@the5thColumnist
True
But not within the same time and cost parameters.

I am now able to do studies that meet the sponsor requirements in a matter of hours or days that previously would have taken years and several hundred thousand bucks in costs.

@matthewskelton @Avner @futurebird @Urban_Hermit

@matthewskelton
I have found that NoteBook LLM is sometimes very useful as a conversation-starter with sponsors or management. We use the slideshow or audio "deep dive" discussion and it invariably gets people talking. We tee it up as "a partial take" and invite them to think about what the LLM took from the material, and what it left out.

As an aid to getting people talking, it has been very useful

@Avner @futurebird @the5thColumnist @Urban_Hermit

@Avner yep, we generate the source docs by hand or from transcripts of audio. High quality, targeted, authoritative material.

In this context NotebookLM in particular does a very good job.

(We use NotebookLM partly due to content generation options and also because it guarantees never to use input data for model training)

@mloxton @futurebird @the5thColumnist @Urban_Hermit

Elon Musk and X are once again proving why institutions should never rely on corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms to reach their people.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0589g0dqq7o

@mloxton this matches my experience: give NotebookLM a specific set of source docs, craft a specific prompt, and it can do a good job of extracting summary details, and sometimes it produces a useful analogy, too.

📄📄📄🖼️🖼️ + 💬 >> 🤖 --> 📄

We take the discipline to capture (write down) the sources and prompts so we always have an audit trail for the generated doc. And we always proofread/edit the generated doc for accuracy.

@futurebird @the5thColumnist @Urban_Hermit

@mloxton this matches my experience: give NotebookLM a specific set of source docs, craft a specific prompt, and it can do a good job of extracting summary details, and sometimes it produces a useful analogy, too.

📄📄📄🖼️🖼️ + 💬 >> 🤖 --> 📄

We take the discipline to capture (write down) the sources and prompts so we always have an audit trail for the generated doc. And we always proofread/edit the generated doc for accuracy.

@futurebird @the5thColumnist @Urban_Hermit

@futurebird

I can describe how an LLM in my QDA helps me

1. If I have a huge and new document corpus loaded, the LLM can give me a five-minute overview of the topics it discovered in the corpus, and also whether and where a topic I defined was covered. This is amazingly useful as a quick orientation, but also allows segmentation. Like if these are interviews of five different KINDS of people, the LLM can show which topics were discussed by which groups.

/2

@the5thColumnist @Urban_Hermit

I promised to share a bit more about VisiOn operating system, didn't I?

VisiCorp Visi On (or Visi-On, or VisiOn) was an early multi-tasking graphical operating system for IBM PC from 1983, released before Windows and Mac, and announced before Apple Lisa.

For those who didn't see me previously posting about it, I'm slowly working on reverse-engineering it for the purpose of home-brewing. https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/vision-sdk

But this is going to be something different! Just a review of interesting interface quirks in this early UI. You can briefly see the host OS mouse, apologies for that.

One immediately obvious thing here is "hourglass" icon. Some believe that it might have been the first OS to use hourglass mouse icon (but no, Xerox most likely had it earlier)

🧵

Rebuilding VisiCorp's Visi On UI reveals how Apple defined the GUI era

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/08/visi_on_deep_dive/

@nina_kali_nina takes a deep dive into one of the earliest PC desktops

<- by me on @theregister

Semi-regularly reminder that we not only have the technology to almost entirely eradicate airborne diseases and pandemics, it's surprisingly cheap too!

HEPA-grade air filtration costs next to nothing to deploy, requires relatively little maintenance, and can scrub the air of almost all airborne disease. We've managed to rid our water and food supplies from diseases. There are no technical hurdles to do the same for the air we breathe too!

I'm getting a LOT of new followers this weekend and today from mastodon.social that claim to be news aggregators. all created in the past 72 hours. Someone's spinning up a MONSTROUS propaganda/fake news campaign out there right now! I'm guessing it's a state level actor. Be cautious and double-check anything that sounds too good to be true or too outrageous to ignore!

I'm looking to build out the Free Fridge & Community Pantries in my town.

I'll continue to update this thread with my progress.

So, the idea is to have nodes throughout town that allow folks to "Give a Food, Take a Food". Similar to "Little Free Libraries" are to books. Folks who have extra food can drop it off there, folks who need food can grab it there.

The focus here is mutual aid, not charity. So, absolutely, if you are food insecure or hungry, utilize it, right. Beyond that though, this is a great piece of infrastructure to share extra food with your neighbors. I will go down to the free fridge we have in town, drop off some of my extra produce that I have grown, and then pick up a can of black beans if I need it for dinner that night. We're meant to contribute AND utilize the free fridge.

There are many ways to create and maintain free fridges, from something as simple as a small box or outdoor cabinet on up to full stand up refrigerators and freezers with an outdoor pantry.

In general, you want it to be a couple of things:
- Accessible to the public
- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
- Unmanned
- No restrictions on who can utilize it or take food from it - it should NOT employ any means-testing
- Receive shelf stable food and/or refrigerated food and/or frozen food

Further, you can break up the different groups that are involved in the free fridge:
- The Host
- The Maintainers
- The Community

The Host - provides a location for the fridge and pantry to be installed and accessed. They also provide electricity to power the fridge/freezer

The Maintainers - this would be my group. We source, install, maintain, repair, and clean the fridge, freezer, and pantry.

The Community - contributes food to and utilizes food from the fridge and pantry. This is important. While the host provides the site and the Maintainers keep it operational, neither one has to stock food or coordinate utilization. The community does it themselves.

Having it split up like this is nice. Can folks from the Host group maintain it? Certainly. But extrapolating it allows for ease of use.

So. Keeping it stocked is up to the community. I've seen it stocked by gardeners who have extra produce (Zucchini turns folks into socialists is the joke! You just grow sooooo much you end up LOSING FRIENDS when you try to push it off on others!). I've seen it stocked through Food Rescue efforts. Some families buy extra from the grocery store and this is a great place to drop it off. I've even seen the local Food Bank drop off extra food when they had left overs from a food distribution.

Keeping it utilized is also easy. You don't want the fridge to stay stocked, right. You want it to stay in the fridge for as short a period of time as possible before someone comes and grabs it. Heck! I've seen a food rescue of fresh produce from a farmer's market vendor be dropped off at a free fridge and then claimed by several families even before it had a chance to be placed physically into the fridge! This is ideal. One fridge and pantry needs to serve the local neighborhood. That's many many families. It can only do so if its filled up and then utilized multiple times a day.

Next post, I'll put some resources on starting your own in your town.

#freeFridge #foodScarcity #foodSecurity #postScarcity #solarPunk #mutualAid

È morto Martin Parr, grande dispiacere, ma rimangono le sue strabilianti foto
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/07/mundane-magnificent-martin-parr-chip-shop-cathedral-cheese-sandwich-britishness

In the Starfleet Technical Manual, there is a throwaway detail of the LCARS user interface that when it is upgraded, users can still utilize the previous several versions. This is because their work is mission-critical and it is unacceptable to compromise the mission by forcing unfamiliar changes; eventual retraining is part of their job, but the flexibility allows them to take the retraining at their own pace.

I think about this from time-to-time and how this is still a sci-fi idea that is seen all too rarely in how we do actual computer UIs.

#StarTrek #LCARS #UI

Trump’s new National Security Strategy openly says the quiet part:

🇺🇸 Break the EU
🇺🇸 Weaken NATO
🇺🇸 Boost far-right parties like AfD
🇺🇸 Force Europe to bend to US economic interests

This isn’t an “ally”. It’s a hostile power trying to pull Europe apart from within.

#politics #EU #Europe #Trump

After about 100 posts from The Karen of Darkness claiming that the EU is censoring social media, Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski has had enough.

#artAdventCalendar, Dec 6th: winter landscape (2/6): Jupiter rising over a local reservoir. Fresh snowfall. Which of course happened the day *after* we had the aurora visiting.

(Edited bc I'm aroace and therefore can't do dates)

How UI degrades over time.

Top (Windows 95): great contrast, obvious shapes. Instantly readable.

Middle (Windows 11): shapes are still self-explanatory, but contrast is gone.

Bottom (Windows 11 Insiders): what am I even looking at? The only shape I can understand here is the Run button. Barely visible, though.

Then, on the left, there’s another something that says Run and has an icon. What is it? A window title? Another button? Why does it have to say Run twice?
... 1/3

I feel like the general populace might not realize the importance of this idea that @pluralistic shares:

what Dan Davies calles an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.

this human (sometimes only nominally) in the loop is central to law as a whole not being broken

it's also of utmost importance for weapons of war, where AI actually is having life and death impact right now, with non-hypotheticals like "how do we make sure the system doesn't kill innocents without repercussions"

because if there's no repercussions the system will end up externalizing on the way to maximizing other metrics

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

#AI #accountability

In case you or your neighbor or family member is considering not vaccinating a kiddo, please take this into consideration:

When a child is in my ER at 2 am with fussiness and a fever, and we can’t identify a cause, the next step heavily depends on whether they are vaccinated or not. If they are vaccinated, risk is low. If not, we start talking about doing lumbar punctures, blood cultures, and other invasive tests, because they are at risk of meningitis and other serious infections.