👋 Whether you’re a casual reader of The Continent or a longtime subscriber maybe you know someone who would appreciate our journalism. Pass this on. It’s free and helps us spread quality African journalism worldwide. Thanks!

https://thecontinent.org/subscribe

Stop saying “artificial intelligence”. (And “neural networks” too.)

Be more specific. Say “reinforcement learning”. Say “generative modelling”. Say “Bayesian filtering”. Say “statistical prediction”.

These are incredibly useful tools that have nothing to do with “intelligence”.

And say “model trained on plagiarised data”.

Say “bullshit generator”.

Say “internet regurgitator”.

These are also nothing to do with intelligence, but they have the added bonus of being useless, too.

Für einen zunehmend verzweifelten 5-jährigen suche ich die deutsche Fassung des Films "Ein Platz für Pluk" von 2004 - lief ein paar mal auf KiKa aber ist sonst nirgendwo im Internet und auch nicht auf DVD zu finden. Hat das vielleicht jemand als #FediEltern im Archiv?

gerne RT!

https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0382912/?ref_=nm_flmg_knf_t_1

📼 Why Is Everything Binary?

The latest briefs.video.

https://briefs.video/videos/why-is-everything-binary/

To celebrate our twenty-first anniversary, #Saxonica is having a flash sale this weekend. https://blog.saxonica.com/norm/2025/02/06-flash.html

Three kidnappings, prison and a shipwreck: Ghaith’s journey reveals the ruthless business of Europe’s migration crisis
One migrant’s torturous experience reveals how militias and traffickers profit from deadly routes across the Mediterranean from Libya
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/03/migrant-journey-traffickers-militias-europe-migration-crisis-libya-syria-mediterranean

Longest of the shots!

My mum is 90 this year and she would really like a University scarf to replace the one she's lost.
She studied medicine at Uni. of Manchester in the 1950s. Seems she was a real trail blazer, one of only 2 women in the year. And they wouldn't confirm her place until they were happy they had enough players for their rugby team!

Anyone have or know of a
Victoria University of Manchester Medical Scool
scarf.

It would make her day.

A x
Please boost.
#UniversityOfManchester
#UniversityOfManchesterMedicalSchool

Note to hachyderm.io users, who can't see this on their server (which I'm mentioning because another one just asked me about it):

the hachyderm admins blocked me personally - if you try to follow me from hachyderm, it lies and tells you this account is "suspended" - and i still have no idea why

coincidentally Nivenly, the company running hachyderm, got into an AI grift and I loudly called it an AI grift. This suggests the reasons are simple and commercial.

they have apparently denied that their AI grift was the reason but haven't said what the reason was

and they haven't contacted me at all and certainly nobody is paying me enough to bother to contact these weirdos

it's a mastodon feature: forum admins with poster's madness

so basically find a non-shitty server or spin up an akkoma yourself

feel free to copy and forward this as appropriate

edit: there was apparently a bug raised, and i'm definitely not wasting my time attempting communication with these circumlocutious scammy sounding weirdos. Perhaps you will wish to. https://github.com/hachyderm/community/issues/579

edit 2: it's their feudal pissheap and they're allowed not to like me! that they lie that my account is "suspended" and go into sub-GPT blathering when asked why is, I submit, a good reason to reevaluate hitching your wagon to their hungover seaside donkey

@llewelly @futurebird @joewynne
And AFAIK the one with the highest percentage of plant material in its diet is bagheera kiplingi, so it's named after a black panther, and that amuses me greatly.
(There was a married couple of jumping spider enthusiast who were also fans of Kipling and named at least 3 species after characters from his works. )

Anlässlich des #DiadelGalgo sind wir auch beim #Galgomarsch Berlin dabei gewesen. #Galgos und #Podencos werden jedes Jahr in Spanien zur Jagd als Werkzeuge gezüchtet und ausgebeutet. Wenn die Saison vorbei ist, werden viele von ihnen aussortiert, teilweise brutal getötet oder gequält und im besten Fall in Tötungsstationen abgegeben. Einige von ihnen schaffen es dann über Vereine in die Vermittlung und in ein besseres Leben irgendwo auf der Welt.

Wer sich für das Schicksal der Galgos interessiert, dem empfehle ich den Film "Yo Galgo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGCoIqoDnc

Wer darüber nachdenkt, bei sich einen Hund aufzunehmen: Galgos sind wahnsinnig tolle, meist ruhige und durchaus auch eigensinnige Hunde. Je nach Charakter sind sie auch geeignet für "Anfänger:innen", man sollte sich also vom Label "Tierschutz" (generell) nicht abschrecken lassen. Es gibt viele Vereine, die hier vermitteln und unterstützen (Rey kam z.B. über die Galgo-Hilfe: https://www.galgo-hilfe.de) und auch dabei helfen, den richtigen Hund zu finden. Also: #adoptdontshop

#tierschutz #tierschutzhunde

Hey #Leipzig, unsere #Foodcoop https://www.biokiste.org/ sucht neue Mitglieder. Meldet euch einfach bei mir oder unter der Kontaktadresse. Gerne boosten.

This is why 404 media is one of the few outlets we should trust w.r.t tech reporting. They're not stenographers.
https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/

Why does everyone get so excited about performance on some benchmarks when we don't know what the training data is? How do you know that they're not testing on the training set? How do you reject papers that don't tell you the splits but get so excited by these PR announcements?

Poison Ivy – so cool

I hope she's well. After Lux's death, she lives in absolute seclusion in her private life.

I wish her that she knows how they will be missed ❤️

Poison Ivy - Peter Gunn Theme

#punk #punks #punkrock #womenofpunk #poisonivy #history #punkrockhistory

Talking about biases

„So you see, COLING traveled around the whole globe during the last 60 years“

Hmmm, the northern hemisphere only, actually, no?

#COLING2025

*LZA-Stellenangebot #2 in Hannover*

Für das Projekt "Langzeitarchivierung für das Land Niedersachsen" suchen wir im LZA-Team der @tibhannover 1
Projektmitarbeiter:in, Schwerpunkt Projektmanagement und Kommunikation. TV-L 13, aktuell auf Projektlaufzeit von 5 Jahren befristet, Bewerbungsschluss ist der 18.02.2025.
Alle Infos zur stelle finden sich hier:
https://tib.eu/stellenangebot-5-2025

Die erste Stelle im Projekt habe ich gestern schon angekündigt, die dritte & letzte kommt morgen ;-)

The female voices of punk rock 🎤

For me, there is no genre of music that comes close to having such a range of personalities and voices

The greatest respect for these ladies ❤️

...and sorry for anyone I forgot

#punk #punks #punkrock #womenofpunk #history #punkrockhistory

The birds are fluffed so much they seem spherical on this cold morning. We are seeing more of them than usual because we have heated (just above freezing) water for them.

Das hier dürft ihr gerne mal rumreichen: eine entfristete Stelle in meiner IT-Abteilung.

Die Besonderheit: wir suchen eine(n) Windows-Admin, der/die offen genug ist, sich mit uns auf eine Reise hin zu einer „open source company“ zu machen. Sprich Stück für Stück Windows-Dienste in Richtung Linux zu migrieren.

Da sollte sich doch hier eine Zielgruppe finden?

https://www.karriereportal-stellen.berlin.de/Windows-Administratorin-mwd-de-j52492.html

After a five-year testing period, I can heartily recommend marrying my husband. I also recommend you don’t try to marry my husband, because I can be quietly vicious when threatened.

Happy anniversary, @ndw !

(Pic by our wonderful photographer, Liga Stevenson).