#labnotes — Public Fediverse posts

@amoroso 🧵Newton’s Waste Book

4
Bookkeepers kept a “waste book” as a place for notes recorded on the fly. Later they would extract selected information and copy it into the formal ledger.

#Journal #labnotes #wastebook #notetaking

how do i stop getting this pop-up on every single page i got to?? i dont CARE about bluesky integration i dont WANT it.

welp.

Our working theory is to limit the mental map we are facilitating into a 1.5D kind of dimensional space. The tree with its nodes one can follow linearly (so not fully 2D) plus a separate layer consisting of a fixed set of arguments to navigate and manipulate the tree via dynamic options at respective nodes. Kind of an on-demand meta-info-modal.

If this reads like something you have seen before, kindly point me towards that research or concept.

RT and discussion welcome. Thanks!

#labNotes

One incentive for management to invest in LLM(-agents) is how a change in technology shifts the paradigm of responsibility:

IT used to be a deterministic system with a transparent relation between input and output. When something goes wrong it is possible to look for a cause in the code and it is clear who bears responsibility for unwanted outcomes. Not with LLMs.

A shift towards probabilistic technology offers a way to obfuscate responsibility.
#labNotes
More opportunity to externalize cost.

It's wondrous to experience it for a cause of inclusivity and civil rights, but on a very personal level it is so, so satisfying that the rush of techno-mediated weak ties communality, of seeing culture coalesce on shared online media still exists.

What a soothing comfort in the face of slop and search engines in disrepair to experience that the social web lives and creates moments of movement.

It's F5 season on the Fediverse, boys gals and nonbinary pals!

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/api/report/progression

#labNotes

i need to draw more freak shit fr

literally why does my custom css on this site love to work perfectly fine for 5 minutes then just shit itself?? for NO reason????

Is there a way to have woots automatically be expanded? It's annoying having to click "expand woot" every time I wanna read something

how the actual fuck do you pronounce this site name

#DynamicEcology is singing my song

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2025/01/27/reminder-no-one-will-ever-look-back-at-your-lab-notebook-and-think-you-wrote-too-much/

#labnotes #academia

I don't think the relevance of the phenomenon called Gell-Mann Amnesia for the news industry has been taken into account in media critique of AI*

Obviously people in media have little incentive to start a discourse about the fact that the veracity and fidelity of large swathes of their reporting is immaterial. But that's why it can be replaced by a bullshit machine that only approximates veracity by chance.

There is ample redundancy to be automated.

--
*Artificial Imitation #labNotes

@nanopore I did a gel-cut DNA ladder sequencing run yesterday. Here are my experiment notes:

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.35994.82880

#nanopore #LabNotes

@klingebeil it's kinda true to say "technology rarely eliminates labor (or rather old tech supporting that job) and only pushes it into niches", an innovation paradigm.

But 60 years is a pretty arbitrary cutoff. Especially since culturally our current society is still a child of technology from the industrial revolution via incremental path-dependent innovation of the post-war economies.

Washing machines and other household appliances automated unpaid labor of 50% of the population.

#labNotes

@vicgrinberg I would hope that eventually "World English" permeates the sociolinguistic domain of academia and confers prestige towards more widely intelligible enunciation of L2-variants, as has been observed in business contexts. That's actually a pretty cool phenomenon.

But then I remember this article about how entrenched hegemonic practices are in academia. And that's among economically privileged peers.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1350508408091008

#fediscience #labNotes

... in the olden times this thread would probably have been a tumblr post, screenshotted and shared on twitter. With monolithic platform economy crumbling, where and how will cultural meta-discourse coalesce next? And will we find healthier narratives through that discourse?

That is also something I sometimes ponder.

#labNotes

@gulovsen @[email protected] onramp to get people outside of the fediverse to see the unique content you can curate: you could selectively cross-post content to other popular platforms. Mastodon and RSS make it super easy.

E.g.: I post a subset "relevant to my professional persona" #labNotes of my posts to LinkedIn, pushing entries from my hashtag filtered Mastodon RSS feed with a backlink and invite/explanation.

boost https://pxi.social/@jakob/110730191116352008 if helpful? thx

cc @[email protected] @[email protected]

Let's use the one at the top of this thread to demonstrate:

You needn't even be a Mastodon user to find all my posts for #labNotes at https://pxi.social/@jakob/tagged/labNotes

How to find the RSS feed for that tag? Just append ".rss" to the end of the URL.

To share each post with that hashtag to LinkedIn, I used the free tier of an automation service at https://ifttt.com (https://zapier.com probably also works). You can tell that service to publish RSS-feed entries to your LinkedIn updates.

#labNotes | Here's a quick tip for #newhere and #feditips peeps looking to show off the interoperability benefits of Mastodon:

How to cross post (to LinkedIn).

Almost every kind of view you can create in your Mastodon app is available as an RSS feed. RSS? A free information sharing protocol that talks well to other tech.

That means I can create a hashtag as a search filter for my own posts to feed to LinkedIn. Why? Because I want to selectively share only things relevant to both platforms.

🧵

Rather than in interoperability I think the main threat vector through big players - and this includes mastodon itself - will fall back to access and the general network benefits of social networks. Tangentially this may become a question of scaling access and filtering for relevance. Hence the one general advice I think is safe to give anyone on the fediverse:

Invest in tools, processes and concepts to manage access. Which probably mostly means:

make moderation easier and better.

#labNotes

Feeds need human curation to maximize a signal-to-noise ratio of trust. Once trust as a token of veracity enters the equation that manual labor accrues outsized value. It may well be that RSS and email (newsgroups) as technologies with likewise affordances gain resurgence.

Hence, all the more salient to see what Meta wants with the Fediverse.

We'll need technology and media concepts that amplify the trust vector. New wayfinding tools, too. Maybe there's a useful application of LLMs?

#labNotes

We need better mental models about large language models.

Too many people, professionals even, fail to grasp what these generative tools *can* do - and what hard limits their architecture imposes. Limits that can not be overcome, not even by unlimited scope of data and computing power.

All because we're clinging to metaphors that obfuscate more than they illuminate.

I'm going to use the hashtag #LLM to occasionally discuss existing metaphors and concepts. And to try alternatives.

#labNotes

@stephenjudkins a pseudonymus YouTube user as the McLuhan of our time. Not the hero we deserved, but...

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us, Twitter edition. Musk as the whale entrapped by a toxicity-machine feeding his insatiable void of an ego hungry for approval.

#labNotes

(screenshot now with alt-text)

@algowatching I do not say this lightly:

I suspect the technology has the most socially disruptive (in the creative destruction sense of the word) potential of all inventions since the washing machine. Because the mechanical turks in question don't see themselves as such.

They are the highly privileged class of managerial knowledge workers who in essence work as interfaces between systems and are in turn instrumentalized as custodians of the embedded power structures of capitalism.

#labNotes

@Odradek @Impactsuspect wenn das Thema nächstes Jahr immer noch relevant ist (also diskursiv - dass uns gesellschaftlich ein Paradigmenwechsel durch neue Affordances von KI/Algorithmen bevorsteht, sehe ich als unausweichlich an) dann frage ich vielleicht bei @digital oder @riffreporter an, ob es Budget für einen Essay gäbe. Aber dieses Jahr habe ich, ohne damit drostensche Abwertung zu insinuieren, leider Besseres zu tun.

Ab und zu habe ich in replys oder unter #labNotes schon was erläutert.

@ct_bergstrom The popular mental model assumes a teleological continuum in which "AI"s approach sentience & become gradually more powerful (helpful/dangerous) in the process.

I think it's more helpful to determine thresholds of *connectivity* that algorithms can achieve. Because meaning is ultimately determined in the audiences' mind, all an input needs to satisfy is a "helpfulness constraint".

Between pareidolia and Gricean cooperative principles, AI need just rearrange information. #labNotes

I am absolutely fascinated by the *responses* to #chatGPT; so much illuminating insight into dissemination and adoption of technology into new social norms and practices.

The actual capability of language learning models seems quaint in comparison to the dawning realization of people who work with text:

Lots of text is but an input-output interface to facilitate interaction between systems. All that matters is *connectivity* of the output. Complexity threshold: reached.

#labNotes

@schock Yes!

I'm curious how "deliberate friction" introduced by a core dev team pushing against emergent use patterns plays out.

Especially since "friction" can be an affordance in itself; see studies about less readable text actually improving retention by forcing readers to concentrate on deciphering the words.

And since I believe that affordances, much like meaning, are ultimately determined by the recipients, I'm curious how this friction will shape idiosyncracies of the 'don.

#labNotes

The #TwitterMigration (especially that of journalists) as an unwitting, crouwdsourced Thick Description in the Balinese Cockfight(1) of our time. And we all are both spectator and participant. Glorious.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Play:_Notes_on_the_Balinese_Cockfight

#labNotes

re 1) see http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Lambda-operator

I think I'm gonna need a new hashtag for regular posts about communication theory, media ecology, linguistics and the likes.
and I think I'm going to change the expiration date for my instance to preserve these musings.

Any suggestions?

#labNotes