Dominic Duffin @dominicduffin1@mastodon.technology

#introductions Hi, I am a PhD student from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland. My research fileds are discrete optimization, cloud computing and software engineering

Every Data Scientist should read Weapons of Distruction by Cathy O’Neil. She warns for the fact that mathematics is misused to turn subjectivity in Big Data into objective facts. She has many examples that will frighten you.

What's the decentralized state-of-the-art for organizing and promoting an #event without #facebook?

(Trying to organize some free events in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Venue organizers largely non-responsive through email.)

#ical #caldav #posse #activitypub

When explaining #MachineLearning to people, I find it useful to describe the arithmetic mean as a simple "learning" algorithm: By taking the mean of a sample from a population, you get a ~binary classifier between "above avg" and "below avg". I think it helps people to get three concepts:
* Machine Learning is not magic, it's maths
* Some forms of machine learning are actually pretty simple
* The data it trains on gives it a bias, & that bias can reinforce itself through misuse
#DataScience

«In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.»
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/russian_censors.html

This would break the internet.

Imagine YouTube Content ID, but for everything: blog comments, tweets, Github commits, Instagram photos, replies to newspaper articles, rental listings, dating profiles.

This is being proposed in the EU. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbk47b/europe-copyright-rules-content-id

No matter which social network you're on, following a diverse group of people helps you taking a peek at the other side of your personal filter bubble.

You don't have to agree with everything and everyone, but please, at least try to listen to people and their opinions.

It will help you appreciate your own life, and may just make you a little wiser.

70+ Internet Luminaries Ring the Alarm on EU Copyright Filtering Proposal

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ring-alarm-eu-copyright-filtering-proposal

The whole "let me just pay for it, remove ads" argument against online tracking is problematic: Not everyone has the spare cash to pay for a bunch of online services.

Hey all, I need some help rethinking community calls for #opensource projects.

At Moodle, as we did at Mozilla, I've been using a public Etherpad for people to:
- Sign in
- Introduce themselves
- Contribute ideas to the project

We're also using Zoom to:
- Discuss things via video and audio
- Record the call for later viewing

After a conversation with our data privacy lead today, I've got to delete the existing data we've captured in this way, and come up with a new approach.

Any ideas? 🙃

When I joined masto, I gravitated towards following creative peeps and noticed a thing that's pretty common to all of us: we feel guilty for promoting places that people can buy our work or otherwise support us financially. So I started the #CreativeToots hashtag for that very reason. Got an Etsy page? Online store? Patreon? Selling a piece of art? Throw that tag on it. Do it with unfettered abandon. Everyone else: Look at that tag for artists to support. Buy their stuff. Help them create. <3

"Let's play a game to help some of the newcomers make connections: name 5-7 things that interest you but aren't in your profile as tags so they are searchable. Then boost this post or repeat its instructions so others know to do the same."

Hello! My interests include

#fineart
#blackart
#filmmaking
#photography
#AfroLatinidad
#caribbean
#diaspora
#artresearch
#healing
#connection
#puertorico

@kensanata On the other hand, centralized systems are not immune to this problem, but at least we have a workaround known as archive.org.

And here is where the contradiction starts, some people don't want their information archived, fear it will be abused, thus #nobot. But while "collect 'em all" is the abusive, crazy NSA methodology, at the same time, it's a valuable and respectful work of history preservation.

The more bots and archive-refusing people, the more damage to historical records is made.

It'd be interesting to know how centralised Mastodon is in terms of hosting. An awful lot of instances seem to be hosted with two French providers, OVH and Scaleway (aka Online.net).

If, for example, OVH suffered a catastrophe how much of the fediverse would disappear?

"Join the coordinated calls against EU’s Censorship Machine"
https://edri.org/coordinated-action-censorship-machine-call/

Sultan of Yogyakarta: A feminist revolution in an ancient kingdom http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-43806210

Most importantly, stop putting institutional events on Facebook, stop using it at universities, stop making participation in Facebook mandatory through your institutional, organization, and activist roles. You can be online, and social, and connected without supporting Facebook.

"The Pentagon Has a Big Plan to Solve Identity Verification in Two Years"
https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/05/pentagon-has-big-plan-solve-identity-verification-two-years/148263/

I browse the web without images by default, partly to have pages load faster, and partly because sometimes you find some crazy things like this! OwO

On the left is the version without images. On the right, the version with images. They didn't just post a picture of the box, they kinda "rendered" the images in the form of a box using CSS transforms!