FeedLand likes for davewiner

Ultimate Spider-Man Trailer Shows a Brand New Day for Peter Parker

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 22:08:13 GMT

The original incarnation of Marvel Comics’ Ultimate Universe lived (and basically died) on Ultimate Spider-Man. Brian Michael Bendis’ run on that book with a number of artists including Mark Bagley, Sara Pichelli and plenty more was so consistent that it remained a bright spot among the larger messiness of its home…

Bobi, the world's oldest dog ever, dies aged 31

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 13:06:26 GMT

The Guinness World Record holder, from Portugal, lived to be 31 years and 165 days old.

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 23:59:59 GMT

Woman Having Her Hair Combed, 1895 #edgardegas #impressionism

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:33:35 GMT

"[Cassidy Hutchinson] writes, Mr. Meadows burned so many documents in his fireplace in the final days of the Trump presidency that his wife complained to Ms. Hutchinson about how expensive it had become to dry-clean the “bonfire” aroma from his suits."

The First Thing to Tell an LLM

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 17:54:09 GMT

In a recent interview on The New Stack Makers, recognized technologist Adrian Cockcroft joined us for a conversation about large language models (LLM) and how fine-tuning them starts with varying forms of prompt engineering.

Suppose you are going to get programming advice from an LLM. In that case, you first tell it: “I want good programming advice,” said Cockcroft, known for his work as a cloud architect at Netflix and later Amazon Web Services. Cockcroft now enjoys his time as a semi-retired technologist.

The model then looks in its model for all the programs it has seen. “And you might say, ‘I want you to program, like you’re an expert programmer in this system, or you know, write me Java code, like your James Gosling, or something like that,” Cockcroft said. “And maybe it goes and finds code that he wrote or something like that.”

Which leads to how prompt engineering applies.

“So there are these things you can do with prompt engineering, where you’re setting up the conversation to try and bias the AI into a space where you want it to go,” Cockcroft said. “And these prompts are getting increasingly sophisticated with plugins and things where you’re building quite a lot of information, which is basically loaded into the model before you start using it.”

Cockcroft said that between prompt engineering and the training comes the idea of fine-tuning the model where it’s potentially too big to put in a prompt.

“For example, I’ve heard of people sort of signing up with OpenAI with an account at a corporate level, but the first thing they do is they feed all of their corporate information into it,” Cockcroft said.

Wiki pages, SharePoint documents, the corporate website — everything gets added.

“And it sort of sets up so that the AI model now understands your terminology, your domain, how to do things that your company, your internal processes,” Cockcroft said. “You’re effectively training the model, you’re fine-tuning the model to be somebody that understands your company. And then you go and start building something on top of that, or you’re asking questions or building whatever assistance you want. But it’s kind of got this extra level of information, where you’ve fine-tuned it.”

ChatGPT does some things well, but it’s more like the tasks that you can give it, Cockcroft said.

Cockcroft recently did some data analysis and used R, the programming language. He started asking about syntax, and ChatGPT began writing the code.

The demand for vector databases reflects the more resounding need to get better information from the LLMs, Cockcroft said. And that is pretty much why we can expect vectors, which have “a whole load of weights which embed the meanings of the words,” to serve as a store for doing fuzzy matches against the numbers that represent the vectors, Cockcroft said.

The post The First Thing to Tell an LLM appeared first on The New Stack.

Final decision on the Twitter API

Wed, 03 May 2023 22:55:46 GMT

Not content with banning native third-party apps, Twitter has continued to cripple their API and move to paid plans for very basic access. I was committed to support Twitter cross-posting as long as possible because there are still Micro.blog customers who want to keep a foot in the Twitter world. But we knew it couldn’t last forever.

July 15th will be our last day to support cross-posting blog posts to Twitter. Even though Twitter has been effectively dead to me since I stopped tweeting in 2012, I’m a little sad to finally have to cut the platform off.

I picked July 15th to give people a couple months to wind down their use of Twitter. We now have to pay Twitter for API access, and that is the longest I can justify doing so.

It’s all another reminder that centralized platforms with closed APIs can’t last. While it’s easy to blame Elon Musk, the writing has been on the wall for a decade.

For more of the Twitter history that brought us to this point, see the chapter in my book called Leaving Twitter. Newly updated for Elon.

So, what’s next?

Updating the Micro.blog web site to remove mention of Twitter. Luckily, we can now mention Bluesky instead! (When one door closes, another opens.) Emailing all Micro.blog customers who currently have Twitter cross-posting enabled, letting them know that the feature will go away on July 15th. Hiding the Twitter cross-posting option for new Micro.blog users. Later, shutting off the feature and removing all the Twitter code. At least we can do a little code cleanup because of this.

End of an era. Seeya on the open web.

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 17:32:39 GMT

I just simplified my life by starting to #unsubscribe to all newsletters that want me to continue reading only by subscribing.

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 14:47:08 GMT

Another good thing about FeedLand. I find a feed, come to FeedLand and add it. I see others who have added that feed too, I look at their feeds.

Extra Bonus Quote of the Day

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:52:28 GMT

“If we really want to keep our children safe, we need to spend less time banning books and more time stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.”

— Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), on Twitter.

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 08:57:59 GMT

Logging off, logging in, updating my settings, logging off, logging in ... and it looks like Dave fixed the Feedland settings issue. Awesome, and thanks!

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 17:04:41 GMT

I've been on a bunch of road trips lately and one thing I've learned is to always book a hotel room on your phone before you walk in, even if it's in the parking lot of the hotel.

Walk into a random Hampton Inn at midnight to get a room and you often have to wake someone up to work the front desk, get buzzed in, they ask a million questions, and takes about 10min to get you a room key.

Or walk into a random hotel with a 5min old online reservation and get your key in 1min.

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:57:45 GMT

I just fixed a problem in the RSS feed for Likes.

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:54:34 GMT

I gave a brief tour of FeedLand and Drummer to a relative last weekend and he mentioned how much more integrated the various features were compared to the software projects he's accustomed to working on as part of corporate teams.

I took this picture

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 02:41:04 GMT

Central Park, March 20, 2016.

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:58:14 GMT

Coming back after about a month of C-19 woes and family duties in other towns across the middle of the country, I am getting back to FeedLand, happy to see that after the shuffling of the software during the transition away from Twitter verification things look familiar and functional. I'll keep my eyes open for any other transitional hitches and report if I find one.

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:25:21 GMT

I hadn’t been following Hachette v. Internet Archive closely, so spent a few minutes listening to Brewster Kahle’s statement. It seems part of a larger issue of whether we can own digital content or will have to rent it. The Internet Archive is such a force for good, glad they’re fighting this.

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:24:30 GMT

"This has all happened before, and it will all happen again..."

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 16:29:25 GMT

Friendica lets us add RSS feeds as contacts and autopost into our timeline (with some queuing which i don't understand). I added the feed to my notes here and the post came through!

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 16:29:23 GMT

The reality of social media is that very few of us find engagement unless we join a cause or help run a narrative.

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 16:04:56 GMT

A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it's automatically added to two RSS feeds -- one for your likes, and one for the likes of all users on your FeedLand.It's basically a single-gesture linkblog. There's a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn't possibly be simpler. Of course since they're standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader.

Sometimes, Consensus Can Be Ruinous

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 14:51:52 GMT

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was the most consequential political event of the past two decades. But it doesn’t feel that way. It has the faint whiff of youthful indiscretion, an episode that many Americans would rather forget. I was 19. The tenor of that time in American life—after the September 11 attacks—seems ever more foreign to me. Instead of the chaotic information overload of the current moment, in which consensus appears impossible, the early 2000s were a time of conformity, authority, and security. When I think about why even the mere idea of consensus makes me anxious to this day, I keep coming back to what happened 20 long years ago. Consensus can be nice, but it can also be dangerous.

Once American ground troops were engaged in Afghanistan, risking their lives fighting the Taliban, any criticism of the war effort invited charges of disloyalty. That was the “good war.” I was a freshman in college on 9/11. Just a year later, in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, I became active in the anti-war movement. Grappling with my own identity as an American Muslim in an environment rife with Islamophobia, I wanted somewhere to belong—a safe space, so to speak. And I found it. For the first and probably last time, I organized a die-in. I also helped organize a “tent-in” with a group of friends and fellow travelers, a motley crew of socialists, anarchists, and ordinary students who found themselves stupefied by a war that seemed self-evidently absurd. In the weeks before the war began—and then for the entire duration of the invasion—we protested by setting up camp in Georgetown University’s free-expression zone, the ironically named Red Square. In practice, at least one person was expected to sleep in the tents on any given night, which translated into a continuous presence of more than 2,000 hours.

[David Frum: The Iraq War reconsidered]

We failed. Obviously, we were just college students, naive and not yet cynical. But there were many of us. On February 15 and 16, 2003—a weekend of coordinated anti-war demonstrations around the globe—more than 6 million people filled the streets in hundreds of cities. As Patrick Tyler put it in The New York Times, “There may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” It was an odd thought, that the people, united, could stop a terrible thing from happening.

When President George W. Bush infamously declared in May 2003—less than a month after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces—that the mission had been accomplished, an extended period of confusion and reckoning set in. After the apathy and triumphalism ushered in by the Cold War’s end, mass mobilization was back. But what was the point of people power if government officials couldn’t be bothered to listen? They had already decided. A relatively small number of so-called neoconservatives, many of whom had run in the same rarified intellectual circles, were committed to a marriage of overwhelming power and maximalist purpose. As the Lebanese American scholar Fouad Ajami described it:

A reforming zeal must thus be loaded up with the baggage and the gear. No great apologies ought to be made for America’s “unilateralism.” The region can live with and use that unilateralism. The considerable power now at America’s disposal can be used by one and all as a justification for going along with American goals.

Like most utopians, they may have been well-meaning in their fervor. A true believer himself, George W. Bush had admirable views about democracy’s universality, for which he deserves some credit. He excoriated critics for suggesting that Arabs weren’t ready for democracy; this was nothing more than “cultural condescension,” he said. He was right. In a November 2003 speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, he asked, “Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it.”

But the stated justification for invading Iraq was not that Saddam Hussein was a dictator. After all, America’s closest allies in the region were dictatorships too. As senior administration officials told the United Nations and Congress, military action was necessary because Saddam’s regime had weapons of mass destruction and was therefore a mortal threat to the Middle East. Others who might have otherwise been skeptical about the indiscriminate use of American power—including prominent Democrats such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton—fell in line. In October 2002, 39 percent of Democrats in the House supported the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. Remarkably, 58 percent of Senate Democrats voted in favor. It was the worst and perhaps most tragic example of “bipartisan cooperation” in recent American history.

Their hearts weren’t necessarily in it, but Senate Democrats were an ambitious bunch. For anyone who aspired to higher office, being on the wrong side of the right war was a risky proposition. With the wounds of September 11 still smarting, vengeance was in the air. In mainstream media outlets, passionate anti-war voices—before the war, rather than after—were difficult to find. I mostly got my daily dose of anti-war news and coverage from small leftist websites. I even wrote for one such publication: It was (and still is) called CounterPunch, a wholly appropriate description of both the futility and pluckiness of the endeavor.

A sizable minority of Americans had their reservations about this new culture of patriotic deference, but they were on the defensive from the very start. The post-9/11 consensus was a tragedy upon a tragedy, exemplified by a 98–1 Senate vote for the PATRIOT Act just 44 days after the attacks. “National unity” is usually an aspiration not met. Here, it seemed within reach.

[Melvyn P. Leffler: What really took America to war in Iraq]

This was bipartisan cooperation at its best but also its worst. At more than 130 pages, the PATRIOT Act—a suitably Orwellian acronym for “Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”—ushered in a perpetually overreaching national-security state and a litany of civil-rights abuses that disproportionately affected Arab and Muslim communities. As the ACLU described it, “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.” Under an expansive surveillance regime, the FBI issued about 192,000 “national security letters” from 2003 to 2006, which allowed it to access the private information of American citizens without a warrant.

This is what unity, consensus, and cooperation made possible in the fog of war. For those Americans today who lament polarization and long for a return to the politics of consensus, be careful what you wish for. In 2001, within a sprawling, unwieldy democracy of 285 million people, what could “consensus” even mean? As the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe has written, “All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion.” The post-9/11 consensus was artificial, guided and reinforced from above. It was also fleeting. When the Bush administration’s hold on the public imagination weakened, Americans returned to their natural boisterousness and distrust of politicians and institutions alike. This is a good thing.

When it comes to wars of choice—which is to say, most wars—Americans should disagree among themselves, and they should express those disagreements forcefully. A democratized news landscape, like democracy itself, can be messy. But that messiness is essential. A certain kind of chaos is precisely what allows for a vibrant exchange of contending and conflicting views. In a democracy, the majority still rules. At the same time, embattled minorities need avenues—and encouragement—to register their dissent, in the hope of convincing enough of their fellow citizens that they are right. Because sometimes they are. And the Iraq War was one of those times.

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 13:18:36 GMT

I need to click the link in my mail for logging into Feedland every time. May be it is by design but it makes me feel awkward that i am doing it in a way that is inconvenient for Feedland

Jalen Brunson’s return sparks Knicks in telling win over West-leading Nuggets

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 20:47:49 GMT

This was a 116-110 victory over Denver that reveals something about the mettle of the Knicks, with just 10 games left before playoff basketball.

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 20:43:17 GMT

A fair number of the tabs on my browser right now open to sites or tools decently or well-designed for reading and/or writing. Not as easy to find sites or tools that are well designed for helping people affiliate with each other as active citizens. Partially, I suspect, it's the design of some of the tools or sites, and partially, though, it's the expectations and work flow I/we bring to them. If my own habits are at all typical, there's a lot of the consumer and not so much of the active citizen in many web-oriented folks.