Drawing on Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality', this talk will argue that an important role for the contemporary university is to resist AI. The university as a space for the pursuit of knowledge and the development of independent thought has long been undermined by neoliberal restructuring and the ambitions of the Ed Tech industry. So-called generative AI has added computational shock and awe to the assault on criticality, both inside and outside higher education, despite the gulf between the rhetoric and the actual capacities of its computational operations. Such is the synergy between AI's dissimulations and emerging political currents that AI will become embedded in all aspects of students' lives at university and afterwards, preempting and foreclosing diverse futures. It's vital to develop alternatives to AI's optimised nihilism and to sustain the joyful knowledge that nothing is inevitable and other worlds are still possible. The talk will ask what Illich has to teach us about an approach to technology that prioritises creativity and autonomy, how we can bolster academic inquiry through technical inquiry, workers' inquiry and struggle inquiry, and whether the future of higher education should enrol lecturers and students in a process of collective decomputing.

Pynchon's Sound of Music is dedicated to cataloging, exploring, and interpreting the manifold manifestations of music in Thomas Pynchon's work. An original mix of close and distant readings, this monograph em-ploys a variety of disciplines—from literary studies and musicology to philosophy, media theory, and his-tory—to explain Pynchon through music and music through Pynchon. Encyclopedic and eclectic—though never exhaustive—in its approach, Pynchon's Sound of Music discusses the author's use of instruments such as the kazoo, the harmonica, or the saxophone and embarks on close readings of the most salient and musicologically tantalizing passages. Zooming out to a bird's eye view, all his historical musical references and allusions are put into perspective to trace the trends and tendencies in the development of the oeuvre's interest in music. A treasure trove for fans and an invaluable source for future scholarship, this book includes the Pynchon Playlist, a 900+ item catalog of all musical references, and an exhaustive index of more than 700 appear-ances of musical instruments.

Unlike today's CG software, I did not use the method of modelling while looking at the three-view diagram on the screen with the mouse, but designed it once on graph paper, and then input values and other information as text in an editor. It was a daunting task when I think about it now, but it was quite interesting to see the letters and numerical values I had listed transformed into pictures. If the pluses and minuses or the digits of the numerical values were different, something ridiculous would be created. It made me laugh a lot.

Relax…it's only the climate crisis

Oilwell is a wellness app to help you embrace climate chaos, created by Edelman, Oil and Gas PR

In the context of computational text collage, I propose that “distance” emerges when the collagist acknowledges the material histories of their corpora and the collagist’s relationship with them—including the other human beings that brought these corpora into existence. Those others may be friends, mentors, ancestors, one’s earlier self, neighbors, or even perfect strangers. Regardless, the melancholy and the meaning of the collage arise only through the acknowledgment of the other’s absence.

Creators of large language models are very eager to conceal this distance. They do so by flattening the materiality of their corpora, thereby effectively severing the text from its own history and rendering uniform what had been equivocal—like bulldozing a graveyard. Yet the distance and the melancholy persist, despite this attempt at hiding it away. When I’m writing with a large language model, I am all too aware of the ghosts and strangers whose voices I’m speaking with. The keyboard beneath my fingers hums with frustrated mourning.

Eno is a data language for all people. Its simple structure welcomes a wide audience, both in regards to cultural background as well as technical ability. Deliberate design choices such as a flat hierarchy and the absence of types at the language level make it one of the easiest data languages to grasp and author content in.

comme ça je le retrouve plus facilement la prochaine fois que je me demande "mais comment ça s'appelait encore et est-ce qu'il y a des épisodes en ligne?"

There are various cases where you would want to publish content from zim to the web. Typically you edit you content in zim, and than convert it to HTML to publish it when you feel you are done

desktop cms for static sites

Maybe it’s useful to know that Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.

I made a list specifically to share in another sub about why people should not use AI for anything related to summarizing information.

People disproportionately focus on how it steals artists' work, which yes, is bad, but it overlooks one of AI's other serious problems: accuracy.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

This app uses Signal's servers, making it possible for Waltz to send end-to-end encrypted messages to normal Signal users, like Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic, for example. However unlike the Signal end of the encrypted conversation, the TM SGNL end automatically archives a copy of the plaintext messages (even ones with disappearing messages) somewhere else that may or may not be secure.

Many of the arguments about LLMs seem to involve us talking past one another. Insistence that they are “just autocomplete” is demonstrably true, but often remains too abstract to persuade people. I have tried to be less abstract here. Meanwhile, most proponents at some point break down in frustration and say “just try it and you’ll see!” Their argument is phenomenological: Doesn’t it feel smart and capable? Don’t you feel like you’re getting value out of it? Working faster? This, too, is demonstrably true. Many people feel that way. The problem comes when we mistake the feeling of using a chatbot (writing this input and getting that output feels like talking to an intelligent person) for the actual inner mechanisms of it (next word prediction). As with calculators, many different internal mechanisms can produce indistinguishable output.

Infinite* Slop

Infinite* Slop is an enterprise-ready high-performance slop generation solution, designed to waste resources of shitty web crawlers and potentially ruin training sets of unethically-sourced AI projects.

I'm too old-fashioned to use Markov chains so this just uses the good old template-based random string generation approach from the 90's.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being embedded into everyday life by powerful actors, primarily motivated by profit. Police, border and criminal justice agencies are also looking to take advantage of the new powers AI offers for “security” policies, at both national and EU level. The EU is creating new infrastructure, away from the public eye, to allow the swift development and deployment of “security AI.” This will also reinforce the existing discrimination, violence and harm caused by policing, border and criminal justice policies. Exposing and understanding this emerging security AI complex is the first step to challenging it.

L'interface s'organise autour de trois fonctions principales : une fonction de création de médias (la capture), qui permet d'enregistrer des médias (image, vidéo, animation, son ou svg) ; une fonction d'organisation des contenus créés ou importés (la bibliothèque de médias, organisée en dossier et projets) et une fonction d'éditorialisation des contenus(la marmite qui propose plusieurs recettes, càd différents formats éditoriaux : document, slides, vidéos...). Une fonction de chat est venue compléter ces trois fonctions principales.

Welcome to Posty Posts: It's the Postiest!™

Using this tool, you can extract your Mastodon archive and create a static site that can be hosted anywhere.

Once you press "Upload and Extract" you'll be given a chance to view your archive and decide if you want to turn it into a static HTML website or not.

After generating the static site, you'll be given an opportunity to download as well as delete all of your data.

https://codeberg.org/oliphant/posty

System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS

The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.

The idea of an information hazard overlaps with the idea of a harmful trend or social contagion. In it, knowledge of certain trends can result in their replication, such as in the case of certain viral trends that can be physically dangerous to those who attempt them.

Circular Microcomputers

The embedded computers powered by repurposed smartphone components.

When you can't host it yourself

Hosting your own social media can be liberating but also painstaking and costly. With the Fedi Monster we share expenses, servers, skills, and you can enjoy your instance that we keep running smoothly. The monster's core idea is to enable you to carve a space for yourselves in a complex and vast network; without relying on a predatory corporation.

We offer many options and a very flexible service, trying to strike a balance in community customization and security and cost for all of us. Contact us if you have specific needs, and we'll see what we can do.
Who and What we are

An anarcho-communist collective of fediverse instance administrators, server caretakers, programmers and other workers, dedicated to providing a reliable, affordable, and ethical hosting service to many kinds of online communities.

We will not host instances and communities that promote or support capitalism, fascism, classism, imperialism, war and militarism, nazism, white supremacy, religious supremacism, police states, are directly affiliated with states, or more at our discretion. and the monster's pronouns are it/them.

A tool for exporting data from and importing data to Fediverse instances. Requires that they support the Mastodon API as implemented by GoToSocial. Intended for use with GoToSocial, but should work with other Mastodon-like instances, including Mastodon.