@libroraptor@mastodon.nz
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

libroraptor

@libroraptor@mastodon.nz

Collector of extensive trivia that never gets asked about in trivia quizzes.

Fringe academic; ICOM-UMAC.

Polymath not-that-kind-of-doctor in history of sci-med-tech, art and architecture, mainly in early modern Europe.

Editor and writer of academic and technical things: I clarify ambiguity. I also bake, garden, and foster homeless dogs.

Posts auto-delete because the Internet's too cluttered and (in my opinion as an actual historian) most records are not worth keeping.

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

dnc, to gardening
@dnc@vive.im avatar

Help me confirm this plant please https://www.diningandcooking.com/1155078/help-me-confirm-this-plant-please/

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@dnc it looks like a tomato to me. But show also some stems, and wait for the flowers – so much of classical taxonomy hinges on the reproductive parts.

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

It is depressing how often Bender & Koller 2020 is cited incorrectly. My best guess as to why this is is that people writing about whether or not LLMs 'understand' or 'are agents' have such strongly held beliefs about what they want to be true that this impedes their ability to understand what we wrote.

Or maybe they aren't actually reading the paper --- just summarizing based on what other people (with similar beliefs) have mistakenly said about the paper.

>>

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline @emilymbender I keep wondering about opportunity to re-jig our notion of what counts as a "good" journal – a high frequency of incorrect citations speaks to me of incompetent authors, incompetent peer reviewers, and incompetent editors.

I used to work in education where it's rife – I wouldn't feel that 50% is an unfair estimate of how many academics in the field are incompetent name-droppers, statistics-fudgers, and epistemology-babblers.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@inquiline @emilymbender Common: citing Lave and Wenger for "my" version of communities of practice, nothing to do with theirs. Citing Bloom for a single-domain taxonomy, unaware that Bloom had three domains. Citing Cresswell for statistics that I don't understand, often with a weirdly didactic yet ignorant and pointless paragraph about ontology and epistemology. Applying Cohen's κ for a task that it can't do, citing a source for thresholds that actually says that we don't know the thresholds.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

𝓖𝓵𝓸𝓼𝓼𝓪𝓻𝔂

Blockchain: a slow database

Crypto: an expensive slow database

NFT: an expensive slow database to store URLs

AI: a way to write slow and inefficient algorithms

LLM: a database that stores text in a slow and inefficient way

Chat GPT: an expensive imprecise query language for slow and inefficient text databases that often returns wrong results

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@thomasfuchs I don't think that it's ChatGPT's results that are wrong, but the person interpreting them.

LLMs do a pretty good job of storing collocation probabilities! If only we could persuade people to see them that way...

alexisbushnell, to FiberArts
@alexisbushnell@toot.wales avatar

Is it wildly ambitious of me, a very novice sewer who is scared to practice with her sewing machine, to try to turn an old jumper of mine into a doggy jumper?

@makershour @sewing

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@alexisbushnell @makershour @sewing Not at all! I am a novice sewer. I get free throwaway clothes from a local charity to convert. What's best to start with depends on your dog's shape. Mine's something like a Rhodesian ridgeback so he has a deep ribcage so needs clothes with a lot of front but only a narrow back. So I get huge vests and jackets, and puzzle over where to put darts in to move the armholes onto his shoulders and to take the floppiness out around his waist.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@alexisbushnell @makershour @sewing The best $2 tug toys are from charity shops, too. They last months longer than the $40 ones from the pet shop, and they're not loaded with horrible high-pollution plastics.

They're on the racks marked "jeans".

Something else that I look out for is lengths of chew-friendly rope. Adding few knots makes a good tug toy. If you find a piece long enough, you can monkey-fist it with a ball inside – my dog just punctures the ball otherwise.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@alexisbushnell @makershour @sewing Ask about the trash that people drop off. So much is unsaleable because it's stained or ripped or stretched out of shape.

There's also often a glut of unsold stock to get rid of at the change of season when they just run out of space.

It's all good for practice – you still end up with handy rags afterwards if you screw up.

I also get patchy duvets (with ripped or uneven filling) from these bins and oversew them into dog beds. (I foster abandoned dogs.)

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

We need to bring back skeuomorphic UI design.

So twice a month I hang out at my library and give people technology help. Back in 2021 I went down there and said to the administrator "hey do you want this?" And they did, so I've been doing it ever since.

What surprised me is that ALL OF MY TAKERS in all this time?

Senior citizens.

And they are absolutely baffled by modern software. In more ways than one. But flat UI is a big one. This is a issue I don't see discussed at all.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@danilo Not only seniors – I am not a senior yet, and I can't tell what's clickable.

Flat design isn't the only impediment: another is invisible activators that are revealed only when you do some magic swipe thing that is completely arbitrary. Far too many phones have this instead of a button now, and many operating systems hide scroll bars this way.

Then there are interfaces that cater to only one sense, generally vision: no contouring means nothing for vision-poor people to find the button.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@danilo I got a new dishwasher recently and my first criterion – that frustrated the sales staff – is that the controls had to be something other than deliberately useless.

There are many books on this. My favourite is Klaus Krippendorf, The semantic turn: a new foundation for design. It is far more accessible than the title might suggest.

On how design interacts with emotions, there's good stuff in Don Norman, The design of everyday things.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@danilo I like design that minimises my cognitive input; they see my cognitive capacity as a resource.

I lost a lot of my cognitive capacity for about five years – couldn't process enough sensory information to cross a street or boil an egg, couldn't speak easily, suffered amnesia – from which I learnt enough to take an especially hard line on this. Now my vision is weakening beyond trendy low-contrast colour schemes.

What is it with designers expecting users to do their work for them?

dnc, to baking
@dnc@vive.im avatar

When you need soft butter quick, but your house is too cold 🤣 https://www.diningandcooking.com/1122508/when-you-need-soft-butter-quick-but-your-house-is-too-cold-%f0%9f%a4%a3/

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@dnc I prefer to bash it into softness, whether in the stand mixer or with a rolling pin. Butter sticks are especially convenient for this. Where I live now, butter comes usually in 500g blocks that are a little less amenable to bashing without cutting first.

ml, to academicchatter
@ml@ecoevo.social avatar

Does anyone know of a good site comparing grad school in various countries? I've seen lots of comparisons of cost of living/tuition, but nothing yet comparing how the actual schooling goes.

In some countries it's a job, in others it's strictly school. There are also structural and pedagogical differences that would be important to know. Some are more or (usually) less accessible to disabled scholars. That's the sort of info I'm seeking.

@academicchatter

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@ml @academicchatter I don't think that there's even a good comparison of grad schools within a country! So much comes down to the apples and oranges problem.

My own experience of looking for accessibility is that you can't trust anything that they tell you – institution-level claims can be wonderful, but implementation is often hyper-local, and when the marketing office makes a big deal of it, it can be because they're in the confession phase – solutions won't begin for years.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@ml @academicchatter The best that I could glean was by visiting incognito, and watching the campus in the same way as I'd run a classroom observation – document the terrain, who's there, what people do. Graffiti and temporary signage and postures and informal interactions and background noise speak so much more informatively than anything else I've ever found.

I've left that line of work now. You make me wish that I'd written it up when I was doing it – it could be helpful.

libroraptor, to random
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

Yesterday, I made puff pastry and cooked all of the mushrooms onto a tart with rosemary and garlic. Today, I saw that another crop had emerged overnight. In two shades of pink!

The fridge is too full so I took half of them to a neighbour.

chrisamaphone, to random
@chrisamaphone@hci.social avatar

one of the few “good endings” i can imagine for the future of LLMs is that they get people to see the value of information retrieval, indexing, and archival — i.e., library sciences — and we start funding that community to translate their work to similar applications, but with proper attribution and dataset transparency.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@oblomov @chrisamaphone I wonder, though, will we ever get to see the armies of poorly paid humans who label the sources that the algorithms are trained on?

Even in the libraries and archives and museums, cataloguers and palaeographers are so often kept invisible. I suppose that it doesn't help their cause that so many of them prefer it this way.

I fear that the public doesn't see that actual work is needed, and that that work takes intelligence and creativity that no LLM has.

hankg, to baking

Growing up Christmas Cake (fruit cake) was this disgusting brick looking thing we'd see at the grocery stores and, if unfortunate, gifted to you when people visited. Years ago I had my first slice of homemade one that I politely tried and really liked. A few years ago I decided to try making my own. I've tweaked this recipe by Delia Ann Smith that a friend in the UK recommended. I use quite a bit more alcohol in mine. I use twice as much in the dried fruit soak which I let go on for a few weeks. I also do a couple additional soaks with a brush during the "curing" process. My alcohol choice is an even mix of Cognac and Cointreau. Before serving I top it with a nice glaze. Maybe next year I'll actually write up the damn blog post LOL. Merry Chrismas
Classic Christmas Cake

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@hankg I chose ginger, lemon peel, and apricots for this year's cake.

Do you find that the liqueur flavours endure well through baking? I'm always disappointed (and maybe overly fearful) by how much seems to be lost in the oven so I use soak it in the least expensive brandy (which is still expensive) and have been thinking to soak in simply water – and then to add the brandy when it's cold for curing. I have a bottle of Rabbit Run orange-rind liqueur that I keep wondering about using for this.

libroraptor, to calligraphy
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

So begins this year's Christmas cake decoration, this time at the last minute because I had most of a PhD thesis come in for editing only a few days ago (it's an excellent piece of work, too). I thinned the ink down too much and it has bled through the icing underneath.

It needs a rabbit.

libroraptor, to cooking
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

I wasn't watching the artichokes and now these three are immense.

What's the best thing to do with them?

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@DemocracySpot thanks. I don't do the leaf-by-leaf eating; I trim down, slice, and then braise or roast them.

The last few I braised in lemon juice, lemon rind, coriander, fennel, pepper and salt. Some of those went into salad; some onto pizza.

These ones will probably have lots of flower in them rather than the young leaf, I'm thinking. But maybe still enough base to be worth it? It seems such a pity to cut them open only to find that they don't.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@DemocracySpot Chef? Not at all... And not very practised with artichokes because the plants don't produce all that many despite all the space that they take up. I might get about a dozen per year so I don't know them very well.

They're both scarce and expensive here so I've never bought one. Used to get jars of pre-cooked ones in spicy, herby vinegar and oil from Italy when we lived in Australia near Italian supermarkets.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@DemocracySpot They're still in the jar, and I am seeing that they drink a LOT of water. That big open-structured one just seems too elegant to destroy. But I could maybe butcher the little ones this evening...

I have a fresh harvest of pink oyster mushrooms from the garden and am thinking that they'd go really nicely with sliced artichoke hearts on pizza. But I haven't made the bread...

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@DemocracySpot It's warm summer weather here so the pink oysters are growing very actively at the moment. I consider them too expensive to buy (which is horrible because I feel sorry for the growers at the market), but affordable to grow at home. Someone gave me half a sack of soy hull pellets that she didn't want any more – for her, they're horse food; for me, they make the mushrooms fruit two or three times faster.

I think that I might get that bread fermenting for dinner tomorrow...

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@DemocracySpot Artichokes had a lot of flowers in them; scraped them out and braised what was left in lemon and fennel and coriander and pepper. Cut it into irregular chunks; scattered over a pizza with fragments of bacon, finely chopped onion, more pepper, and cream – maybe I should call it a Flammkuchen.

Fan-grilled it low in the oven until the sticky-up bits of artichoke started charring.

The mushrooms went on a separate pizza with green capsicum/peppers. I like that combination.

bezmiar, to permaculture

Contrary to popular dogma, industrial agriculture cannot "feed the world." Below are seven key takeaways from a report comparing the industrial food chain to the smallholder peasant food web.

  1. Peasants are the main or sole food providers to more than 70% of the world’s people, and peasants produce this food with often much less than 25% of the resources — including land, water, fossil fuels — used to get all of the world’s food to the table.

  2. The industrial food chain uses at least 75% of the world’s agricultural resources and is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but provides food to less than 30% of the world’s people.

  3. For every $1 consumers pay to industrial food chain retailers, society pays another $2 for the industrial food chain’s health and environmental damages. The total bill for the industrial food chain's direct and indirect cost is 5 times governments’ annual military expenditure.

  4. The industrial food chain lacks the agility to respond to climate change. Its research and development is not only distorted but also declining as it concentrates the global food market.

  5. The peasant food web nurtures 9-100 times the biodiversity used by the industrial food chain, across plants, livestock, fish, and forests. Peasants have the knowledge, innovative energy and networks needed to respond to climate change; they have the operational scope and scale; and they are closest to the hungry and malnourished.

  6. There is still much about our food systems that we don’t know we don’t know. Sometimes, the industrial food chain knows but isn’t telling. Other times, policymakers aren’t looking. Most often, we fail to consider the diverse knowledge systems in the peasant food web.

  7. The bottom line: at least 3.9 billion people are either hungry or malnourished because the industrial food chain is too distorted, vastly too expensive, and — after 70 years of trying — just can’t scale up to feed the world.

https://etcgroup.org/content/who-will-feed-us-industrial-food-chain-vs-peasant-food-web

#Agriculture #Smallholding #Peasants #Regenerative #FoodWeb #SupplyChain #Permaculture #Farming #Biodiversity

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@violetmadder @katlin @bezmiar I find that our local climate forum overlooks this, too. It's not very diverse – nearly 100% retired, wealthy, white people with fairly similar perspectives and experiences. Their hearts and worries are in a good place, but I still haven't figured out how to convince them to widen the potential – they think that what they're saying is "neutral" and "factual", and that their modes of interaction are open. And they can't figure out why different people don't join.

libroraptor,
@libroraptor@mastodon.nz avatar

@violetmadder @katlin @bezmiar We all are, though. Diversity's the only way I can think of to address it, and diversity's difficult for people who aren't used to cosmopolitanism. Maybe even for people who are used to it.

All I am doing now is staying on the outside in order to repeatedly remind people why that is, especially when I get asked to join this or that group. Maybe enough little prods plus a long time to digest the idea will eventually open things up.

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