Thomas Berker

A weekend with some more experiments with local #LLM: these monsters are so much more useful when fed with a lot of context - mostly about me - which for obvious reasons is verboten in the case of chat-gpt & co. Reasonably good results with Alibaba's #qwen (通义千问 3:235b-a22b, via #ollama). It is […]

Simple and good about "What AI is Really For":

https://www.chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-really-for

"When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year [...], you have a sudden imbalance of […]

Nerve wrecking joy: updating my mastodon instance without having a clear idea of I am doing. I think I made a backup of the database, but maybe I did not? Usually there is next to nothing at stake when botching an update of my #selfhosted services. But losing my dear followers would indeed be […]

Mmmmh, #writerdeck, small, cheap computers that can do only one thing: distraction free text prosessing. Very tempting, and many diy options. On the other hand, I have bought so many devices through the years, and usually they gather dust in a corner after a week of intensive use […]

Imaginary Research about the AI winter I have now achieved one of my dreams – a publication in the _Journal of Imaginary Research_. Volume 10, on the theme of flourishing has just been published. My contribution, co-authored with Aida Inverno, stresses the importance of doing research about the imminent AI winter. AI winters follow periods of hype about what AI can do. We’ve had them before. My contribution appears on pp.40-41. The Journal appears once a year. Check out their website later in the year for the 2026 theme.

Just realised that a lot of what I talked about at the oppositional responses to ai workshop (#cscw2025) today was inspired by Sally Wyatt's brilliant idea to do research on the coming AI winter.

https://sallywyatt.nl/imaginary-research-about-the-ai-winter/

A monitor showing the niri desktop with the settings for dms open. A wallpaper from Scavengers reign shows a pot of leaves.

Unreasonably excited about my new Linux desktop environment: The wonderfully functional and performant #Niri (1) made beautiful and complete with #DMS (2). Redefining the sweet spot between bling and function, the holy grail of desktop environments […]

[Original post on tikatech.org]

Back to my #android ( #grapheneos ) phone after another week with the #sailfisos C2. Defeat. Most things work well enough on the C2. But my employer #ntnu is locked into the Microsoft ecosystem and has disabled mobile access to email and calendar from outside Outlook. Not being able to ckeck my […]

I am teaching an introduction to #sts on the MA level this fall and did a little anonymous mapping of #ai use at the beginning. Most interesting findings: for almost all of these 20 students AI = #chatgpt. And almost all expected that AI will lead to profound changes in the next decade, with the […]

Trondheim's Good infrastructures lab is looking for a #PhD student who wants to write about the fediverse as infrastructural hope. Norway treats its PhD students well and we will help you to make your application competitive. For the call, see here […]

Finally switched from #plex to #jellyfin for my streaming needs. Main reason: using a tool instead of a (wannabe) platform is such a mental and esthetic pleasure as it eliminates clutter and reduces complexity. Jellyfin does fewer things and it does them well. Platforms all dream of becoming […]

"Young people have always felt misunderstood by their parents, but new research shows that #GenAlpha might also be misunderstood by #AI."

Rosie Thomas of @404mediaco summarizes the findings of a really interesting paper that focuses on how #LLMs (mis)interpret teenage slang and meme culture […]

@skyglowberlin

Claude (which obviously has Internet access):

"University: Christopher Kyba received his PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006

Thesis Title: "Measurement of the Atmospheric Neutrino Induced Muon Flux at the Sudbury Neutrino […]

@skyglowberlin I just asked Claude and it got place and title of my really obscure thesis exactly right. What is wrong with LLMs is unfortunately not only that they are wrong.

That no ownership of the means of production always was linked to exploitation of work should be an easy way to convince knowledge workers to not use any cloud products (including non-local LLMs). Unfortunately, it is not.

#selfhosting #localfirst #work

Ok, I have now switched to #maintenance mode: Preserving, repairing, and caring for things and people in my reach. Abandoning the progress myth starts here! Innovation must die! Old and boring is beautiful.

Grrrr, working with revising an article where one peer reviewer has not understood a word of what we want to say. They still wrote a long review where 90% just repeat what we have written and smell a lot like AI. The other reviewer wants us to comply to the IMRAD-structure, as if this was the […]

INCREDIBLY excited to announce this: I collaborated with the Internet Archive to make a new 24/7 lofi livestream!

By day, you can see scanners scanning and what they're scanning, and when they're not scanning, you will see public domain silent movies and pictures. Sorta like an Internet Archive […]

So what happens after you have convinced someone close to you to ditch #Facebook and #Instagram? S/he starts to scroll the homepage of the mobile chrome browser where a feed of curated "news" is displayed. Never underestimate the salespeople of algorithmic entertainment!

Next mission: #RSS

Bluetooth is still quite unstable, unfortunately.

First day of exclusively using the #Jolla C2 phone (=Linux phone), many months after I have received it. The worst bugs are gone and everything except my work email works. And not having access to work stuff on the go may in fact be an improvement.

Two recent reads on #AI that summarise well some of our recent discussions at a university department in the #humanities. The contours of a reasonable, post-hype answer to this challenge slowly become visible:

A long read: https://archive.is/hE0UM

And a hot take […]