@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

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

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 random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

So many good news this year, it's overwhelming. Fights against diseases, avoiding a recession in the US, reaching peak oil sooner, huge gains in solar, massive reduction in crime, fewer tax havens, and so much more.

https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Are there any RSS Readers that are trying to integrate ActivityPub too? Pondering the glut of email newsletters in our inboxes these days, and wondering if we are due for an RSS Reader renaissance, except with a fediverse twist this time…

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@RandomCanuck @ricmac there's an instance in the browser? I couldn't find anything about that on the website. Do you have a link?

I'm looking for something with an instance and ideally a solid pod. That could make a rather interesting user agent.

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@RandomCanuck @ricmac ah, gotcha! I thought a Vivaldi browser is a (single user) instance, which is what I'm looking for. Not merely an instance run by Vivaldi.

Still interesting, thanks!

vrandecic, to Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

This box was a perfect fit!

vrandecic, to FantasyWriters
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

The Wikidata community edited Wikidata 2 billion times!

Wikidata is, to the best of my knowledge, the first and only wiki to cross 2 billion edits (the second most edited one being English Wikipedia with 1.18 billion edits).

Edit Nr 2,000,000,000 was adding the first person plural future of the Italian verb 'grugnire' (to grunt) by user Luca.favorido.

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?diff=2000000000

1/2

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Ok, kids are on the bus, time to get a professor sweater on, make another cup of tea, and be MEGA PRODUCTIVE today - meetings and reading proposals and a colloquium talk and writing things I said I'd write a long time ago.... I will do it all! (Maybe.)

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@sundogplanets is sciency drama 1) human drama with scientists being the humans or 2) science being stubborn and experiments or engineering not doing what theory says it should?

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random
@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org avatar

A short play in three acts.

ACT 1. September 25, 2023.

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@ct_bergstrom

good thing that will scale to all the facts

</sarcasm>

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

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

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,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@uastronomer

Maybe not surprising, you argue well for why it is the case.

I'm saying it's bad.

Equating trustworthiness with readability will be a terrible strategy in the coming times. And given that a lot of people do so, it will be very bad for society.

vrandecic, to Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I am "greynery"

dancinyogi, (edited ) to random
@dancinyogi@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Only ONE of the four can exist in the universe:

Please boost for a wider demographic 🙏

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@dancinyogi

It's so interesting to see that the comments are not representative of the voters at all. The comments are all about the greatness of Vanilla, but the votes go for chocolate

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.

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@evan that's really impressive

vrandecic, to Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I'm a plant.

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I loved this article about one person's quest to figure out why a bridge was there. That's the kind of dedication and geekery I will always love to read about. Great work!

https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge

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 Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Bishop to A3. A bold opening move.

flexghost, to random
@flexghost@mastodon.social avatar

Donald Trump selling assets like Mar-a-Lago to a shell company owned by his oldest son is exactly what innocent people do

Trump isn’t a flight risk

He’s a flight guarantee.

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@hu_logic @flexghost

I'd rather he'd flee and thus be unable to participate in the 2024 election than him going through the court cases and still be the Republican candidate.

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Taufik is Wikimedian of the Year 2023.

He was hiding that he was editing Wikipedia from his parents for years, leading them to believe that he was playing video games.

seav, to Wikipedia
@seav@en.osm.town avatar

opening ceremony is starting just about now! 🎉

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@seav that screen

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@seav I saw someone saying the world's largest HDTV screen is here. I wonder if that's it

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,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@simon ah, yes. Every python library with C code needs to be compiled to Wasm first.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • normalnudes
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • GTA5RPClips
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • osvaldo12
  • ngwrru68w68
  • ethstaker
  • JUstTest
  • everett
  • Durango
  • Leos
  • cubers
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • tester
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • anitta
  • tacticalgear
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •