@vrandecic@mas.to
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

vrandecic

@vrandecic@mas.to

Husband. Dad. Cat housemate. PhD. Works on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions at Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata founder. Previously: ontologist at Google, Wikimedia Trustee, and RPG author. Berkeley, CA, roots in Brač, Croatia, grew up in Germany. he/him. Views my own.

Posting cat pics and occasionally other stuff.

#tootfinder

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vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

My daughter asked me a riddle. So we asked ChatGPT. We bet on the answer. We were both wrong.

jonny, to random
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what am i even reading.

https://json-schema.org/blog/posts/dynamicref-and-generics

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@jonny why not make an array of pairs instead of two arrays of same length?

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@jonny every dimension that has to be the same length can be turned into a tupel with fixed length. That won't work for "has to be longer than", but for equality it should work

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Hey @simon - I just stumbled upon https://til.simonwillison.net/webassembly/python-in-a-wasm-sandbox but then a few months later in https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox you say you still are looking for a solution for the problem of sandboxing Python. I am super curious, why did you discard the first approach? It seemed promising, and you seemed to have gotten it to work. I would be thankful for an answer.

vrandecic, to random
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The pressure when you use your time-based authenticator app, trying to type those six digits in before the time runs out...

vrandecic, to random
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I seriously believe that one of the best things Google could do for the Web ecosystem is to bring back Google Reader.

vrandecic, to random
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"Smoking on board is illegal and prohibited..." Redundant, or indeed any extra meaning?

vrandecic, to random
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I've been a friend of Universal Basic Income for thirty years, but I'm the last twenty years, I have growing reservations about it, and many questions. This article about an experiment with a right to work was the first text I read on it that substantially impacted my thinking on this (text is in German). I recommend reading it.

https://perspective-daily.de/article/2567-was-passiert-wenn-dir-der-staat-einen-job-garantiert/BDn2v8pM

1/4

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Wikimedia's CTO @selenadeckelmann with a thoughtful article on Wikipedia and generative AI such as LLMs

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/07/12/wikipedias-value-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I don't agree with everything in this comic, but I sure learned a lot.

https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Is there a list of @wikipedia and related Mastodon bots that shout out the picture of the day from Commons, article of the day, etc?

vrandecic, to LLMs
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

This is really bad.

Comparing output from ChatGPT with articles from Wikipedia: "participants perceive LLM-generated content as clearer and more engaging while on the other hand they are not identifying any differences with regards to message's competence and trustworthiness."

https://paperswithcode.com/paper/do-you-trust-chatgpt-perceived-credibility-of

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Interesting link:

https://apple.com/hypercard

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

We were wondering what the line "One a penny, two a penny" means, as it sounds paradoxical, and so we asked Google, and it generated the following code (!) as the answer:

def one_a_penny_two_a_penny_meaning():
"""
This function explains the meaning of the phrase "one a penny, two a penny".

Returns:
A string explaining the meaning of the phrase "one a penny, two a penny".
"""
1/4

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Great story about how YouTube helped with moving away from IE6.

"Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review."

I swear that wasn't me. Although I would have loved to do it.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Today it's been exactly twenty years since I made my first edit to Wikipedia. It was about the island of Brač, in the German Wikipedia.

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bra%C4%8D&oldid=123911

vrandecic, to Disney
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

We're watching Spy x Family on Disney Plus with Little One, and they're showing ads for alcohol all the time. The beer mixed with fruit juices stuff, and other beer drinks. That doesn't feel right.

#Disney #spy_x_family #modelo #corona

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Great interview with Erik Brynjolfsson on the potential impact of AI on the economy.

"In particular, if the technologies are mainly used to [...] replace humans with machines, it is likely to lead to lower wages and more concentration of wealth and power as capital substitutes for labour. But, if we use the technology mainly to augment our skills, to do new things, then it is more likely to lead to widely shared prosperity and higher wages."

https://www.ft.com/content/b71759fe-397b-4688-bc81-b082edb25f31

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

"RIGHT NOW, IT’S up to AI companies whether or not to disclose where their training sets come from. Without that information, it’s next to impossible for people to prove that their data was used, let alone ask for it to be removed."

If it is difficult to tell whether copyrighted work has been infringed, I find it difficult to see how copyright was infringed. The whole point is to prevent copies. Copies should be reasonably easy to detect, no?

I'd like opposing views.

https://www.wired.com/story/battle-over-books3/

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar
vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

If you're a bit older, you might remember 3.5” disks, and that they had a capacity of 1.44 MB (two sides, HD, PC).

But what did that MB stand for? How many bytes was that? Do you think it was

a) 1.44 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,440,000
b) 1.44 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,509,949

Answer in reply.

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

RIP Niklaus Wirth;

BEGIN

I don't think there's a person who created more programming languages that I used than Wirth: Pascal, Modula, and Oberon; maybe Guy Steele, depending on what you count;

Wirth is also famous for Wirth's law: software becomes slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster;

He received the 1984 Turing Award, and had an asteroid named after him in 1999; Wirth died at the age of 89;

END.

vrandecic, to Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

This box was a perfect fit!

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Wikipedia is about verifiable facts from reliable sources. For Wikipedia, arguing with "The Truth" is not effective. Wikipedians don't write "because it's true" but "because that's what's in this source".

It is painful to see Katherine Maher viciously and widely attacked on Twitter, also for a quote restating how Wikipedia works.

I have worked with @krmaher
We were lucky to have her at Wikipedia, and NPR is lucky to have her.

vrandecic, to Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

This bag is giving its third day of joy

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