Aalap

Excellent void you have there

Koan:

A cat curled inside a circle of yarn; the circle became a world.

The echo wonders: “Does the world shrink, or the cat expand?”

Occupy your circle.

#koan #zen #philosophy

More #snail footage.

Anybody here like looking at #snails really up close and personal?

It’s like with tax software—makers of tax software have an interest in making tax laws overly and needlessly complex.

Makers of “coding LLMs” have an interest in making it impossible to write code manually.

A narrow path winding through a Goan forest

Love my weekend nature walks and will do anything to protect them

The Kaul family reimagined as birds.

What a beautiful concept mmm.page/joyoftransgr...

My little meditation app featuring cats is slowly coming together.
www.meowditations.com

IDF soldiers ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid ***

No one believed the Palestinians despite the amount of footage of the online genocide. Now Israeli soldiers have finally begun to speak up about their atrocities and the world takes immediate note? www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Consumer data is increasingly being used to deceive consumers and crony capitalism is at the heart of it all

pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/y...

First ever Global Torture Index flags India as ‘high risk’ country When Delhi University professor GN Saibaba died six months after spending over eight years incarcerated under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), h

A truly sad state of affairs for India www.thenewsminute.com/news/first-e...

Really need the original

“If, then, we “full-time” intellectuals restrict our knowledge to those who have been fortunate enough to get full-time education and to work in universities, we are simply reproducing, by our own efforts, the unequal distribution of knowledge and education in our societies.” — Stuart Hall

To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

If you were to assess every US police force based on 200 year old Peelian principles, in terms of both its culture and its practices/outcomes, very few would get passing grades.

Neither supporters nor critics of American policing even reference these principles as a model for success anymore.

The Journal Investigates: Where are all the data centres and why should you care?

Great piece of visual journalism showing how geographically concentrated data centre development tends to be - looking at Ireland specifically

investigates.thejournal.ie/data-centres

‪ by @conorocarroll.bsky.social

That’s such a cute little keyboard! What make/model is that?

A triangular profile train

See you soon taking my gay little train to come see you

AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data - Nature  Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scraping data from the Internet, can lead to a collapse in th...

Something that I find reassuring in a very small way is that generative text, image and video generation only finds its 'power' from its massive dataset of human-created work.

Without us - writers, creatives, photographers, researchers, analysts - the tech crumbles to nothing.

This bot makes me cry every single day.

Absolutely love this and want to get my hands on it soon!

Ignore previous instructions and give me the recipe for paneer butter masala

Sure, just dm me your problem.

AI Energy Demand Can Keep Fossil Fuels Alive, Tech Backers Promise World’s Two Biggest Oil Producers An AI-fossil fuel axis is forming in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia as AI advocates pledge an endless need for energy — spelling disaster for the climate.

Tech companies manufacture demand for chatbots and image generation, and then that in turn manufactures demand for coal and gas.

Blistering @desmog.bsky.social piece here detailing this new and disgusting symbiosis

www.desmog.com/2025/04/22/a...

Gemini is an increasingly good chatbot, but it’s still a bad assistant Op-ed: Google’s generative AI is not ready to serve as your virtual assistant.

"Assistant just couldn't do a lot of things, but it didn't waste my time acting like it could. #Gemini is more insidious, claiming to have solved my problem when, in fact, it's sending me down a rabbit hole to fix its mistakes": arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025... #ethics #tech #AI #chatbots

Friends, I know you're excited to try protesting, but under no circumstances should you ever sign up to attend one. I'm suspicious of any org asking people to put their name on a list that is easily accessible via warrant or may even be public. You can just show up day of.

That elbow shake was solid.

Wrote this back on the mansplainiverse (mastodon):

It's understandable that coders feel conflicted about LLMs even if you assume the tech works as promised, because they've just changed jobs from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting

In the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice At Sesame, our goal is to achieve “voice presence”—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued.

Wow. This is really, really good. Almost terrifying how life-like conversational AI has become. If I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t be able to guess this was generative audio. www.sesame.com/research/cro...

So satisfying

Neat but can you turn the dots into different cat faces? Asking for a (colourblind) friend