Elektrine
EN
Log in Register
Paige Chat Timeline Communities Gallery Videos Email DNS VPN Uptime Kairo
Back to Timeline
Remote

zenkat

@zenkat@sfba.social
mastodon 4.6.5
  • Open on sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

0 Followers
0 Following
39 Posts
Joined January 22, 2023

Posts

Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social in techtakes · Jul 25, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @BioMan@awful.systems
@BioMan@awful.systems @lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems There are a few things we have forgotten as a species. Our forgetting will prove disastrous. 1) The acquisition of knowledge is a *social* process. Truth does not exist is a vacuum. It is the outcome of social processes. 2) Our default mental and social processes do not automatically produce objective truth. Far from it, in fact. Our default is mob consensus. 3) Our current success rests upon the advancements of The Enlightenment, which developed social processes (like the Scientific Method) which tend, over the long run, to create local knowledge that approaches objective truth.
0
0
3
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Jul 16, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @AeonCypher@lgbtqia.space
@AeonCypher@lgbtqia.space @nurglerider@mastodon.social @silverwizard @tinker@infosec.exchange yay?
1
2
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Jul 14, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
RE: https://c.im/@psoheil/116919484770655155 LOL the entire "debate" on whether we live in a simulation is ridden with so many internal contractions and unscientific woo. It is unprovable garbage that belongs at the bottom of your philosophy professor's trash bin. The only reason anyone pays it any attention is that the tech billionaire class has realized you can buy unemployed philosophers for pennies on the dollar to fob off pet theories on a bunch of rubes. The end game, of course, is convincing the masses that #AI has become the godhead, so that they can mandate its worship and permanently cement their power in a techno-theocracy (ref: Peter Thiel).
5
0
3
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Jun 25, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @dev@discuss.systems
@dev@discuss.systems JFC on a jumped-up jalopy, is this real?
5
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 13, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @zenkat@sfba.social
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot But from a pragmatic and/or functional perspective, does it matter? We call a knowledge graph a "semantic layer", but it's also just a computer program without lived experience of the world (and a much simpler one at that). And modern multi-modal LLMs encode so much more than just textual information. They're co-trained with all the audio, video, and image information available out on the interwebs. So their embeddings don't just encode the association between "black" and "queen" and "chess", they also encode the visual representation of those pieces across a multitude of chess sets. They "know" what a black queen looks like, how it's shaped, the colors it may be. (This is how NanoBanana and other image plagiarizers are able to work). You can feed a picture into an LLM, and the LLM can trivially describe it. You can feed a piece of music in, and it will describe the key, timbre, and emotional tone. If that's not "semantics" (ie, having a referent to the real world), what is?
0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 13, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot Heh. Having spent the better part of a decade working on the Semantic Web (Metaweb's Freebase) and building what is quite literally the biggest and most comprehensive encoding of semantic knowledge in the world (Google's Knowledge Graph), I'm pretty confident I have some idea of what "semantic" means. But sure, let's debate the semantics of "semantic", as a LISPer I'm sure you'll find it fun as well. 😸 If I'm understanding your argument, you're saying that since LLMs lack any referent to the real world, they don't have true semantics, at last in the classical philosophical sense of the term. They can encode knowledge, but they can't "know" what it means because they don't experience the world, and so can't map those terms to real-world objects. If that's the case, sure ... no argument from me. I don't believe LLMs are conscious entities. They have no lived experience, and so by definition can't map embeddings to the "real world". They are simply statistical encodings of human knowledge.
0
1
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 13, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot "They do not have a semantic layer; they do not have a model of what any sequence of tokens mean" is a strawman argument. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work, and why they are able to produce such remarkable results. LLM encode tokens into high-dimensional vector embeddings that reflect human meaning. eg, The embedding for "king" and "queen" are very close in vector space. Even more interesting, mathematical operations on these vectors are semantically meaningful, eg "queen" - "king" == "woman" - "man". But the encoding of meaning goes even deeper in the "self-attention" mechanism of modern Transformer architectures. They add all of the context of the tokens of a session into a huge "KV matrix", which extends the base semantics of each token with the context of all the proceeding tokens. So the embeddings for "black king to C5" become associated with chess, etc. LLMs are statistics designed to encode semantics. It's fundamental to how they work.
0
1
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 09, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

#caturday wishes from #sanFrancisco

#graffiti by @ian_the_meow

sfba.social

SFBA.social

22
1
8
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 09, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

RE: @nocontexttrek@mastodon.social

#caturday

1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 08, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

🎶 Out on the road today
I saw a Hello Kitty sticker on a Cybertruck
Little voice inside my head said
What The Fuck
Seriously, What The Fuck? 🎶

0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 06, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

This administration is what you get when a nation makes "Fake it until you make it" its national motto.

0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 06, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

It appears that J. Edgar Boozer has poked the wrong bear. Really looking forward to discovery during the lawsuit.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/kash-patel-fbi-bourbon/687066/

Also, how fucking tacky is it that the head of the FBI has branded logo with the name "KA$H"? What a loser.

Kash Patel’s Personalized Bourbon Stash
The Atlantic

Kash Patel’s Personalized Bourbon Stash

The FBI director has been leaving an unusual calling card.

4
0
2
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 04, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @reflex@retrogaming.social
@reflex@retrogaming.social @Zebadiah_Carter@mastodon.social @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online Congratulations on embracing your irrelevance on the national stage. The fascists are cheering you on.
1
1
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 03, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online
@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online Oh, I agree fully. Even getting that rugpull in the future is better than the alternative. Just being realistic.
1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 03, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online
@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online I hears ya, and generally agree. But also ... Fetterman. Turncoat Dems ain't no help either.
0
2
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 02, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @CppGuy@infosec.space
@CppGuy @lzg "So back at the dawn of electronic computers, this brilliant but eccentric mathematician proposed a thought experiment about electronic consciousness. In the seventy years since, it's been debated and mostly rejected by philosophers. We also know how LLMs are able to produce human-sounding text mechanically. But I'm just going to ignore all that and cut/paste some dialog with my chatbot because that's what passes for scientific debate these days."
2
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 02, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is hitting pretty hard in the age of #LLM and #AI

3
0
2
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 29, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

It's 2026. Why does all on-hold musak still sound like it's being played from a cassette tape in a dusty closet in Skokie, Illinois?

0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 29, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social

My friend and I are designing fliers for a benefit show we're putting on. She put it through an #LLM to spice it up.

The result is flashy (if a tad generic), but ... the QR code no longer works. It's just garbage bits that don't encode anything.

Things is, we didn't notice until we had posted our fliers all over town. The QR code looks correct to the human eye, so we just figured the original had been copied over. But nope, it's garbage, and nobody can get tickets to our show.

This is a post about #Claude Code.

1
0
1
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 29, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @Doug_Bostrom@scicomm.xyz
@Doug_Bostrom@scicomm.xyz @tuban_muzuru@beige.party @Barbramon1@mas.to @mrundkvist@archaeo.social @grimalkina@mastodon.social Here in the US, I hang my hopes on three things: anti-gerrymandering, open primaries, and ranked choice voting. All of these make it harder for extremists to rig the game and ignore the electorate.
1
1
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 29, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @zenkat@sfba.social
@Doug_Bostrom@scicomm.xyz @tuban_muzuru@beige.party @Barbramon1@mas.to @mrundkvist@archaeo.social @grimalkina@mastodon.social "Given the self-evident fact that the Founders lived in a world without corporations or corruption, an originalist reading of the Constitution demands that we give the utmost deference to the pure and unsullied motivations of billionaires." /s but not really
1
2
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 29, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @Doug_Bostrom@scicomm.xyz
@Doug_Bostrom@scicomm.xyz @tuban_muzuru@beige.party @Barbramon1@mas.to @mrundkvist@archaeo.social @grimalkina@mastodon.social Given the Roberts Court's track record, I have trouble seeing that approach working. They'll just make up some bullshit reason to overturn it, no matter how well-crafted the law.
0
2
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 29, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @tuban_muzuru@beige.party
@tuban_muzuru@beige.party @Barbramon1@mas.to @mrundkvist@archaeo.social @Doug_Bostrom@scicomm.xyz @grimalkina@mastodon.social Hate to break it to you, but Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision, not a law. It can't be repealed. It can only be overridden with a constitutional amendment.
0
1
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 26, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @robpumphrey@mastodonapp.uk
@robpumphrey@mastodonapp.uk This article is clickbait bullshit. I am an avid cyclist who lives in San Francisco, a city filled with robotaxis. I feel MUCH safer next to a Waymo than I do by human-driven cars. Ubers and Lyfts regularly block bike lanes. They also text while driving, serve into my lane, drive erratically, and generally cannot be trusted to keep their eyes in the road. Waymos, on the other hand, have 360-degree vision, drive conservatively, respect my hand signals, and consistently follow the generally-accepted rules of the road. Studies show they are 8x safer than human drivers. Which is a low bar, when you think about it, because many humans are lousy drivers (at least some of the time).
4
1
2
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 10, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @Ailantd@mastodon.art
@Ailantd why not both?
1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Mar 17, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @schratze@todon.nl
@schratze The ones in top of Twin Peaks are ravens. Definitely ravens. The rest of your post checks out, tho. 😸
1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Feb 28, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
@david_chisnall @pieist @bruces Yeah, retrieving data over just a 40-year timespan is challenging enough ... https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-backup-of-historical-proportions/
1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Feb 28, 2026
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @bruces@mastodon.social
@bruces Sure, but what's the lifetime of the decoding apparatus? A cube a glass is just a pretty bauble without a way to decode the information within.
3
6
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Nov 28, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @bruces@mastodon.social
@bruces@mastodon.social Puts interstellar travel into perspective. Let's say I had jumped aboard Voyager when it launched. I would have been 7 years old. I would have then spent my entire life aboard that ship, only to get 0.1% of the distance to the closest star. An entire life -- adventures and loves and family and career -- would have been reduced to a sterile sameness, a monastic existence in a tiny cell. This planet is our only home. We better learn to love it.
0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Nov 20, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club
@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club Honest question: If there was some mechanism that consolidated all these duplicate requests into a single source to feed the AI machine, would you adopt it? ie, You could make magically this problem go away, but at the price of complicity and acceptance of large-scale training on your site's data.
1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Nov 20, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop
@cstross@wandering.shop Relevant: https://furry.engineer/@talisyn/115565735439777573
0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Nov 18, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop
@cstross@wandering.shop The connections to "debt-based capital financing" is ... concerning. That's how you get contagion into the real economy.
2
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Nov 18, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop
@cstross@wandering.shop
Your browser does not support the video tag.
6
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Nov 03, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange
@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange Remember, on ad-supported platforms, you are NOT the customer. You are the product that is being sold to the real customer -- the advertisers.
4
1
1
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Oct 27, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @ThePSF@fosstodon.org
@ThePSF Thank you for making the right but hard choice. ♥️
1
1
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Oct 21, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @bagder__dup_3144@mastodon.social
@bagder@mastodon.social That's awesome, congrats!
1
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Oct 17, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @FoxesInLove@social.neonpaws.digital
@FoxesInLove@social.neonpaws.digital Oh but the fox is very good. Time well spent! 🦊
0
0
0
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · May 24, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @MrLovenstein@mastodon.social
@MrLovenstein The only winning move is not to play.
5
1
1
0
Open post
zenkat
zenkat @zenkat@sfba.social · Apr 26, 2025
zenkat
@zenkat@sfba.social

SF native who loves software, science, music, nature, art, food ... and everything else this amazing corner of the planet has to offer.

sfba.social
Replying to @ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org JFC. I am so sorry. Stories like this make my blood boil.
2
0
0
0

Remote instance

sfba.social
Open on original server

Media

313k7r1n3
Elektrine

Tor hidden service

elekhj7afj4qnrr4yd3bkzslsyo5jgfxw3orgjkhlcxifueodybyiiad.onion

Platform

  • Email
  • Chat
  • Timeline
  • Communities
  • VPN
  • DNS

Company

  • About
  • Contact
  • FAQ

Legal

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • Warrant Canary
  • Lite (no JS)
  • VPN Policy
  • Source code

Support

  • support@elektrine.com
  • Report Security Issue
Mail client setup IMAP mail.elektrine.com:993 POP3 mail.elektrine.com:995 SMTP mail.elektrine.com:465
© 2026 Elektrine. All rights reserved. Server: 21:52:06 UTC