racism.

2) Don't be on a server where mods mistreat Black folk.

3) Support the mods on your own server, financially and otherwise.

4) Don't engage with sea lions that say "Mistreatment? Here? prove it!" There have been enough threads shared on Black folk receiving racism. Individually convincing each one is exhausting, and expecting that is a tactic of bad faith actors.

Good morning! There’s a very distinct north-south divide when it comes to the carbon intensity of our electricity grid — a case of the greens and the green-nots. https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk

Trans people just want to fucking live. You know what I'm saying? We want to have a safe home, we want to eat in a restaurant on occasion, we want to hang out with friends, we want to fall in love and be loved back. We want to have fun and dress up sometimes and stay at home on our couches sometimes and have a life that is fulfilling and in which we aren't constantly in fear of murder or harassment. This is not new and it's not radical and it's not harming you or anyone else to ask for it.

My daughter found a big garter snake in the yard today. After we hung out with it for a bit she went inside and make this note for the snake, helpfully translating the English into Snake

I cannot overstate how much time and energy we have saved by having a lab wiki where we record collective knowledge and solutions to common problems. Instead of trying to recreate something someone did two years ago it's a quick search and then often just copy-paste.

Here's ours: https://wiki.weecology.org/