jonny

jonny, 6 months ago to random

Hey any journalists on here plz turn your public post indexing on, because most of you haven't and thats why people looking for public information cant find you.

Go to settings > public profile > privacy and reach, select "include public posts in search results"

Not all the fedi wants to be a public space, and thats fine, but some parts should be right now.

jonny, 3 months ago to random

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

jonny, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

Helping someone debug something, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Edit: too many ppl reading this as "this person bad at programming" - not what I meant. Criticism is of deceptive presentation of LLMs.

jonny, 3 days ago to random

You wont believe the number of stormtroopers theyre deploying against unarmed students unless you see it. This is just one side: at least 7 police departments with at least two layers at every point of egress, with several layers in back for rear control and rotation. They've got the army out against your kids for having the audacity to do whatever they can to stop a genocide

#UCIrvine

a wide (~50m?) staircase with maybe 20 rows of cops in full riot gear stare down a handful of unarmed students

jonny, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Friends, today is a good day to stop using chrome :)

Download Firefox, reimport your bookmarks, set as default browser, replace chrome in all the places you launch it from muscle memory... I guarantee you wont miss anything from chrome, and you take one step away from Google owning the web.

20 minutes, tops.

https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/111522208836443681

faq for prospective repliers: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111525828172612252

jonny, 4 months ago to RSS

I guess this is turning into a real project so putting this out there if anyones interested:

We're making a very lightweight tool to create RSS feeds for journals from crossref metadata (with room for other sources). If ya dont know, many publishers are shutting down their RSS feeds to drive people onto their surveillance platforms, and every enshittification leaves behind an opening for adversarial interop.

This opens some interesting possibilities like creating feeds for keywords indexed across journals to start breaking down journals as the major organizational scheme of scholarly lit - papers have metadata keywords, but they mostly arent used, so lets use them!

Eventually wed like to write a FastAPI plugin similar to activitypub-express so we can make all feeds available on the fedi as well, and that would be a really nice set of tools to build for smaller AP projects that dont necessarily want to be full instances.

This is designed to be extremely deployable so you can run your own feed generator, but we'll also host a reference instance here at feeds.neuromatch.social once we get it running.

Just getting started, help wanted and welcome from anyone who loves #RSS and reading papers ♥

Repo: https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/journal-rss

Cc @lili and @roaldarboel

Stems from this thread: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111668885237921256

jonny, 8 months ago to random

Academics: stop being coy about #SciHub and start treating it like basic research infrastructure. If you dont include it in your syllabus already as a normal way to access research, you should start. No more winks and nods, just link directly to it and accept no criticism for doing so from the researchers that necessitate its continued existence by their publishing practices

https://mastodon.social/@eff/111075817148342123

jonny, 5 months ago to random

Scientists will be like "results should be replicable!" but then do all their experiments with a random walk of homebrew code that runs on four computers networked with a nest of BNC cables, each with a different version of MATLAB, and after every experiment the data is saved by walking a flash drive around to each of them since they cant be connected to the internet because one of them still runs Windows XP and if the rest so much as heard of a software update the work of 5 grad students whose whole PhD was spent setting up this monstrosity would be ruined forever.

jonny, 3 months ago to random

What I think is very funny about the scam of ppl putting a random OpenAI textbox into every program with a cheap 50 word conditioning prompt prepended and telling you its "personalized AI" is how its really them getting scammed. Because in like less than a year they are going to start hiking the API cost like a hockey stick and all those things will have to price themselves out of existence and face the wrath of the Customer while OpenAI scoops up any of those things worth a damn and undercuts the rest of the market.

jonny, 3 months ago to bluesky

Compare figure 3 here in the #atproto / #bluesky paper
https://bsky.social/about/bluesky-and-the-at-protocol-usable-decentralized-social-media-martin-kleppmann.pdf
To the diagram here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.

Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.

jonny, 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago) to random

Hello fedi. i am trying to solve the "fetch all replies" problem once and for all that makes the fedi feel a lot more desolate and with a lot more reply guys in it than it should be. this is take two, where before i had it triggered by a button, but now i think it should happen on the server-side whenever you expand a post. can anyone help me out figure out how to make this more efficient by only fetching posts that the server doesn't already have? i am not sure what the best strategy would be, and if anyone with experience doing efficient rails and SQL stuff could give me some pointers that would be gr8. the patch is actually extremely simple it just needs a few nice things to make it not DDoS everyone.

https://github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon/pull/44

Issue that describes approach: https://github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon/issues/43
Wiki page: https://wiki.neuromatch.social/Fetch_All_Replies

#MastoDev #FediDev #FetchAllReplies

jonny, 23 days ago to random

everyone i have figured it out, cats just have unchecked integer operations

jonny, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to bluesky

Checking in on whether #bluesky / #atproto has become any more like a communication medium, and... nope. almost unchanged since i looked at it last in June. Bluesky is a spectator platform where a small number of accounts receive most of the visibility and smaller accounts are effectively invisible. The introduction of new feed algorithms (to the degree that happened, there aren't really many that I can find in wide use) did not change that. This is a non-normative analysis: in some cases, it is good to have a medium that promotes some very small number of posts and accounts, eg. to surface singular events, etc.

From a 25h sample of the firehose...

• 600k posts, 2.4m likes, 250k boosts, 350k follows
• 40% of posts receive 0 likes, 70% receive <= 1
• accounts in the 99th percentile of likes received 44% of likes, accounts in the 95th percentile received 74%
• 40% of posts were from accounts within the top 95th percentile of accounts by likes received.
• the maximum number of likes for a post by an account not in the top 95% is 32.

The first plot below shows the cumulative sum of likes received on the y axis against each account in the sample on the x axis - this includes accounts that didnt' post during the sample (but would still have posts that could be liked, so this also shows the extreme recency bias). The second plot is a hockeystick showing the number of likes (not cumulative sum) received on the y axis per post on the x axis.

For background, the default algorithm only cares about likes, boosts don't matter, which is why i am calculating things by likes here - they are the primary algorithmic signal.

These are the same calculations that I did back in June, but this time i'm leaving the firehose open to do a longer sample to be able to parse momentary virality from persistent effects.

edit: more on "where is the fedi comparison" and "why is it like this" https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111660754706547194

jonny, 3 months ago to random

Too many ppl taking the wrong lessons from the three-balled rat "AI" generated #frontiers paper. The problem isnt "predatory publishers" or that one person didnt peer review hard enough. The problem is that we actively construct a system where companies make billions of dollars selling prestige vouchers academics have to buy to survive. If the for-profit journals didnt make the system a game, there would be nothing to play.

Frontiers is a symptom. Science, Cell, Nature, and the prestige treadmill they exploit us with is the disease.

jonny, 2 months ago to random

What in the entire earth and more importantly why any of this

jonny, 7 months ago to random

Since #SciHub isn't updating during its lawsuit, those of us with access to paywalled research should view it as an obligation to make that research available to everyone. Can we reboot the #ICanHazPDF hashtag? How about we follow it and the @icanhazpdf group.

Re: @ml https://ecoevo.social/@ml/111191070326071349

jonny, 9 months ago to random

the number of ppl perhaps rightly mourning the decay of academic twitter as one of the only ways to share, find and talk about research seems like it points directly to the fundamental hollowness of the current journal system as a means of uh sharing, finding, and talking about research.

our for-profit system of communication is so hostile to the way we want to work that we became dependent on a different, also very hostile informational chokepoint.

I think it is a pretty normal idea to want to try to rebuild our communication systems ourselves, in common. whatever that looks like. I get why that's weird or boring or scary to ppl I just think it would be fun and good to do.

jonny, 3 months ago to random

So take this post about twitter bots from @jsrailton one step further:
https://mastodon.social/@jsrailton/111869872361186177

Whats in it for the people running the bots?

Since twitters on-platform monetization is much lower than the cost of the bots, its not that.

This is bot seeding - you cant just stroll up brand new with a thousand new accounts, thats way too easy to detect and filter. You need to prepare the bots long beforehand, give them lots of organic-seeming activity, get them some algorithmic placement.

In other words, this is what an actively adversarial information platform looks like: the constant manufacture of informational weapons in plain view. These bots are prepped and ready to be deployed whenever a war needs to be sold, an election swung, a story drowned out, and so on. Bots dont exist because twitter is bad at moderation, they exist because it's extremely lucrative to rent bots to manufacture consent (also counting state actors, where profit and power are hard to disentangle).

In addition to the perverse incentive @jsrailton points to re: twitter not wanting to ban the paying bot customers, bots on twitter is also a symptom of its status as a theater of informational warfare, and how that is now core to its profit model.

jonny, 1 month ago to random

🫸 "user"

• passive
• patronizing, othering
• hierarchical divide vs. "developer"
• I want to talk to the manager

👉 "operator"

• active
• sick af
• agentic decider of own destiny
• telephony and The Matrix vibes

👍 "co-operator"

• mutually active
• equal participant among many
• highlights the social reality of all action
• imagines a p2p future with other people in it

jonny, 3 months ago to random

Piracy is archivalism. Pirates rescue media that for one reason or another the IP owner doesnt find profitable to distribute. Works like this simply wouldnt exist without pirates
https://mastodon.social/

jonny, 1 month ago to random

Oh thats grim:

By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).

Netflix pays fb for ad space
Fb gives Netflix DMs to better target ads
Netflix gives fb back clickthrough and behavioral data, including data from rival advertisers (read: google)

So fb gets to say they dont use private messages for targeting ads, they just share them with whoever can give them more data on you, which is ofc fine.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/

jonny, 5 months ago to random

I am re-reading the MATLAB package that caused me to quit being a neuroscientist and focus on how broken scientific infrastructure was (the first time), and i found my favorite bug of all time -

code for automated, trial-based behavioral neuroscience experiment:

• query a database with hardcoded credentials every time you want to calculate reward/reinforcement size. reward is delivered once per trial max.
• yes, hardcoded credentials use the password "password" and formerly exposed a root-level postgres user on public VCS.
• query is structurally pointless: the query checks that a value hasn't changed - the class is named "constantReinforcement"
• db connection has a 1s login timeout. connection always times out because db hadn't existed for ~6 years
• if db connection takes longer than 0.3s, send an email to code author saying database access is slow
• try to send email with an SMTP server without authentication, remarkably this works for awhile. SMTP server changes to require authentication.
• SMTP connection times out.
• default timeout is 100 seconds.
• rewards in fact calculated between every phase of every trial, not once per trial
• 5 phases in trial (6 phase transitions since trial transitions also count as a phase): pre-stimulus, stimulus presentation, pre-reward, reward delivery, post-reward

so our poor mice were waiting 600 total seconds, 10 minutes, to complete a single trial which should take ~1s. it took two weeks to debug the problem. this was one of about 2 dozen bugs of this nature that defined my first year or two of grad school.

since this I have seen far worse code in active use running live neuroscientific experiments that get published in the top-tier journals.

when i first started writing experimental code to fix this, one of the most famous ppl in my field told me not to waste my time because nobody really cares if the code is correct as long as it produces data. i stopped believing all papers and doing neuroscience shortly after.

jonny, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

Apparently #Clarivate's Web of Science, one of the major proprietary indexes that employers use to determine whether papers in a journal can be considered in tenure & promotion decisions, denied @joss 's request to be indexed without even telling us. This is not the first time JOSS has been rejected

I checked their "objective review criteria" and JOSS easily passes all the qualifications.

Speaking strictly as my own opinion, not in my role as a JOSS editor or reviewer, but as a matter of fact these indexers are a fucking racket.

https://github.com/openjournals/joss/issues/1283

Edit: here's the cause of rejection -

We received a desk rejection (based on an initial check) as we don't have :

Editor titles and affiliations listed.
A postal address for the publisher.

https://github.com/openjournals/joss/issues/1283#issuecomment-1971277233

But they are listed: https://joss.theoj.org/about

And the submission was in last may and we just got the response.