Xiaohongshu was already my first stop when holiday planning, I really like their Dots AI companion specifically for this task. It seems really good at surfacing relevant UGC for travel planning

#China #SocialMedia #AI

Abstaining from AI use will earn you a pat on the back... and that's about it. Good job, buddy.

- Frontier labs aren't demand-financed by marginal chat users, they're financed by capital markets betting on enterprise substitution (Anthropic had its first "positive" quarter when switching Enterprise plans to API rates)
- this card probably indicts data centre and training capex, and local models are the only true threat to data centre capex, simply due to token economics of these models
- Coding agents, imo, are atm a golden chance to massively provide open solutions to previously proprietary tech (think phone modem binary blob reverse engineering, ...).

@jwz https://mastodon.social/@jwz/117106720849031751

I'm feeling incredibly grateful to live in a time when frontier AI research is published in the open, in English, and in detail. Just finished going through the Kimi K3 paper.

People on Xiaohongshu are selling B-roll of them eating so that influencers with green screens can advertise their products.

The girls are live, the guys are videos on loop

#China #SocialMedia #Xiaohongshu

Can't wait to be hunted by the Palantir FPV Drone that was battle tested in Bakhmut because I escaped my data labelling pod to search for non-synthetic food in the wastelands. My body will be mulched up and used as biofuel for the GPT-7 data centre

Romanian conspiracy theorists believe it's likelier that Germany and Austria stole water from the Danube than that climate change caused historic droughts in Europe

#ClimateChange #Heatwave #EUPol

I have to say #Mastodon is way more European than Bluesky

How does Mastodon feel about using Mistral's new Shieldstral for moderation at scale?

Yes, technically it's "he who shall not be named", but it's a) European in origin, b) small enough footprint, c) with a noble goal

https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/

#FediTips #Fediverse #Meta #Mastodon

> Brussels is considering a new approach to Russia sanctions after Greece held up a large package of EU measures to protect a shipping tycoon. European officials are looking at ways to speed up approval of more targeted financial restrictions so that member states have less opportunity to use vetoes in negotiations...

So far:

- US got the EU to cut its public services in favour of militarism
- Russia got the EU to abandon it's unanimity value in favour of impotent sanctions

Fracturing the EU and its spirit has been achieved without firing a single bullet, and by getting the Euros to do it to themselves.

#EU #EUPol #Russia #Ukraine

https://www.ft.com/content/33c2e340-8964-4124-b0d7-21851a5d8dcb

Morning, today we're looking at #MechanisticInterpretability , a subfield of AI Safety that attempts to understand the inner workings of artificial intelligence by analysing concrete structures, algorithms and circuits.

Why do we even need to do this? Because the hope of understanding neurons as being features died on polysemanticity -- models represent more features than dimensions by assigning them to an overcomplete set of non-orthogonal directions (i.e. you can't hope that concepts can be broken down into linear combinations of features).

This isn't a new field, people have been projecting intermediate GPT layers through the final layer activation and looking at the top-k most likely next tokens since GPT-2.

And that's how we arrive at the Natural Language Autoencoder -- an autoencoder over residual-stream activations where the bottleneck is natural language text instead of a sparse vector.

Nothing in the training objective requires the verbalisation bottleneck to be readable, faithful, or even semantically related to the intermediate layer being investigated, so while the training algorithm is typical of autoencoders, two things are distinct here:

1) both parts of the autoencoder (here the activation-verbaliser, AV, and the activation-reconstructor, AR) undergo special SFT to ensure the verbaliser and reconstructor can generate and read natural language from intermediate layer activations
2) a KL-divergence penalty is baked into the objective to make sure that, during joint training, the NLA doesn't diverge from the SFT version

A side-product of this training is that we can take the current verbalisation and "desired" verbalisation and compute steering vectors from their difference.

Surprisingly, Anthropic didn't find any evidence that the NLA was engaging in steganography to smuggle information to avoid human detection, but it did find that NLAs tend to confabulate a lot.

#AIResearch #Transformers #TransformerCircuits #Anthropic #NLA

Spain reports that 50,000 asylum seekers illegally crossed the border into Ceuta yesterday.

Ceuta's population is 83,000...

Even if you have the noblest of hearts, you have to recognise this isn't sustainable, and that in the race to take care of everyone, the systems of care we currently have will end up serving no one due to sheer overwhelm

#Spain #Ceuta #EUPol

Now that #Fauci is in the spotlight, reminder that Ursula von der Leyen personally negotiated a massive #COVID vaccine contract with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla (the biggest vaccine procurement in EU history), entirely through private text messages and phone calls.

When requesting access to the texts, under the EU transparency procedure, the Commission responded that it _had_ seen the texts, but that it _allowed_ them to vanish.

Basically, when the Commission's handling of the texts constituted maladministration, their reply was effectively that maladministration is their administrative style, and that "texts got lost, such is life".

They've learned nothing because the structure doesn't require them to learn: there is no electorate that can throw von der Leyen out, no parliament that selected her, and no mechanism by which the ruled can punish the rulers for this.

The same Commission is trying to shove Chat Control down your throat btw

#VDL #EUPol #ChatControl

The levels of self-absorption within all ranks of EU institutions can be simply summed up using Juncker's curse:

"We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it."

Members of the EU Council, Commission and Parliament all believe that they're moral reformists that are selflessly saving the EU from disaster, when instead are taking corporate bait hook, line, and sinker.

Metsola's actions this week are a testament to this.

#EU #EUPol #ChatControl #Privacy #DigitalRights

Gonna take a break from the fediverse for a bit. After the n-th person coming into my replies to argue with me and then reply-block me, I've reached my limit.

We need a gender inclusive way of taking the piss out of middle aged people in Lycra. MAPIL just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way MAMIL does

#BikeTooter

Is it just me or does #BikeTooter lean more #gravel or #mtb than pure road?

Where are the #RoadBike riders?

There's an insane number of IMSI catchers in Taipei. I get GrapheneOS pings almost daily.

Anyone know what this is about? News mentions SIM card fraud.

#Stingray #IMSI #privacy #cybersec #infosec

> Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one.

Back in the day, we'd run posts that were meant to be anonymous through a English-French-English machine translation pipeline.

Today, if you need anonymity, you should use a local LLM to make your writing indistinguishable to stylometry attacks.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/i-can-never-talk-to-an-ai-anonymously

#Privacy #Anonymity #MassOnlineDeanonymization

Mastodon doesn't suffer from a purity testing culture /s

@aburka https://hachyderm.io/@aburka/116491352327476996

Sunrise MAAPACCINO. Everyone said these guys are fast, yeah, they are.

#BikeTooter #MAAP #Cycling #RoadBike