Their Rule 4:

No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism. We follow German law; don’t question the statehood of Israel.

Europe@feddit.org removed my comment for de-tangling the conflation of antisemitism and anti-zionism. A dangerous conflation that is genuinely antisemitic and fuels antisemitic hate as it conflates the actions of Israel and Zionism to all Jewish people and Judaism.

This prioritization of the German definition, the adopted IHRA definition, is promoting antisemtitism and is diametrically opposed to the 'No antisemitism' aspect of the rule. The definition has been condemned by the writer of the definition, a multitude of human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch (HRW), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), B’Tselem, Peace Now, and Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), and over 120 leading scholars of anti-semitism.

::: spoiler Germany Is Trying to Combat Antisemitism. Experts Warn a New Resolution May Do the Opposite

Fifteen Israeli nongovernmental organizations, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, B'Tselem and Peace Now, issued an open letter in September stating their concern that the resolution, especially the IHRA definition, could be weaponized to "silence public dissent."

This could also affect Jewish voices speaking out for Palestinian rights and opposing the occupation, they added. "Paradoxically, the resolution may therefore undermine, not protect, the diversity of Jewish life in Germany," the letter argued.

• archive.is/iyARK

:::

::: spoiler Rights groups urge UN not to adopt IHRA anti-Semitism definition

"The IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism, including in the US and Europe,” the letter said.

US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Israeli rights group B’Tselem, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) were among the signatories

The letter is the latest attempt by human rights advocates to urge the UN not to adopt the IHRA definition. In November, more than 120 scholars called on the world body to reject the definition, due to its “divisive and polarising” effect.

• aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/3/1…

:::

::: spoiler 128 scholars ask UN not to adopt IHRA definition of anti-Semitism

In a statement published on Thursday, the 128 scholars, who include leading Jewish academics at Israeli, European, United Kingdom and United States universities, said the definition has been “hijacked” to protect the Israeli government from international criticism

• aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/3/1…

:::

::: spoiler Why the man who drafted the IHRA definition condemns its use

The drafter of what later became popularly known as the EUMC or IHRA definition of antisemitism,including its associated examples, was the U.S. attorney Kenneth S. Stern. However, in written evidence submitted to the US Congress last year, Stern charged that his original definition had been used for an entirely different purpose to that for which it had been designed. According to Stern it had originally been designed as a ”working definition” for the purpose of trying to standardise data collection about the incidence of antisemitic hate crime in different countries. It had never been intended that it be used as legal or regulatory device to curb academic or political free speech. Yet that is how it has now come to be used. In the same document Stern specifically condemns as inappropriate the use of the definition for such purposes, mentioning in particular the curbing of free speech in UK universities, and referencing Manchester and Bristol universities as examples. Here is what he writes:

The EUMC “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom, and applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the university [Manchester] mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat [ambassador Regev] complained that the title violated the definition.[See here]. Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university [Bristol] then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like. [square brackets added – GW]

• jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/ar…

:::

Lei è Flohra, una coccinella molto speciale, ed è la mascotte della nostra app

Flohra, l’app Android del riuso, è pronta per essere testata. L’app consente di visualizzare le istanze Flohmarkt come @fedimercatino
Se non hai ancora un account Flohmarkt, puoi sempre utilizzare la comunità Lemmy @Il Mercatino del Fediverso 💵♻️ anche dal tuo account Mastodon
#Flohra è un client open source basato su Kotlin Multiplatform e Compose Multiplatform che consente di accedere alle istanze basate su #Flohmarkt, un ambiente federato sviluppato da @midzer per creare nel #Fediverso un’alternativa etica e federata a eBay.

Gli annunci pubblicati su Flohmarkt sono visibili per tutti gli utenti ch hanno un account sui social del Fediverso, come Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Misskey o Pleroma

Per il momento Flohra è disponibile solo su Android, e chi vuole istallare l’ultima release alpha può farlo a questo link:

https://codeberg.org/RocketInSpace/Flohra/releases/tag/0.1.0-alpha02

NB: Al momento le funzionalità sono in sola lettura, ma prevediamo implementarne altre a breve.

Per chi è curioso, ecco un po’ di schermate:

Flohra, la schermata iniziale e l’accesso ai contenuti dell’istanza locale o delle istanze federate

Flohra: le funzionalità di scorrimento laterale e la ricerca per tag

Flohra, la schermata dei preferiti (con tanto di scorrimento laterale) e la schermata delle impostazioni

Vuoi segnalare un errore o dare un suggerimento? Scrivici su Friendica, Twitter, Mastodon o sul gruppo telegram Comunicazione Pirata

Segui il canale di InformaPirata

informapirata.it/2025/05/12/fl…

informapirata

2025-05-12 12:34:42

Flohra, l’app del riuso, consente di visualizzare le istanze Flohmarkt come Fedimercatino. Ecco come scaricarla

Ecco un’app open source per vusualizzare gli annunci di prodotti usati attraverso la piattaforma libera e federata Flohmarkt

informapirata.it/2025/05/12/fl…

#Fedimercatino #Fediverso #Flohmarkt #Flohra #Mercatino #Riuso

[ap_content

Flohra, l’app del riuso, consente di visualizzare le istanze Flohmarkt come Fedimercatino. Ecco come scaricarla

Ecco un'app open source per vusualizzare gli annunci di prodotti usati attraverso la piattaforma libera e federata Flohmarkt

^{informapirata}

There’s this weird phrase “agentic AI” which looks weid. But it’s a sign for how bad the state of the bubble is: Software agents are a very old concept, they are simple systems provided with a target function to optimize that operate somewhat autonomously. This fits in well with modern “AI” systems who can be used to either extract data to operate on or might provide a few newish modes of interacting with other systems. So why not call them “Agents” but use the construct “agentic AI”?

The “AI” bubble is in trouble. Investment in data centers goes down, there still is no realistic business case, most people outside of LinkedIn still don’t much appreciate the slopification of the world. The only thing keeping the hype alive is momentum. First you had LLMs/generative AI, then came “reasoning models” who also hallucinated a chain of thinking/reasoning that might look like something that could have lead to the output (it is important to realize that this is still just a random string, nothing that has anything to do with cognitive processes). There’s always the next thing behind the horizon.

Problem is that the next thing when it comes mostly is the same thing we have: Maybe better at a few things, worse at a few others, maybe a bit cheaper, maybe also more expensive. And often: A disappointment when compared to the massive promises that predated their actual release. To not have that disappointment settle in, you need a new thing: “We never cared about this model really, it’s just a thing, we are actually working on …”

We see that a lot. Fabrications/hallucinations have been “soon gone” for a while now because that’s how software works, right? Bugs get removed. (Problem is that hallucinations are a structural property of those systems, they can be removed just as well as human beings’ need to breathe.) So when you read “agentic AI” you have to read it as scaffolding.

The “agentic” part promises that something new will happen in “AI”. Something more than “we can now use those systems in automation pipelines a lot easier”. That’s just a bit of application and as soon as you are on the application level, you need to really talk about revenue and all those nasty things. But if “agentic AI” is “on the horizon” you can still keep the momentum going for a few more months, for another round of investments. “Agentic AI” will be deprecated in summer or early fall to coin a new term describing the same processes of automation.

Because it’s never about the tech, it is about the political project.

tante

2025-03-16 12:59:12

It’s all hallucinations

The discourse on “AI” systems, chat bots, “assistants” and “research helpers” is defined by a lot of future promises. Those systems are disfunctional or at least not working great right now but there’s the promise of things getting better in the future.

Which is how we often perceive tech to work: Early versions might be a bit wonky, but there’s constant iteration and work going on to improve systems to be more capable, more robust and maybe even cheaper at some point.

The most pressing problem for many modern “AI” systems, especially the generative systems that are all the rage these days are so-called “hallucinations” which is a term describing when an AI system generates incorrect information. Think a research agent inventing a paper to quote from that doesn’t exist for example (Google’s AI assistant telling you to put glue on pizza is not a hallucination in that regard because that is just regurgitating information from Reddit that every toddler would recognize as a joke). Hallucinations are the big issue that many researchers are trying to address – which mixed results. Methods like RAG are shifting the probabilities a bit but are still not solving the problem: Hallucinations keep happening.

But I think that this discourse misses an important thing: Anything an LLM generates is a hallucination.

That doesn’t mean that everything LLMs generate is incorrect, far from it. What I am referencing is what hallucinations are actually defined as: A hallucination is a perception you have that is not connected to any actual stimulus. You hallucinate when you perceive something in the world that you have no sensor data for.

The term hallucination itself is an anthropomorphization of those statistical systems. They don’t “know”, or “think” or “lie” or do any such things. They iteratively calculate the most probable set of words and characters based on the original data. But if we look at how it is applied to “AI”s I think there is a big misunderstanding because it creates a difference between true and false statements that just isn’t there.

For humans we separate “real perceptions” from hallucinations by the link to sensor data/stimulants: If there is an actual stimulant of you feeling a touch it’s real, if you just think you are being touched, it’s a hallucination. But for LLMs that distinction is meaningless.

A line of text that is true has – for the LLM – absolutely no different quality than one that is false. There is no link to reality, no sensor data or anchoring, there’s just the data one was trained on (that also doesn’t necessarily have any connection to reality). If using the term hallucination is useful to describe LLM output it is to illustrate the quality of all output. Everything an LLM generates is a hallucination, some just might accidentally be true.

And in that understanding the terminology might actually be enlightening, might actually help people understand what those systems are doing and where it might be appropriate to use and – more importantly – where not.

#ai #hallucination

perception in the presence of no external stimuli found, but characteristic of true perception

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}