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• Post #2499643

  I just finished Robert Gehl’s new book on Mastodon and can’t recommend it enough: it’s the book I wish I had when I joined here 3 years ago; it’s the book that fills in back stories to recurring topics here that I couldn’t quite grasp; it’s the book to give others —friends, developers, researchers, policy makers, grant bodies— on what the fediverse is about; and it’s that amazing thing —an academic text that’s enjoyable and easy to read. We need more of this! @rwg https://global.oup.com/acad...

• Post #2384216

  a revealing experiment in AI based data analysis…… https://kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signals-or-artificial-stereotypes

• Post #1911377

  I just spent two really thought provoking days at this amazing event co-organized by Jens Madsen from the LSE and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and it’s made me feel a little bit more hopeful again that there is enough will and expertise that we might still succeed in building information environments that reflect reality as opposed to commercial interests or the whims of autocrats - even though that task is being made even harder than it already was by the advent generative AI https:...

• Post #1881610

  Request for advice #accessibility I am looking for a tablet based solution that ideally satisfies the following constraints for a hard of hearing person: 1. high quality speech transcription 2. works for *groups of speakers* 3. ideally different speakers are colour coded 4. simple to use & easy to read full screen display 5. also works offline I can satisfy some of these with tools I know of, but not all -most readily droppable features are 5 and 3. any suggestions?

• Post #1875068

  Since taking office in January 2024, the current US administration has terminated over 100 scientific advisory committees https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01301-5

• Post #1829619

  on the shifting nature of social media: social media are now para social media https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487

• Post #1769216

  interesting paper on how training models on (partial) output from other models transfers unexpected (and difficult to track) additional representational content: this can amplify unwanted signals/behaviours even through training data that seem wholly unrelated to that preference/behaviour this occurs due to the interaction between gradient descent as a training procedure, shared initialisation, and the fact that internal representations involve super-position #LLM https://www.nature.com/articl...

• Post #1769214

  amazing and frankly terrifying: (RL based) AI robot that plays elite level table tennis https://youtu.be/EH8kZDc7OLk

• Post #1417692

  this is a beautiful exposition of what science is, both in content and writing https://lisagraumlich.substack.com/p/the-unfinished-sentence (via Liz Neeley https://www.liminalcreations.com/newsletter)

• Post #1350072

  my current thoughts on the Bluesky boom: good for them! My time here has brought home to me how much people want very different things from micro blogging: some want a feed of fast moving, short, quippy, posts with reach (essentially early Twitter), others want slower, thoughtful (and maybe kinder) discussion, with privacy and control if that splits into different platforms with different culture (and design), that may ultimately be helpful, and if the two systems have some degree 1/2

• Post #1331588

  science….

• Post #1331583

  the vibe coded social network seems to be down again….. really not selling the approach

• Post #1331581

  I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… shouldn’t that be one of the most important considerations in thinking about social media design right now? #ActivityPub #atproto

• Post #1265404

  finally in print, the last puzzle piece in a decade of thinking about communication across social networks from the perspective of ideal rational agents: how do we factor in ‚dependence‘ - the fact that the same underlying evidence may, for example, reach us via multiple different reports, giving rise to double counting? There is a strong intuition that multiple independent observations should carry more weight than dependent observations. But how much more? We show that there is no (known) a...

• Post #977012

  interesting new paper on the feasibility of using LLM agents for computational reproducibility checks by Narayanan and colleagues @randomwalker https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11363

• Post #924048

  good piece! “the development and application of methods, the training of minds, the creation of people who know how to think about hard problems. If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.” https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

• Post #899098

  I recommend (for multiple reasons) this piece on coding with AI (Claude Code): https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

• Post #570827

  I recently posted a pre-print about reasoning and large-language models.... trying to get that piece on a pre-print server itself was a bit of a journey which illustrates concerns I've had for the last 18 months or so: namely that AI will kill publishing reform. here a blog post about it: #academic #openScience https://write.as/ulrikehahn/is-ai-killing-scientific-reform

• Post #525758

  if you ramp up the production of information, you need better discernment, because your capacity limitations haven’t just magically increased without better discernment things will break *even if* the quality of the additional information is high …. it’s not just “AI slop” that’s a problem, just helping regular scientists to produce more is damaging if we don’t simultaneously provide better tools for discernment (human and technical) - but if anything, we are weakening those (e,g. by de-skill...

• Post #519135

  RE: https://wisskomm.social/@rwthaachenuniversity/116124828842725742 another German university joins Mastodon. Say hello!

• Post #468671

  the end of online anonymity? https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800