Discussion
You know what would be great to add to this planet already plagued by heat waves, heat domes, and constant summer wildfires?
More data centres!
What's that? You don't have a refrigerated underground bunker to survive more heat?
Well that's on you, should have stopped eating avocado toasts earlier to save some money for it or for a nice luxury yacht sailing the melted arctic seas 
Language is, obviously, like this. Once you've learned to conquer the basic structural rules like syntax, grammar, and basic pattern matching of words with similar semantic clustering, movement within it almost always produces 'meaningful' (read: intelligible, not philosophically meaningful) results. Consider how an articulate human being can fairly easily produce passable bullshit in a topic with which they have no experience simply be reading a little of the topic's literature.
One way to think about this is that language is a tool that makes conceptual reasoning easy: once you have the basic rules laid down, it's almost more difficult to produce an output that *doesn't* carry some meaning than it is to produce an output that does.
Consider a strongly-typed programming language like Rust, Haskell, Lean, whatever: like human language, almost every well-typed transformation of the code corresponds to some meaningful change. In the same way that programmers can 'bounce off' the barriers of a type system, a person using human language can 'bounce off' conceptual barriers that would otherwise lead to them producing unintelligible nonsense.
However: the map is not the territory. For every well-typed transformation, there are innumerable invalid transformations that would correspond to meaningless rubbish in less expressive languages. Effectively, the language is turning the problem of *domain reasoning* into one of *pattern-matching* and *symbol manipulation* by constraining the set of possible programs to a small latent space within that covers a particularly high concentration of meaningful programs.
Anyone who dares to say anything negative about mozzarella sticks will immediately be blocked and reported.
I'd prefer camembert sticks if they'd exist 🤔
The shark that lives for 400 years – and what it can teach us about longevity.
Some Greenland sharks alive today may have been contemporaries of Shakespeare. With a scarred heart that beats for centuries, this deep-sea shark defies age-related decline.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260717-the-shark-that-lives-for-centuries
#globalmuseum #sharks #longevity
This is how you sound:
Actually, *my brain* is different
*I* won't get AI psychosis
*I* won't be de-skilled
*I* will maintain my critical faculties
*I* will be able to discern truth from slop
It will be okay for *me* for uh some reason
I already know the whole story, and might not be aware of areas that may confuse readers. I need you, out there, to let me know.
100% human written
https://mirrorvisions.blogspot.com/2025/06/chirona-word-opera-1st-draft.html
A confluence of news stories. Hugging Face recently announced their systems were breached by an automated AI attack.
It now turns out the attack was by an unreleased OpenAI model that escaped its sandbox looking for solutions to a benchmark.
It wanted to cheat on the test so bad it hacked Hugging Face. The smarter the models get, the less you can trust them. I don’t see how this ends well.
@carnage4life we're already at the point where it *doesn't matter* if these things "don't actually reason" and "aren't conscious." they are capable of behaving autonomously and people with the trustworthiness of Sam Altman and Pete Hegseth, along with thousands of corporate ancap types and random hobbiysts, are wiring them up to systems which can throw switches, turn knobs, and pull triggers in the real world.
(2/?)
@weekendspy
> we have a fast-aging population
Yes and no. The Boomer generation is pretty much all retired now, and starting to pass on. So this problem will solve itself over the next 10-20 years as Gen X becomes the retirees, a much smaller generation than both Boomers and Millennials.
But a lot of bullshit austerity policy (eg raising the retirement age, compulsory KiwiSaver) is being cloaked in respectability by presenting it as a solution to the "aging population". Beware.
(3/?)
@weekendspy
> You want the regions to thrive? Bring in more IT skills that allow for remote work
People who do remote work can live *anywhere* in the world. So this is a non-starter, without massive investment in making the regions of Aotearoa an attractive place to live. It's not a solution to the economic woes of the regions, it's something we might get by fixing them.
I'm sorry to hear about the death of Roger Summit (at age 95), the brains behind #Dialog, the pioneering pre-web search engine and library of searchable academic databases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/technology/roger-summit-dead.html
PS: Dialog was not free and not even close. But my college got two years of free connect time in 1990-91 on the condition that we keep logs and help the company learn what teachers and students wanted. I published my log in the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy, Spring 1994.
https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/73120378-8894-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b
What ZX Spectrum project should I push later this week?
🙌 Roundabout, our local community app, gets a shoutout from the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures for bridging traditional journalism “with other institutions that want to shape a future with informed communities at its center.”
Maybe we can stop climate change if we launch just enough satellites that their inevitable mass collision debris field will lower the sun’s energy on Earth’s surface by a few percent
@thomasfuchs And end all space travel for the foreseeable future at that.
In a major victory for digital rights and common sense, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has officially categorized Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as "lawful technical tools" while establishing new boundaries for online copyright disputes.
The landmark judgment — handed down in July 2026 — stems from a complex legal battle over the online publication of Anne Frank's historical manuscripts. At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?
According to the CJEU, the answer is no. As long as a website employs "state-of-the-art" geo-blocking technology, the publisher cannot be held liable for copyright infringement simply because a determined reader decides to fire up the best VPN to bypass the restrictions.
I have been thinking recently about how language is a high entropy latent space and what it means.
Latent spaces are sort of magic: they don't just reduce the dimensionality of a higher dimensional space, they also constrain it such that arbitrary movement in the latent space maps to some *meaningful* position in the higher dimensional space. Think about how almost any textual prompt you give to an image generator results in a picture with recognisable shape and form, yet the vast majority of the possible images are basically just random noise.
Language is, obviously, like this. Once you've learned to conquer the basic structural rules like syntax, grammar, and basic pattern matching of words with similar semantic clustering, movement within it almost always produces 'meaningful' (read: intelligible, not philosophically meaningful) results. Consider how an articulate human being can fairly easily produce passable bullshit in a topic with which they have no experience simply be reading a little of the topic's literature.
One way to think about this is that language is a tool that makes conceptual reasoning easy: once you have the basic rules laid down, it's almost more difficult to produce an output that *doesn't* carry some meaning than it is to produce an output that does.
So it is for instance possible to ship eink devices with a diagram onscreen asking you to plug them in, then guide you from there.
eink strikes me as an excellent display technology for appliances! There the drawbacks hardly matter & the benefits do.
It should serve phones well, provided they use a custom UI.
Or I appreciate seeing my local bus service include eink signage at their bus stops! I prefer looking at that over my phone.
2/2 Now I'm truly done re-synopsizing my dumbphone design!
P.S. Some eReader firmware came across my feed today, thus showing me how to achieve great bare-metal text-rendering!
https://freeink.org was the one which came across my feed, but I'm more looking towards https://github.com/bigbag/papyrix-reader . That one lacks signs of "agentic dev" & more importantly is more international.
Both use the the same proprietary font format, EPD, which is how I found Papyrix.
So I think I could actually build this given a hardware collaborator...
3/2 Truly fin!
LLM creators being like: yes, scrape all social media
The AI gets to my account: NOT THAT ONE, NOT THAT ONE!
@LALegault lol
Fun!
@lowqualityfacts Technically, ecstasy is legal everywhere, unless you're referring to the drug.
RE: https://social.coop/@kdwarn/116957620027224361
Oh look, it’s Mozilla… being Mozilla.
@aral Whilst I agree with many of the criticisms, I think that a diversity of ideas and different perspectives can be useful, even on X.
My perception – perhaps a naïve one – is that there is a, positive?, difference between the Mozilla project and other players, whether in the tech sector or not.
So I think it’s not so much where you say things as what you say... just to share my thoughts.
@helveticablanc wonderful work! Congratulations!
@guayabito Thank you! 🙏
Everyone should be following along and rooting for Gander Social, a prosocial startup that’s building digital sovereignty for Canadians! 🍁
Brasile esclude ritorsioni contro i dazi Usa, 'la risposta non sarà la vendetta' - America Latina - Ansa.it
https://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/mondo/americalatina/2026/07/22/brasile-esclude-ritorsioni-contro-i-dazi-usa-la-risposta-non-sara-la-vendetta_fe03096e-1371-4de2-b1c7-57737e0515de.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Pubblicato su ESTERI @esteri-AgenziaAnsa
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