Deploy your website with a single HTTP request or a git push.

The git-pages static site server takes care of caching, compression, redirects and headers, forge updates, and more.

a small JavaScript library that grows letters from their bones. Give it a word and any font, and it swells, packs, blocks and folds the letters into one coherent hand as clean(ish) SVG.

This post offers up a close reading of a section of the Stochastic Parrots paper, to make sense of an increasingly contested analogy. The reading is my interpretation, which draws from the text in the 2021 paper by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and (S)Mitchell. This year, Bender and Mitchell have both written updates; I cite Mitchell's often and you should probably read that before this.

I admit I might not understand what a stochastic parrot is meant to be, or rather, what you imagine it to be. My version is basically, "systems that produce fluent text with no informed intention and operate without accountability," though this is likely a narrower (or more permissive) claim than the original.

Nonetheless, I have real respect for the authors, and the paper, even as I grow more disoriented about what's true about its claims, compared to what people claim about its claims.

So I'll unpack this by examining, line by line, the section related to the term and how I interpret it, humanities-style. This is not as an explainer, but an informed reader trying to make sense of a text. I've written the section from pages 616-617 out, sentence by sentence below, in bold. This is the core of the definition, though there is some interesting precursory text ahead of it.

Manifestes utopiques, textes programmatiques, déclarations tonitruantes ou pronun­ciamientos souterrains… Le web regorge de textes sur ce qu’il est ou devrait être.

Nous, membres de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche (ESR) et de l’éducation nationale (EN), déclarons adopter une posture d’objection de conscience face au déploiement des technologies d’IA générative[1] (IAg) dans nos institutions.

L’objection de conscience désigne le refus individuel, mais aussi collectif en tant qu’il est publiquement partagé, de prendre part à une activité que l’on perçoit comme incompatible avec des valeurs fondamentales.

un site qui donne des conseils juridiques et des rappels légaux sur l’usage du numérique, dans l’optique de protéger ses utilisateurices dans des situations d’urgence, de stress, comme nous pouvons les vivre au moment de grèves ou de manifestations.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Scrubjay is a weird website builder that lets you cobble together web elements, images, links, text fragments, etc into a series of nested rooms. Handcoded in HTML, CSS and Javascript and running locally, it's usable for research, collection, game-building, website construction or simply to hold little fragments of digital things, in the same way that you hold a pebble in your palm on a walk.

One may have wondered how well a normal CD ROM can hold up to extreme situations. Often it may be a question as to whether or not it would be a good idea to, say, put a CD in the microwave, or take in the shower. While common sense answers most of these questions, it is always a good idea to find out for sure by running scientific experiments. This series of experiments was carried out to put an end to the uncertainty concerning the durability of CD ROM's.

The test subjects consisted of a small collection of CD ROM's.  Half were randomly chosen to be control CD's (it is a coincidence that all of the experimental CD's were Microsoft Internet Explorer CD ROM's).  No placebo CD's were needed as CD's Are not alive, thus do not exhibit the placebo effect (although this has not yet been tested). 

Bienvenue sur notre site !

Nous sommes Bevelgacom, un FAI à but non lucratif axé sur la connexion des générations. En tant que FAI, nous nous concentrons sur la préservation des technologies "rétro". Avec notre focus sur les réseaux Dial-Up et GSM, nous fournissons une connectivité pour les générations à venir et passées.

Tous nos services sont GRATUITS à utiliser ! Nous acceptons cependant les dons pour payer nos lignes téléphoniques.

En bref, une convivialité maximale pour une plus grande efficacité, tout cela vous donne l'opportunité de passer un moment agréable et constructif en notre compagnie...

Ce site web évolue constamment et est toujours en cours de développement, mais n'hésitez pas à nous envoyer toutes remarques ou commentaires que vous pourriez avoir. Notre souci est toujours de vous satisfaire.

Vous êtes un utilisateur mobile !
Notre passerelle WAP est maintenant disponible. Vous pouvez entrer 206.83.40.166 dans vos paramètres GPRS/CSD pour vous connecter au World Wide Web
Découvrez l'incroyable génialité de notre portail WAP sur wap.bevelgacom.be localement situé au cœur de l'Europe. Profitez des informations en direct en déplacement, ou profitez du contenu multimédia le plus récent.

Recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with higher short-term risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and all-cause mortality than recorded BNT162b2 vaccination in adolescents and young adults. These findings support a favorable benefit-risk profile for BNT162b2 vaccination relative to documented infection, although the observational all-cause mortality comparison should be interpreted as descriptive rather than causal.

Pagefind is a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your users’ bandwidth as possible, and without hosting any infrastructure.

Pagefind works with any static HTML output. All static site generators and website frameworks are supported, as long as the built HTML contains the content of the website.

After indexing, Pagefind adds a static search bundle to your built files, which exposes a JavaScript search API that can be used anywhere on your site. Pagefind also provides prebuilt UI components that can be used with no configuration.

The goal of Pagefind is that websites with tens of thousands of pages should be searchable by someone in their browser, while consuming as little bandwidth as possible. Pagefind’s search index is split into chunks, so that searching in the browser only ever needs to load a small subset of the search index. Pagefind can run a full-text search on a 10,000 page site with a total network payload under 300kB, including the Pagefind library itself. For most sites, this will be closer to 100kB.

Instead of OpenAI being prosecuted for creating malware that hacked another company, press releases, news outlets, media personalities, and lawmakers refer to “rogue models” as if they acted on their own. Instead of researchers being questioned about their companies’ habit of plagiarizing academics’ work or using customer data to train models without consent, the public’s imagination is redirected to fears about what the future might hold upon the arrival of fictional superintelligent machines.

The AI industry has even suggested that popular, bipartisan anti-data-center activism is a “distraction” from attempts to regulate the impending, scary, “superhuman” machines these companies are building. According to the AI industry, we should be more worried about a fictional machine god than about the climate catastrophe that these data centers exacerbate, the asthma suffered by those living near them, the rising electricity bills of the public subsidizing them, or the water that is redirected to cooling them.

Estimates found workers already waste 3.4 hours a month cleaning up the AI schlock, amounting to a monthly loss of $8.1 million for a workplace with 10,000 employees.

Isn't it odd how no AI CEOs called for pacing the frontier when the internet flooded with deep fakes and revenge porn? Nor did they call for it when people got hurt or killed because an AI chatbot gave them misinformation, encouraged selfharm, or induced delusional behavior — isn't that odd?? And isn't it odd that militaries using AI to select civilian targets wasn't the cue to pace the frontier??? But the CEOs have IPOs coming up, and suddenly they all agree that now's the time to pace the frontier! ISN'T THAT ODD????

Though technically an independent third party, the METR report on the Hugging Face hack uses intentional language throughout, reporting on what the agents “believed” 21 times — add “think” or “thought” and you get more than 75 appearances. A report of this type should address the underlying mechanisms, not the gloss: it was a product of text accumulating over time, pointing toward an action, motivated by the conditions of the task and its evaluation. Was the behavior of these agents “deceptive?” That is harder to argue when the text was left legible to anyone who looked. Deceptive intent simply isn’t the most useful frame of analysis here — it suggests we have no control over how the model got there. But it got there through language production. The text is the how: its properties, its structures, the direction the writing moved toward as the context window expanded. And yes, engineers are grappling with it, too.

If policy serves the radical intentionalist stance, it will enshrine a void of human accountability into law that could ultimately reward companies for experimenting with irresponsible deployments. Already, it seems OpenAI will face no specific consequences for the attacks on other websites. Enshrine that as policy, and it sets a precedent that limits future administrations’ abilities to levy fines, controls and bans on companies whose models engage in risky or socially harmful behavior.

The “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They are redirecting their own agency to the thing they are building. To take their story seriously, we would have to believe that the entire industry is captive to an absurd scenario of mind abduction:

“We cannot stop gathering data, cleaning it, pre-training models, calibrating the results of that pre-training to goals that we ourselves have researched and optimized toward, training and then post-training. We are doing all of that but nothing can intervene, we are addicts, in thrall to something greater than ourselves. We beg someone to save us.”

What can make sense of that? There is something in control here, but it isn't the technology. It is the organizing idea of “intelligence,” which is the wrong word for many reasons, but it operates as an ideology. They know this isn't true, they must act as if it is true to continue their work.

Song of the grid est un générateur de musique algorithmique développée par Sarah Garcin, inspiré des travaux de Peter Langston et de son article Six Techniques for Algorithmic Music Composition (1989). Les rythmes euclidiens sont basés sur The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms de Godfried Toussaint (2005).

A synthetic Israel-funded think tank has published more than 100 articles since it launched less than a month ago. First spotted by Politico, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy is run by the American advertising firm Piro Inc, paid for by Israel, and appears designed to generate content for LLMs that are continually scanning the internet to inform their responses, with the goal of tweaking chatbot answers in favor of Israel.

Every few days, the Hanover Institute publishes around a dozen articles related to Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine. Every article’s headline has a question. The articles have no byline, often contain graphs, and cite real sources but do not link to them.

a guy extracted all of the 3d models from Katamari Damacy and put it up on a site:

hey disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.