micropost
- Some (Mastodon) servers may themselves be owned by AI vendors and may use federated content to train generative models even without the use of a scraper
- Someone needs to legally prevent AI vendors from using all available data as training fodder
The annual subscription for my RSS Reader BazQux is coming up. I am comfortable with this reader, and it’s price is OK. But the reminder gave me a moment to evaluate another reader for the coming days. Since both Peter and Ton have FreshRSS as their reader-of-choice, I am curious to find out what it can do for me. I installed it locally on a Docker image, since this requires a few clicks. I can easily install the OPML file from BazQux to my local FreshRSS and am ready to go in 5 minutes. Let’s see what happens.
Bookmarked AI maximalists and the danger of social Darwinism
The “embrace AI or else” ethos conveniently ignores one crucial fact: artificial intelligence is a product of human choices and values, not some divine force of nature. We are not passive bystanders in the AI revolution, helplessly swept along by the currents of technological change. We have the power to shape the development and deployment of AI systems by our deepest-held principles and aspirations. We can create an AI future that empowers rather than subjugates humanity and creates shared prosperity rather than entrenched inequality.
This is something I still believe in. Maybe dream of. We don’t have to be innocent bystanders. We have the means and the mass to have a say in our own future. Vote, demonstrate, DIY, organize. It is not easy. We don’t all have the budgets and teams as Big Tech companies have. This sentiment was very prevalent at the Public Spaces Conference last week. We don’t have to be dependent on private companies or give everything to the state. There is a third option, which is based on public values. As Joan writes in the above article as well,
It requires a massive mobilization of political will and civic engagement to counteract the laissez-faire social Darwinism that animates so much of current AI rhetoric and policy. It requires a steadfast commitment to democratic oversight and control over robust AI systems and the unaccountable tech corporations developing them.
After finding and loving Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore I also became what Peter so pointedly describes, a card-carrying Robin Sloan fan. I dug into the prequel Ajax Penumbra. Stormed through Sourdough and loved the one-off experiments like My father the druid, my mother the tree, The Suitcase Clone and Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate.
Yesterday Sloan’s new novel arrived.
Moonbound also comes with a great minisite to explore the extraordinary world further and read some of the background in Sloan’s work. Moonbound (or should I say M∞nbound?) plays in 13777, there are dragons on the moon, talking goats and a videogame. And I am only at the first 50 pages…
I love Juhis’ post “Make ripples through time and space by writing”, how he explains how his past writing helps him in the future. Over the last years, I’ve seen the same effect on myself. I frequently search through my old blogposts to check my thoughts on certain subjects, to find extra information. This doesn’t build itself. You have to do the work. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to write online since 2000. My Frankopedia is more than those public posts, I also have thousands of notes in both my personal journal and my PKM library. Start a blog today, just as he says. Embrace the chaos of your thoughts and writing. Work with the garagedoor open. Build your mothership. You can do it.
PS: My apologies if I wrote the author’s name wrong. I am not sure if it’s Juhis or Juha-Matti?
I noticed the same thing as Ben, due to the upcoming AI-training-bootcamp from Meta on everything from images to texts, artists are leaving the silos and set up shop at Cara.
The first thing I did when I opened the app is to find out if it is somehow federated or decentralized. Unfortunately it is not. Not yet maybe? I’d love to fill my timeline with more diverse artists from various sources. There is already Pixelfed, which leans more towards photography and video. Cara is aimed at a broader scope of artforms. All without AI, with which Ben gives a great explanation how federation opens doors to unwanted and undesirable scraping of your content after all. His explanation gave me new insights, for instance
I never considered this an option. That’s crazy. It’s smart in some devious way, yet crazy. Ben’s conclusion:
That’s why in Europe we have an AI Act to start with. It’s not perfect, it’s not done, but it’s something.
PS: Yes, I tried the app and made a profile. One cannot have too many profiles…
Today, our daughter (17) leaves for her first holiday alone with her friends. She’s had holidays without us before, but always accompanied by other parents. After a difficult and tiresome period of final exams, she and her friends now deserve a much needed break. As her father, I’m beaming with pride at how independent she’s becoming. She’s made plans and decisions for herself, showing incredible maturity. But, as any parent would, I can’t help but feel some anxiety knowing she’ll be 1500 kilometers away from us.
Bits of Freedom is duidelijk niet gecharmeerd van de mogelijke nieuwe premier, Dick Schoof. Onder zijn bewind bij de NCTV werden gemeenten aangespoord om in moskeeën te infiltreren, werden burgers in het geniep in de gaten gehouden via een illegaal IT-systeem en blijkt hij niet zo gecharmeerd van encryptie in digitale communicatie. Dat in combinatie met een hoofdlijnenakkoord waar vrijwel niets over onze digitale samenleving staat, waardoor het een “vrije kwestie” wordt… samen met Bits of Freedom hou ik mijn hart vast…
Definitely something I should pay more attention to on a later date, is the fine project that is Blog of the Day. Harking back to the internet days of yore, where modem-screeching was a call to explore the Weird Wild Web…
Anyway…
Blog of The Day is a great project by Joe Crawford and James G where you can find a new, random blog in the spotlight every day. A great way to find out there’s more than five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.
Gisterenavond schoof ik aan bij Kirsten Jassies en haar Podcast over Social Media. Om een uurtje te praten over Mastodon, Indieweb, Enshittification en Public Spaces. Voor mij was veel gesneden koek, misschien was het soms té gesneden koek. Zo’n interview leert me weer dat veel concepten zoals decentralisatie en eigenaarschap over je eigen domein niet voor iedereen logische concepten zijn. We zijn door de jaren heen zo gewoon geraakt om gecentraliseerde diensten te gebruiken, dat we ons gedrag er op aanpassen. Om dan een ander verhaal te horen, ik kan me voorstellen dat het wat kan duizelen. Dus alvast bij voorbaat mijn excuses aan de toekomstige luisteraar als het je na een uur danst voor je ogen.
De podcast staat nog niet live, ik verwacht ergens binnen nu en een paar dagen er naar te kunnen linken. Sowieso zal de aflevering live gaan voor de Public Spaces Conference en de Europese Verkiezingen, omdat we beiden promoten in ons verhaal!
(Met dank aan Johan Rompelberg voor de foto en geluidsopname!)
Het boek Het Internet is Stuk van Marleen Stikker vertelt over de rol van technologie in de hedendaagse samenleving en onderzoekt de alternatieven. Van de kennis uit de jonge jaren in De Digitale Stad tot de recente decentrale alternatieven van Mastodon en Pixelfed. We hebben alles binnen handbereik om het internet te repareren, we moeten het nog wel even (willen) doen.
https://frankmeeuwsen.com/2024/05/26/het-internet-is.html
There is now AI in my terminal. I am not quite sure yet how I feel about this….
Right now I am testing some LLM’s that have trainingsets specifically for the Dutch language. I can test them offline, on my own machine in the terminal. It’s extremely easy to try and test these models. And after some digging, I found the dataset on which it is based. The Gigacorpus with Dutch forumposts, books, law-texts, Wikipedia etcetera. It’s fascinating to see how so many researchers and enthousiasts are working on AI models that are private, local and open source. What a difference with the ongoing and growing hype we see with OpenAI and Californian Big Tech…
The last days I’ve been testing Ollama, an open source app to run Large Language Models offline on your own (beefy) machine, together with the OpenWebUI frontend. See this explanation for a deeper dive in the possibilities. To have an AI fully offline, without any information you provide it leaving your own machine is very interesting to me. It is also a way to test different models, and to explore the potential to make your own model. And yes, I have already made a Deep Thought model, a simulation of the supercomputer from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And yes, it is funny.
Ik heb het hoofdlijnenakkoord met een eenvoudige prompt door ChatGPT laten omzetten in kernpunten. Met de vraag om vooral aandacht te hebben voor de digitale samenleving, mediawijsheid en digitale cultuur. Maar zo in het antwoord te zien is het de angst die regeert.
Ik ga het later zelf nog eens goed lezen en kijken hoe deze samenvatting stand houdt. Nu eerst gewoon gaan werken…
On my day off I did what I wanted to do. Build robots out of old stuff. It’s a fun way to keep myself entertained and learn kitbashing along the way. The final result will be up in a few days.
Pearl Jam is on tour again and of course there are tons of fans livestreaming every show. I’m watching them play live in Portland right now thanks to Instagram. While our cat Bowie has his morning nap Eddie Vedder belches out the lyrics to Do the Evolution.
I’m ahead, I’m a man. I’m the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
Een kleine stap brengt veel vooruit.
Een six word story, iets dat me de laatste twee weken bezighoudt. Binnen ons team van Kaliber Studio oefenen we met dit format. Eén van ons geeft op donderdag een prompt of thema, de maandag er op delen we onze Six Word Stories bij de start van ons wekelijks overleg.
Ik was daarom blij verrast om te zien dat Remco van den Akker een verwoed Six Word Story schrijver is! Ik ontmoette Remco online, omdat ik op zoek was naar een goede lamp bij mijn tweede scherm. Hij heeft me daar uitstekend mee geholpen en we raakten aan de praat over bloggen. Hij wilde al een tijd zijn blog starten, had al wel wat staan maar wist niet goed hoe verder. Ik lees zojuist dat mijn tips hem dat zetje hebben gegeven om daadwerkelijk te publiceren. Daarom speciaal voor hem deze Six Word Story! Het maakt me blij dat ik door kleine zetjes iemand vooruit kan helpen. Vooral als het gaat om online publiceren en je eigenaarschap online omarmen.
Die tips zou ik weer eens als blogpost moeten delen. Ik heb in het verleden genoeg van dat soort posts geschreven. Hier een voorbeeld. Vooruit, nog eentje dan. Ik kan er inmiddels wel een mooie verzameling van maken. Maar eerst ga ik van een zonnig weekend genieten en Remco’s Six Word Stories lezen!
It turns out my idea how to add a stylesheet to my RSS feed was right. Now I need to get it working. I think I have all the elements in place, yet somehow the feed doesn’t show any other styling or new elements I added to the template.
Maybe I should add a new post to have the underlying machines create a new feed where it will use my new template. So that’s what this post is, next to a small update.
Added this to the public micro.blog forum, but perhaps I can find help here as well: In accordance to the idea to make an RSS feed more pleasing to the eye, I want to add an XSL stylesheet to my feed. I use the Tiny Theme. What would be the best way to do this? Should I create a copy of layouts/_default/rss.xml and add the reference to the XSL stylesheet in there? And how would I create a XSL stylesheet in the directory structure? Is this also like layouts/_default/rss.xsl or could this better be static/css/rss.xsl?
Just browsing through my bookmarks and I came across Phanpy.social, a nice client for Mastodon. I like their catch-up functionality where you can filter and tweak what you want to see from your timeline at any given moment. It also has some great shortcuts to browse through the timeline by just using your keyboard. They instantly feel familiair to me.
