⿻ patcon (is in Toronto)

Fwiw the first half is what I tend to come back to as a ground. It gets a bit mathy later, but I have found the orientation around information and surprise to be helpful :)

Information is surprise If I tell you something you already know, then that's not very informative. So perhaps information should be measured in terms of unexpectedness, or surprise?

plus.maths.org/content/info...

What Can Systems Thinkers Learn from Tech Governance Bianca Wylie and Su Lynn Myat in discussion about the connections and relationship between tech governance and systems thinking.

www.eventbrite.ca/e/what-can-s...

Listening to Su Lynn Myat & @biancawylie.com talk about tech #governance. But asking what is it to regulate AI got me reflecting.

Maybe regulating AI is in essence regulating the essence of language and intelligence most generally: surprise. Is it possible or desirable to try to regulate surprise?

When #complexity or #plurality live within individual bodies, singular experiences... that's usually something I want to trust and walk toward, and to put my attention more closely on. That's where the toughest labour is happening <3 forward.com/opinion/7826... h/t Libby Lenkinski

Current status: visualising "water level cuts" of HDBSCAN clustering on pol.is data from protest, thinking on filter bubble propagation, #queer / outsider identities & hierarchical navigable small world networks.. #complexity #democracy

main--68c53b7909ee2fb48f1979dd.chromatic.com?path=/story/...

Bluesky Jobs Bluesky Jobs

We’re hiring for two machine learning roles. A chance to do cutting edge things with ML to make this place a lot more personalized.

jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9i...

NO GODS, NO MASTERS, NO HEROES

Or... is it still in anarchic punk rock spirit to yell:

GODS, MASTERS AND HEROES ONLY IN MODERATION AND WITH GREAT RELUCTANCE

Thanks for sharing your work and talking through the metaphors on the Polis User Group discord, Rob 🙌🏻🙌🏻 polislike.short.gy/discord

#democracy #delibwave

YouTube video by patcon Civic Memory: Another prototype for Polis-like system onboarding

Check out this stellar new interface prototype for exploring #polislike data in an imaginary future @nyccec.bsky.social project of @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social, created through the personal efforts of Roberto Andrade, a @decidim.org contributor!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPy8...

@pujaohlhaver.bsky.social heads up www.navigation.org/grants/open-...

> While reproducibility remains the bedrock of science, [...] we think more energy should be focused on building tools and experiences that are more joyful and collaborative, where reproducibility is a positive side effect.

If you're so lucky, people forget it was ever a story at all.

When you're on the trail of the right story for the right moment, it becomes easier to tell. And crucially, not just easier to tell by you, but by everyone. Eventually it tells itself.

And at some point, it's no longer a story, but the very culture in which other stories travel.

This morning, I was hit in the face by a baton.

I’m going to have a pretty gnarly bruise but we need to remember why this is happening: Trump and ICE are rounding up our neighbors, treating them as subhuman, and shipping them off to labor camps in foreign countries. It has to end.

Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock, a network of AI cameras used by ICE, feds, and police Agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with "evidence collection and investigative work."

GET RID OF YOUR RING CAMERAS www.yahoo.com/news/article...

You know it’s bad when the Dept of Labor says immigration raids are “threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for US consumers.”

@opinion.bloomberg.com #CPI
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

A Harvard economist warned two weeks ago that without data centers, the American economy basically had zero growth.

We're witnessing the greatest transfer of wealth from the masses to the elites in modern American history, and it is an intentional policy of the federal government.

Bwaaaaahahaha 🤣😂😂🤣🤣🤣

Oh jeez, I was not expecting this maniacle laugh to escape my face just now

Which one??? I am intrigued and confused, in the good way that I like to be

Not sure what else is good in there, but feel free to share if you find anything useful <3

Pol.is data collection is adjacently dystopic. As Colin Megill has said, it's an opensource "Cambridge Analytica". It's scary data. The only argument for collecting it, is that allowing all citizens access to realtime collective introspection is worth the risk.

You can't determine a troll via words contributed. If a troll is representative, it's a participant, tho perhaps one playing by diff rules. Pol.is marginalizes minority POVs, without erasure & makes all coherent groups legible to the whole, troll or otherwise

The danger is not that we fail to compromise -- it's that we fail to even recognize the fractal boundaries of our divides in sufficient resolution, and fail to fully understand the terrain of mutual understanding over which negotiation MIGHT BE POSSIBLE.

There is no half measure to reactions. We want your "full heart agree" or "full heart disagree". If you can't offer that, you don't have a "half agreement" -- that's a cop-out. You have a "pass" and a job to do. USE YOUR WORDS. Write something you can take a full-hearted position on. Throw it in.

Facilitating a Polis Conversation: Notes from the Field Begrudgingly co-authored from my messy personal knowledge-base notes, using ChatGPT's assistance.

Random take-aways from my recent essay on facilitating with #polislike tools: nodescription.substack.com/p/facilitati... #democracy #collectiveintelligence #delibwave

ANN FRANCIS ALTMAN, Plaintiff, VS. CONNIE FRANCIS GIBSTINE, Serve at: 9 Dwyer Place St. Louis, MO 63124 Defendant, and PARKSIDE FINANCIAL BANK & TRUST, Serve at: 711 N 11th Street St. Louis, MO 63101 SAMUEL HARRIS ALTMAN, Serve at: 140 Amberleigh Drive Silver Spring, MD 20905

Annie has sued her mum.

Her mum and Sam Altman blocked her inheritance for 6 years. Annie was ill, and forced to go on foodstamps.

Her dad left his will to her. He died from overwork and a serious heart condition. For years, Annie had begged Sam to pay for their dad to retire…

1/

YouTube video by Cynthia Rudin PaCMAP: An algorithm for dimension reduction

& @ventrella.bsky.social, on watching your video explanation of Clusters (archive.org/details/clus...):

you might get a kick out of @cynthiarudin.bsky.social's description of her lab's #PaCMAP algorithm, which is the rising new hotness in dimensionality reduction :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD-u...

Join the Community | Metagov

If anyone is interested in this stuff, @metagov.bsky.social is also a great place to join. metagov.org/join/community

h/t to the @radxchange.bsky.social foundation calls (in particular @glenweyl.bsky.social and Luis Razo for sharing generously on the open calls) -- for inspiration on the general idea of modelling humans/values with attractive-repulsive force simulations.

And further, if this #particlelife data could somehow be a proxy for real opinion data (agree/disagree/pass), then it might also help me evaluate the tooling, via easy synthetic data of high #complexity (since the particle life simulator creates data w emergent subtle structure)