Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Proved my old-school tech prowess today:

Asked an engineer to scrape a list of company email addresses off of a website we use internally. After 10 minutes, they were still refining an LLM prompt to do it.

I used devtools to grab the JSON data, copied it into Word, edited out the surrounding array structure, then copied that into Excel to sort alphabetically, deleted the numeric keys. Ta da! Took me about 3 minutes.

I really, really worry that basic computer literacy is nearly dead.

Weirdly, as we checked out of the hotel this morning all signs of the riot-adjacent activities last night except the graffiti had been tidied away. And it’s interesting to note the presence of one tonne sacks of short planks had been prepositioned near all the fires during a public transit strike.

Conclusion: the fires were preplanned, the police response was preplanned, and they were planned by the same people (hint: not the demonstrators).

cool we got a reverse url -> torrent index going. now we need a little crawler to extract url lists from wacz archives by just skimming the zip index and grabbing just enough pieces pull them out, then populating the index becomes automatic.

so coming soon to a #sciop near you, a p2p wayback machine, where a URL can get resolved into a bittorrent-backed web archive. then we federate the sciops. and we have the federated/p2p archive dot org we deserve.

If you have a Windows 11 machine, the update they just pushed sneaks Copilot onto your machine and sets it to run at startup. I just had to uninstall it (again) when I found it running in my system tray after the mandatory reboot.

#Windows
#Windows11
#Copilot
#AI
#LLM

@mauve as someone who started online in the early 2000s: we had (semi)centralised spaces and connections born on-platform. But thinking of something like Livejournal, you didn't have a global timeline exposing you to everything anyone was posting.
In other places (thinking of Deviantart) where you had that exposure, the context was still present because the community was small (to today's standards) and very focused. I guess the same would apply to forums of the time.

First social networks I saw (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace) were weird to me because they didn't seem to have a point. No focus like "this is a community about a topic" or "this is place to blog", but just "this is a place to have a profile and friend other profiles".

A nice thing about the Fediverse is that it brings back, in some places, this "topical community" thing with servers, and a nice middle ground between small (server) and wide (fediverse)

Tag yourself, I'm Gando

#meme

hopefully there's noöne amongst my followers who needs to be told this (for reasons, ofc, of all of you being honest, law-abiding people who understand and respect the norms of their respective societies), but people who brag about how much they love breaking the law will rat you out the first chance they get, and people who try to incite you to leftistly commit crimes work for your country's domestic intelligence service

me to my wayfarers: "hey cyber shades, what's the top news on Facebook?"

my sunglasses talking like Knight Rider: "a child has built the Statue of Liberty out of trash and he requires 1,000 faves on his post. also he is a war veteran and has no legs. also it is his birthday today."

me: "this child, is he also Jesus for some reason?"

sunglasses: "yes jackdaw, the child is also Jesus."

me: "cyber shades please send a sad react and reply that this is so true and inspirational and important."

Ok so nvidia fell for the old ways but you gotta wonder what state actors are in anthropic and which country is the best at polyamory tradecraft

Was re-reading Melanie Mitchel's 2019 book, "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans", https://melaniemitchell.me/aibook/ and was relieved to (re)read how she refers to "units" instead of "neurons" in artificial neural networks. Even adds a note about doing so to avoid the dismay of neuroscientists. Indeed.

Got reminded again today of how powerful biological neurons are by Mickey London's lab latest preprint:

"What can a neuron compute", Aizenbud et al. 2026 (Segev, London)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.08.730984v1.full

The secret sauce of biological neurons? Mostly dendritic morphology:

"Bounds on the computational complexity of neurons due to dendritic morphology"
Anamika Agrawal, Michael A. Buice 2025
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.11.664448v1

A point spectacularly well made by Jones and Kording a while back:

"Can single neurons solve MNIST? the computational power of biological dendritic trees", Jones and Kording 2020
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01269

... in line with plenty of prior work, even by the same lab, like:

"On Functions Computed on Trees", Farhoodi et al. 2019
https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/31/11/2075/95669/On-Functions-Computed-on-Trees

The key ingredient? That a presynaptic neuron delivers multiple inputs across the postsynaptic neuron's dendritic tree. That enables a lot of the above's computational properties. To reproduce that, a whole multi-layer ANN is needed to match the power of a single cortical pyramidal neuron:

"Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks", Beniaguev, Segev, London 2021.
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(21)00501-8

What's more, adding biological constraints to ANNs improve the latter:

"Do Biological Constraints Impair Dendritic Computation?", Jones and Kording 2021
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452221003900

#neuroscience #dendrites #ANN #AI