@danstowell@mastodon.social
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danstowell

@danstowell@mastodon.social

I'm a scientist of sound. I apply machine learning to birdsong.

Associate Professor of AI & Biodiversity, at Tilburg University and Naturalis (the Netherlands).

I also post food+drink here: https://hostux.social/@nomnomdan
and music here: https://ravenation.club/@mcldnowplaying

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

JulianOliver, to random
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

Duckduckgo down

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

Likewise. https://mastodon.social/@TechCrunch@mstdn.social/112489610437865886

KathyReid, to random
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

Sam Altman has recently suggested as an alternative to .

Apart from being egregiously out of touch, it's also a huge power move, one that I don't think people grasp.

The polarisation of society into those deriving an income from return on capital - capitalists - and those deriving an income from labour - workers - has been driven in large part by venture capital and their hunger for new asset classes.

Housing is an asset class, it's no longer social infrastructure.

Stocks are an asset class - they're no longer a way to ensure survival of the best organisations - because many companies with little revenue have high valuations.

Compute is now an asset class. It allows organisations to gain advantage, and create a moat from their competitors. Compute is an asset.

By substituting compute for money (another asset class), Altman is trying to substitute compute for currency more broadly.

And who creates currency?

Typically, the state. Who now creates currency, sorry I mean compute? The MAANGs that have taken the place of the state.

Compute is currency.

Replacing currency with compute is a form of wrestling control from the state.

As we say in Australia, yeah, nah.

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@KathyReid I see it as a different type of power move. If I may: Compute will not replace currency. Compute has no intrinsic power in society, but acts only through existing mediums of power - often, money. "Universal basic compute" would be boosting the importance of their asset class (to constitutional level!) without giving anyone a share of any power; UBI involves giving people a modicum of actual power (in the form of actual money).

danstowell, to random
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

A reminder to all you postdoc job seekers: I'm hiring! At our lovely university in Tilburg (The Netherlands), deadline 13th May, details here: https://mastodon.social/@danstowell/112173904691735997

aldroid, to random
@aldroid@mastodon.social avatar

i had a state of the art sandwich for lunch

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@aldroid innovative jam?

yaxu, to random
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

Well that's the first time I've seen the phrase "Open Source Software Supply Chain" and I think I hate it. https://openssf.org/blog/2024/03/30/xz-backdoor-cve-2024-3094/

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@yaxu Nicely put here: https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

danstowell, to machinelearning
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

PhD opportunity in France: "Machine learning on a solar-powered environmental sensor" https://audio.ls2n.fr/2024/03/27/phd-offer-machine-learning-on-solar-powered-environmental-sensors/ working with @lostanlen #machinelearning #phd

yaxu, to random
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

I kind of feel that not enough is made of how the far-right has weaponised the internet and is totally undermining democracy. Like everyone knows it but is there much being done to oppose it? At this point I think there's every possibility that reform uk will win loads of seats in the next election here, and win the election after that, just by manipulating public opinion on otherwise uncontroversial issues like active travel and human rights.

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@yaxu Generalising from my own trajectory... there's an ideological problem: a left-learning person of the Internet generation grew up on the idea that a libertarian Internet would be empowering and just. We campaigned so much on censorship, net neutrality, etc. -- Now we discover our vision was fundamentally flawed if the medium becomes important: powerful actors will corrupt the medium anyway. We don't have a recipe to fix this, that doesn't involve the Internet control we've so long opposed.

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

one thing that really rocks about code that there's very little reason that the rest of science couldn't do is just be able to point at what you did and talk about it.

like this thread where two people* just helped me understand something cool and i was able to ask questions about it mostly because of how easy it was to point at different parts of their work.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@felipe/111980315068253276

linking to a whole bigass pdf is not even close, and neither is a notebook really. the fact that papers are inert and not the thing we are actively using and thinking about is a big loss. it is extremely odd that in almost all sciences, the thing that you're working on doesn't exist in any public form until all of a sudden it appears at once, and then stays that way. after working with code and self publishing the last few years, i can't imagine going back to not being able to talk about what i'm thinking about in a concrete way being the norm.

*(who i am going to tag in the reply to this post so that in case anyone replies to this one those two don't get a bunch of notifs)

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@jonny I have a feeling that OSF.io is helpful for this, right? It doesn't break down the PDFs but still

aldroid, to random
@aldroid@mastodon.social avatar

[on the train to Zug]

me: [chanting] zug, zug-

Other passengers: zug, ZUG

Ticket inspector: [pounding her ticket machine]: ZUG, ZUG, ZUG!

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@totetmatt @aldroid https://hiptoys.de/wp-content/uploads/Zug-um-Zug-Ticket-To-Ride-285x300.png

danstowell, to random
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

Fully-funded PhD opportunity in & ! At KU Leuven, Belgium, as part of the new "Bioacoustic AI" network! Please share this: https://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/jobs/60289031?utm_medium=jobsites&utm_source=AcademicPositions @KULeuvenOpenScience

yaxu, to random
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

Relatedly say you had recorded a live set from the desk and from the room (camera mic), and wanted to mix the best of both worlds - clean sound with some room feel (including cheering at the end).. Any tips?

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@yaxu Years ago I did plenty of this. I always tried to get the two recordings somewhat phase-aligned, which might mean inverting one of them, but certainly sliding them around so some of the clear peaks reinforce themselves. (You can run cross-correlation analysis to be fancy, or slide em around in Audacity.) - And - the room sound can be surprisingly low in the mix and still give the whole feel

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

i used to be far, far more loud about "thing bad", often in that FOSS enthusiast way that many of you (over 25, anyway) are probably quite tired of

at some point i realized that while thing is, indeed, bad, being loud about that rarely has any effect, and decided that instead i will put that effort into finding ways to make thing not bad; in changing it myself, in being a force multiplier, or relying on others to be a force multiplier

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark Yes and yes! It may feel somehow shameful to be not saying "thing bad" - and also, jaded/cynical/corrupted? - but the moments where "thing bad" has a useful effect are few

aldroid, to random
@aldroid@mastodon.social avatar

i love it when this happens. there needs to be a word for the phenomenon where two unrelated thumbnails incidentally make a coherent larger image

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@aldroid longcattification

aldroid, to random
@aldroid@mastodon.social avatar

software that reminds you of a song: i'll start.

i just opened onenote for the first time in a while and immediately my brain started singing "OneNote! (onenote!) ooh, one note in heaven..."

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@aldroid Teams can only get better?

renordquist, to academia
@renordquist@akademienl.social avatar

Yikes; at my uni we have "meeting-free weeks" a few times year, in an effort to let people have more time to spend on research and teaching rather than in meetings. In previous years I did pretty well blocking off that time.

This time, my meeting-free week is one big meeting.

Waiting for the rain of meetings to stop here.... time to put up an umbrella and block of time in my calendar.


@academicchatter

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@renordquist @academicchatter We have that too - the bad news for me is that my 2 institutions have meeting-free weeks on different weeks...

erlend, (edited ) to opensource
@erlend@writing.exchange avatar

Marketplaces do not self-correct. Ecosystems do.

A marketplace is not an ecosystem. It is merely a single organism, a megafauna, whose sole purpose is to consume and grow as much as possible.

An ecosystem on the other hand has no inherent growth-imperative. The primary objective of an ecosystem is equilibrium; circular exchange of energy. A secondary objective is emergent diversity for the sake of adaptability & robustness.

Make ecosystems, not marketplaces 🌱

#OpenSource #ecology #economics

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@erlend I applaud yor spirit, but I find it strange to claim that ecosystems have "objectives" - they really don't. Sustainable systems generally have self-correcting equilibrium-directed processes, but usually as an emergent property, not an objective, right?

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

https://protomaps.com/ and PMTiles are brilliant - you can serve up a vector tile file of the entire world (100+GB) and have it display in browsers using HTTP Range header tricks to download just the subset needed for the current area

I figured out how to create a subset tile file for Half Moon Bay (just 2MB) and serve it using maplibre-gl

https://til.simonwillison.net/gis/pmtiles

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@simon Thanks, super intriguing. I'm interested by the idea to show POI markers on top. Since you wrote your own JS to load your list of POIs, am I right to assume that there's no library that would already provde a low-code way to put them on top of a static-site protomap? (Hmmm, I guess we'd need a range-request technique if we had lots of POIs)

danstowell, to ArtificialIntelligence
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

It looks like "foundation models" for music audio are here, or almost here: "LLark: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Music" https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07160 This is impressive work from Spotify, especially since it appears to be fully open-source.

peluchecero, to random Spanish
@peluchecero@mastodon.world avatar

I FEEL SO CHEATED

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@ratkins ah, do you have a link for that info, please? we've been trying to work out why it takes longer than when we first rode it

yaxu, to random
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

Dorkbot was such a lovely movement to be part of. Nice to be reminded of it randomly via an illustration in a book about typography

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@yaxu I can't thank you enough for having invited me into it

danstowell, to london
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

"A needlessly complicated but awesome bridge" has been added to my old neighbourhood! Very elegant invention: https://youtu.be/SsGEcLwjgEg

danstowell, to ArtificialIntelligence
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

Announcing fully-funded PhD positions on our new "Bioacoustic AI" project: bioacousticai.eu Apply now for a studying animal sounds (), , signals, and ! 2 open to apply now, 8 more coming soon. (Pls share)

aldroid, to random
@aldroid@mastodon.social avatar

3d printer: 1 hour remaining
brain: you should watch it till it finishes

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@aldroid Hi-5 from "Machine learning: training epoch 3 of 286"

danstowell, to random
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

Any of my chums using a Fairphone 4? Considering it https://www.fairphone.com/

danstowell, to science
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

Amazing what we do for sometimes... These researchers went out for weeks, saying the phrase "My elephant is green" to local wild , exactly 432 times to each magpie.

danstowell,
@danstowell@mastodon.social avatar

@yaxu quizzically

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