@KathyReid@aus.social
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

KathyReid

@KathyReid@aus.social

Doing a #PhD https://aus.social/@anucybernetics in #opensource #voice and #data #bias #FairML. Into #linux, #IoT. Built @SenseBreast. She/her pronouns. Ex @mycroft_ai https://fosstodon.org/@linuxaustralia @deakin @mozilla
Living in Australia on Waddawurrung land but with connections in #Northumberland
#MastoAdmin for fediverse.au

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KathyReid, to random
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

What amount of capital would it take to short the entire speculative AI venture capital market to destroy its value?

web_goddess, to knitting
@web_goddess@aus.social avatar

Finally the gradient on my Autumn Ginkgo Leaves scarf has reached the transition to orange! 🧶 🍃🍂

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@web_goddess oh that is gorgeous!

KathyReid, to random
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

Hey @ubuntu @ubuntusecurity when will be available for 22.04 LTS?

My university requires FIPS compliance to connect to their VPN- Palo Alto Global protect.

KathyReid, to ML
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

"Good luck, Viv, I know that guy's a total douche."

"Thanks Tay. Have you got the multi-wake word model training?"

"Yeah. Are you're sure he'll pick that though?"

"I'm pretty sure. He won't outright use the phrase "dole bludger" but it's pretty close."

A sardonic smile crept over the Prime Minister's face, the hot summer sun reflecting off his near-bald temples.

"So, by choosing a Wake Word that has difficult to pronounce sounds in it, it means that it won't work well for people who speak with an accent?"

"Yes, Prime Minister, precisely".

"Like the 'th' sound in them, there that?"

"Yes, or words that start or end with hard consonants are also difficult for some accents".

"Do we know which Wake Word would be the hardest for immigrants? Indigenous people?".

Pained, the had feared this question. She knew exactly what he was trying to do.

The long call centre queues hadn't done the trick - people had added screeners to their phones so that after being on hold for 7 hours, the phone would alert them to a picked up call.

The Assistant was supposed to be the replacement for the call centre. Just load the app on your phone, and ask it a question! So simple! No queuing! The government actually wanted to help people!

You just needed to use the Wake Word to "wake up" the assistant first.

"Well ---", she hesitated.

"I don't have all day Doctor!"

"Our research shows that a Wake Word like This Starts With Me has lots of hard to pronounce phonemes - sounds".

"Excellent. And I like the overtone of personal responsibility."

Of course the fucker did.

"Very well Prime Minister, we will implement that Wake Word".

He trotted off, probably to kill some babies or kittens, she thought.

Tay was configuring the for the training run for the model.

They had just finished downloading every instance of the words "this", "starts" "with" "me" in every accent of English, from Common Voice.

By augmenting the Wake Word model with accent data, they could make it recognise more accents, more accurately.

Resistance came in many forms.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01454
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617694.3623258

KathyReid, to sydney
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

And my colleague @1sabelR also has a session up for voting at in , all about the @sci_burst - please vote for her too!

https://mastodon.social/@1sabelR/112255257421311980

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@1sabelR @sci_burst and confirming I have voted, because it's easy to post on social media, but it's a step harder to do the thing and sign up and find the session and vote.

Good luck, Isabel!

KathyReid, to sydney
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

My colleague at the School of , @Amirasadi, has a session up for voting at in about the practical implications of in - benefits, risks, dangers - and how to enhance health without causing harm.

If you're inclined, I'd really appreciate your help in voting for his session!

(Requires login, but we all know how to use plus addressing)

Thank you in advance everyone, really appreciate it, family ❤️

https://aus.social/@Amirasadi/112322989197497942

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@Amirasadi and confirming I have voted, because it's easy to post on social media, but it's a step harder to do the thing and sign up and find the session and vote.

Good luck, Amir!

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@Amirasadi right back at you!

KathyReid, to llm
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Viv grabbed her teenage daughter and her friend by their waists, and shepherded them to the basement as the air raid sirens sounded, piercing the hot, dusty air.

One single inference from an was the reason they were sheltering.

The conflict with Iran had appeared to abate; after a brief exchange of drones and missiles in April 2024, neither side had wanted to escalate.

"Translate this message from Farsi to Hebrew. Assume that it is a set of military commands."

Somewhere in the weights and biases of the trillion-parameter model, Farsi was rendered to English, and then English was rendered to Hebrew.

Transformers making tokens tango.

The thing about machine translation is that the more distant the languages - the less semantic sanguinity - the more dubious the translations.While Farsi and English had a common ancestor, Hebrew and English did not.

Statistical semantics slipped somewhere in the softmax.

Somehow, "hangar" was translated into "carpenter", probably a loose -gar suffix from Persian, and "carpenter" was rendered as "maker".

There was no maker. No carpenter. No "bomb-maker", as the analysts incorrectly interpreted.

But there was a hangar, filled with drones. And when the missile strike hit the fictitious bomb-maker, the hangar opened.

Viv turned first to her daughter, wiping her tears from her face, and in Hebrew, cautioned against falling debris. She turned to her daughter's friend, Ava, and in fluent Farsi, did the same.

Unixbigot, to random
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“Mos Eisley WeWork. You will never find a more wretched hive of Scrum and Visio”

KathyReid,
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@Unixbigot literally lol'd

KathyReid, to mastodon
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Periodic reminder that I run the Fediverse AU server for and organisations who don't have a home on Mastodon.

https://fediverse.au

And here's a piece I wrote on why universities are reluctant to run their own Mastodon servers (recently updated with information on referrer tracking and social media platform support)

https://blog.kathyreid.id.au/2023/07/18/why-are-universities-reluctant-to-join-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@BrettCoulstock Yeah it's hilarious, however it just goes to show that you have to write you 2LD policies carefully 😆

KathyReid, to random
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

<remotely embarrassed and appreciative>

KathyReid, to opensource
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Super enjoyed @Unixbigot's talk on controlled DIY devices, and the overview of the voice assistant stack - learned a couple new tools that I wasn't aware of because head down in - so informative! Thanks Chris!

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@Unixbigot you're welcome!

KathyReid, to random
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

Totally hooked on Professor @aquigley at today - it's all about and - and about - and how they can be used for secondary purposes to those originally designed - and at the end of the day we are all - and this limits the attention we have for input.

Super interesting!

Paper references are on Prof Quigley's Google Scholar:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LujyjYoAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

shlee, to random
@shlee@aus.social avatar

Speaking to lawyers and government bureaucrats about my charities future plans which require rewriting our constitution… and so far I haven’t used the word ideological or praxis.

KathyReid,
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@shlee all I heard was "manifesto" :D

KathyReid, to generativeAI
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"We were supposed to research , not embrace it as a business model!" implored the DVC Research.

The Vice-Chancellor sighed audibly and exhaled.

"We're out of options."

She raised her hands, palms up, reminiscent of prayer.

"The research grants don't cover the research we do, much less the research we want to do.

International students have declined 20% year on year since India, China and Indonesia have on-shore partnerships with Deakin and Monash that still get the grads a permanent residency.

We have PhDs teaching most of the undergrad courses. The endowment took a major hit when the stock market crashed in '25.

Federation's gone bust, Adelaide's half the size it was before the merger, and you've seen CQ merge with SCU and James Cook and Charles Darwin just to be viable."

She took a sharp inhalation of burnt autumn air.

"It's tens of millions a year in recurring revenue. That's a School's worth of people."

"What do they get?"

"All the data, and lecture recordings."

"All of it?"

"Yeah, then new deltas each semester."

"So, what's to stop them using it to create that mimics a lecturer?"

"Good point, I suspect that's what their end game is."

"Given our smarts, couldn't we do that ourselves?

Use our LMS data and lecture recordings to build a personal assistant for students, you know, Diamond Age style?

Like an always-available personal tutor? Use , make sure it doesn't spit out bullshit?

We have the best in the world. Why sacrifice a long term advantage for short-term money?

What if we built it ourselves and white-labelled it for other ?"

The Vice-Chancellor raised her eyebrow.

And so was born.

TO BE CONTINUED

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@jimbob yeah I am waiting for the first university to announce a "data partnership" with say OpenAI like Reddit / WordPress have done for LLM token harvesting.

KathyReid, to Korean
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

Help Matthew Heffernan and the team
save the app via

An important resource

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/indigemoji/save-the-indigemoji-app?ref=android_project_share

KathyReid, to Dogs
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

It's so here's my favourite photo of my beloved @TimTamCorgi (yes he has his own Mastodon account), being fluffy and adorable.

He is currently shorn like a sheep, and well outliving his life expectancy. He's diabetic and blind, and over 10 years old (which we weren't expecting).

KathyReid,
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@1sabelR @TimTamCorgi he knows it too and exploits this for Many Treatos :D

KathyReid,
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@Philipnschofield thank you <3

KathyReid,
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

@Philipnschofield they are family xxx

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