andreas_geisler - Network

Oh this is just delicious. Did you know that the Financial Times is...

Oh this is just delicious.

Did you know that the Financial Times is strangely OKish for a newspaper focused on capital-B Business?

Here they have smelled blood in the water around Tesla:

https://on.ft.com/4bYkVgm

(It's paywalled, but also Free if you register - up to you if you use a real acct ;) )

Read up on history: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-...

Read up on history: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-fork-in-the-road/

Tell your representatives to block the nazi spending bill.

Better to block EVERYTHING than allow them to go ahead legally.

#USPOL

Repost, because why the hell not: The phrase “The map is not the te...

Repost, because why the hell not:

The phrase “The map is not the territory is associated with Alfred Korzybski, in this lecture from 1931 : http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands-sup3.pdf

How I understand “the map is not the territory”:
In a way, I take it completely literally, then extend it.
Let’s say we have a city, and let’s call it Copenhagen.
Then we map that city, using a billion drones working for a billion hours, making sure all pertinent information about the layout of Copenhagen is recorded into a map.
The map is still not Copenhagen.
Now let’s say we take a giant mobile 3d-fab device, and task it with printing out the map as a physical object, scale 1:1

Now we have Copenhagen, and a replica of Copenhagen.
In all the senses of the word that have to do with faithfulness, the replica is an even better map than what existed as information only (let’s set aside that in all senses of the word that have to do with what maps are useful for, the replica is a much much worse map than the information-only map).

Still, the replica is not Copenhagen.
People might start flocking to the replica to marvel at just how insane it is for someone to produce a “map” in 3d 1:1 — but that is not the reason why people go to Copenhagen.
In what it matters, the map is stil just a resemblance of it object.
Only if we were to overnight demolish Copenhagen and replace it with a 1:1 replica would there be any sense in which the map has become the territory.

So, I take it to mean this, and I extend it to any sort of model that humans create.
Information is not the same as the object it describes.
A theory of gravity is not itself gravity.
A model of a black hole is not itself a black hole (luckily).

It’s not that hard to understand, really.

But what do I mean when I invoke it?
I tend to invoke it when people talk about Physics instead of reality.
A very good example is how people look at all the math in physics and conclude “REALITY IS MADE OF MATH”.
Then I look at them overbearingly and say “The map is not the territory”.

Specifically, of course, all maps are made of information. Reality isn’t.
Arguably it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that information only exists in our maps of reality, not out there in reality.

Side note 1:

Understanding what I mean by “information only exists in our maps” requires extending what is meant by “a map”.
For this point, I use “map” to refer to any internal or formalized representation of something external.
When we learn to throw a ball, our brains produce a “map” of various bits of physics, and also of the neural pathways required to trigger various muscles of the bod (though none of these are directly available to the conscious mind).
When we speak about abstract matters, our words and sentences are a map of our intentions, etc. etc.

In this sense, “map” is extended to all representations.
Information is a property of representations.
We have no evidence whatsoever of information existing outside of representations.
Even a DNA strand doesn’t “contain” any information.
It’s a physical object which interacts with other physical objects and the outcome is yet more physical objects being formed.
No information exchanges anywhere.

Except in our models of what goes on in there in the cells.

Side note 2:

I could also expand the bit about faithfulness and usefulness:
A map is faithful to the degree it contains information about details of the territory.
A map is useful to the degree it allows us to find pertinent details about the territory.
Since an abundance of details is an effective block against finding a specific detail, these two values are in opposition, in a semi-complex way.

If the map does not contain any details, it also won’t be useful.
To be useful, the map must contain pertinent details, but unless it was made for a specific purpose, the author most likely doesn’t know which details the particular user will find pertinent.
So the optimization between faithfulness and usefulness comes down to including enough details for many pertinent details to be included, but not so many details that the pertinent bits become hard to find or recognize.

#map #territory #informatics #findingThingsOnMaps

#LightPillar over Erupting #Etna

#LightPillar over Erupting #Etna

#Astronomy #Picture of the Day

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250224.html

#APOD #Italy

One photo by 𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕒 🏳️‍⚧️🦋

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joH55KcSLqE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joH55KcSLqE

My lanyard had served me well but it's time to retire it. These thi...

My lanyard had served me well but it's time to retire it. These things seem to last about 15 years for me. My dad made my first one when I was a young teen. I made its replacement which is now a frayed knot.
Should I go with white, or find some more green 550 cord? I haven't bought any in decades. The stuff lasts...
Anyway, The Ashley Book of Knots is a fantastic resource for all sorts of knots, including the functional as well as decorative kinds.

While you're gearing yourself up for rebellion: This video goes thr...

While you're gearing yourself up for rebellion:

This video goes through a bunch of nonsense english rules that no-one should bother with : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BccyQaNKXz8

The problems with Bluesky: Crypto VC money Not decentralized Pre-em...

The problems with Bluesky:
Crypto
VC money
Not decentralized
Pre-emptively complied with nazi demands to stop moderating queerphobia and anti-trans hate.
Ties to Maga.
Ties to Russia

and the list goes on

(documentation : https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113955910895724333 )

If You Like Workplace Fatalities, You'll Love This GOP Plan To Kill...

If You Like Workplace Fatalities, You'll Love This GOP Plan To Kill OSHA

Make falling to your death from a burning building because your boss locked the doors great again.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/if-you-like-workplace-fatalities

Dystopian shit is dystopian: Remember when the far right was going ...

Dystopian shit is dystopian:

Remember when the far right was going on about the "deep state"?
That accusation (as all right-wing accusations) was an admission:

https://sfba.social/@DeliaChristina/113904395673138483

#USPol

The only good thing about #Deepseek is that it knocked the bottom o...

The only good thing about #Deepseek is that it knocked the bottom out of the pump'n'dump schemes that were creating an illusion of technological progress through the stock markets.

GenAI is not progress. It is a very costly dead end, a distraction, and an assault on workers' rights everywhere: from the rights of the people whose work was stolen for the training, to the rights of the workers being threatened with supposed (not actual) obsolescence.

It's three mirages in a trench coat, trying to look like a success.

please don't leave me to remain... https://64.media.tumblr.com/895c...

please don't leave me to remain...

#waitingroom #dentist #gollum #drawing

Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal f...

Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angry.

In the last 60 days, the diaspora* web assets received 11.3 million requests. That equals to 2.19 req/s - which honestly isn't that much. I mean, it's more than your average personal blog, but nothing that my infrastructure shouldn't be able to handle.

However, here's what's grinding my fucking gears. Looking at the top user agent statistics, there are the leaders:

• 2.78 million requests - or 24.6% of all traffic - is coming from Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot).
• 1.69 million reuqests - 14.9% - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot)
• 0.49m req - 4.3% - Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
• 0.25m req - 2.2% - Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36
• 0.22m req - 2.2% - meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

and the list goes on like this. Summing up the top UA groups, it looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don't to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again.

Oh, and of course, they don't just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don't give a single flying fuck about robots.txt, because why should they. And the best thing of all: they crawl the stupidest pages possible. Recently, both ChatGPT and Amazon were - at the same time - crawling the entire edit history of the wiki. And I mean that - they indexed every single diff on every page for every change ever made. Frequently with spikes of more than 10req/s. Of course, this made MediaWiki and my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users.

If you try to rate-limit them, they'll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they'll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.

Just for context, here's how sane bots behave - or, in this case, classic search engine bots:

• 16.6k requests - 0.14% - Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
• 15,9k req - 0.14% - Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36

Because those bots realize that there's no point in crawling the same stupid shit over and over again.

I am so tired.

If you are having trouble convincing family or friends to leave Met...

If you are having trouble convincing family or friends to leave Meta, here's something that might help:

Remind them that digital spaces aren't "territory".
Leaving them behind isn't a loss.
What is at risk of being lost is not the "place" but rather the connections to other people.

When the place turns out to be a trap (it always was), people should realize that they themselves and others like them were the only thing of value there.

Save that value by leaving the place that endangers them.

Seen on Mastodon. The newest trend this semester is "Claude boys" (...

Seen on Mastodon.

The newest trend this semester is "Claude boys" (because of course it is boys).
They've dedicated themselves to the "wisdom" of Claude "AI", and essentially live in the style of the "protagonist" of "The Dice Man" by Luke Rhinehart (George Cockcroft) : They ask the "AI" about every decision, right down to "Should I do this homework assignment?".

This is a fucking hell-world.

Strange bedfellows make for "awkward gestures" ADL color reveal htt...

Strange bedfellows make for "awkward gestures"

Das Bild ist ein dreiteiliger Comic-Strip, der die Figur Dr. Manhat...

#noafd #fckafd #rassisten #faschisten #geschichte #nazis #ns

Alexithymia: why some people find it so hard to identify emotions, ...

Alexithymia: why some people find it so hard to identify emotions, and how this affects them | #alexithymia #emotions #feeling #language #interoception #alexiosmia #cognition #metacognition #homeostasis #mentalhealth

One photo by 𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕒 🏳️‍⚧️🦋

For once, PLEASE READ THE COMMENTS. You can ignore Thiel's meanderi...

For once, PLEASE READ THE COMMENTS.

You can ignore Thiel's meandering clusterfuck of an "op-ed".

But read the comments, written by Financial Times subscribers:

https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583105

#crazyThiel #Palanturd

It's complicated https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/cache/media_attac...

Look, due to the topic of Mastodon, I added alt-text. It's such a bother to do that here.

#uspol

#uspol

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/582 enter image description her...

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/582