Robotistry

Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com.

Disabled by #LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in #Robotics (not LLMs) via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817.
Located in the Canadian Maritimes.

Avatar: Braitenberg Vehicle 2b

Pronouns: she/her
Robotistry Consulting: https://robotistrycrs.com
Patient-Led Research Collaborative: https://patientresearchcovid19.com

Last Notes

2026-10-10 00:27:47 UTC

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I don't understand the poll.
"Is A more important than B" is a yes/no question, not a "mostly A" question.
The poll options are different sides of the same die. One isn't more important than another - by definition they're all different takes on the same question and equally important.
I think it's important that servers have different moderation policies because the whole point of the structure is to enable self-organizing relationships based on moderation policies that establish and enforce group culture.
As long as policies differ, federation (and lack thereof) will self-organize servers into clusters with roughly similar culture - roughly similar notions of what is and is not acceptable.
This creates social groups where people know what to expect and minimizes within-group disruption and bad behavior, while recognizing and supporting the diversity of the users' needs and expectations.
In order for this to work at all, each server must be free to determine its own moderation policy, its own acceptable behavior, and its own position on the continuum. Only then will it find the cluster that its culture fits best with.
I think there needs to be room for a wide variety of moderation policies, but I think it's most important that there not be any kind of "official policy" on the subject because otherwise (a) the self-organizing piece will fail and (b) we introduce enormous opportunities for political capture, power consolidation, and manipulation.

2026-09-25 22:38:59 UTC

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Rabbits - masters of shunning through body language.

2026-09-14 18:18:42 UTC

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Adult human size, human-in-a-costume form factor version? Absolutely. Deeply, deeply unsettling.
Original illustrations? No more unsettling than a Who or a Sneetch.

2026-09-05 11:41:09 UTC

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I played with these for a while. They were fun repetitive little puzzles that didn't make my brain hurt.
I found the site and clicked through to find ... more nice little repetitive puzzles that _wouldn't_ make my brain hurt if the <expletives deleted> who created them hadn't decided that the humans *really really _needed_* a fancy video game handheld backdrop and little audio clicks and chirps whenever you press a button, each one of which exacerbate my pounding-but-only-stabbing-with-auditory-stimuli headache.
And provided ZERO settings controls to turn them on and off.
(a) I am not here for their self-gratifying "ooh, it's prettier now, and listen, we made a soundtrack!" bullshit. I am here for the puzzles. The assumption that people who like to solve puzzles need auditory feedback when the button has been clicked is WRONG. People who like to solve puzzles need buttons that take actions that enable you to eventually solve the puzzle. That's it.
(b) They have made their puzzles unusable for me.
(c) There is NO mechanism to contact the creators and complain about this bullshit on the website. The only contact mechanism is the set of social media icons at the bottom of the page. No, I am not joining a Discord or X and having to cope with random feeds of garbage I'm not interested in just to tell you that you made a bad design decision that could easily be fixed.
I HATE that complaint mechanisms are now "air your dirty laundry in public".

2026-08-26 00:18:07 UTC

Another entry in the decline of #IEEE.
Until now, my IEEE membership has come with an @ieee.org email account. For decades, it was an alias I could forward wherever I wanted. Then it was an account I could forward. Then it was some kind of Google thing (never really understood that) and I had to log in to google to send emails to mailing lists.
Today I was informed that they are separating the email accounts from the main subscription and charging $40/year for them. There is no option for an alias.
There are a lot of other google-related things that fee includes, none of which I use, and none of which I even knew were being provided.
All of my ieee-related services - access to collaboration tools, membership in technical committees, journal and society subscriptions, access to Overleaf - is all mediated through this account. They have literally spent the last four years forcing people who aren't members to get these emails in order to use freely accessible online services.
I am so frustrated and I'm struggling to know how to get this across to them, since the last email I sent to their help desk got a "you must give us personal information to prove your humanity before we will respond" auto-reply.
I *hate* this timeline.

2026-08-05 11:46:34 UTC

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I really don't think the people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for the Democratic candidate are the reason Trump won.
Trump won because about a third of the US population wanted him to win, badly enough that they acted against the apathy, exhaustion, and bureaucratic barriers that prevent so many US voters from participating.
There is plenty of blame to go around. It primarily rests
- with the people who voted for him,
- with the Republican politicians who refused to impeach him, who elevated him and supported his second candidacy, and who consistently failed to improve accessibility of voting and regulation of political money,
- with the justices who refused to apply the law that would have rendered him ineligible for office,
- with the members of the electoral college who ratified his election without addressing his legal eligibility, and
- with the media ecosystems willfully pushing propaganda.
People whose personal ethics prevented them from choosing the lesser of two evils are negligible against those forces.

2026-07-10 08:51:08 UTC

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But you didn't define a "level of distribution" in the poll.
If you don't include your assumptions, and you have no information on what assumptions the respondents were making, you haven't defined the "it" that people want or don't want.
If you are making assumptions that are directly contrary to an existing default paradigm (e.g. OP control of reply posts in threads vs. individual control of posts), you can't trust that the respondents interpreted the question the way you intended.
Having worked through it, I know I don't want it under any assumptions.
But you have no way of knowing whether your respondents have done that or whether they just clicked on the basis of "that sounds cool/terrible".
I hope you're not using polls like this to justify pushing for feature changes. They don't generate information about whether "people want it" or not. They just tell you whether people liked the sound of the phrase.

2026-07-08 10:54:19 UTC

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I don't understand how this would make anything better.
I post to "friends of friends". The people who follow my followers see it, but not the people who follow them:
me -> sep1 -> sep2 X sep3
Someone in sep2 replies to my post as "friends of friends".
me: can see my post and the reply
sep1: can see my post and the reply
sep2: can see my post and the reply
sep3 (follows sep2): can see the reply
sep4 (follows sep3): can see the reply
Now say sep3 replies to sep2's post as "friends of friends".
me: can see my post, sep2's reply, but not sep3's reply.
sep1: can see all three posts
sep2: can see all three posts
sep3: can see all three posts
sep4: can see all three posts
sep5 (follower of sep4): can see only sep3's reply
All this does is further fragment the visibility of content in discussion threads that eventually end up public.
Before we start getting into questions like this, how about we establish whether you're assuming reply control is a thing - whether visibility of replies can be limited to visibility of initial post by the OP.
If the answer is no, then all this does is further fragment already confusing public threads.
If the answer is yes, then this is effectively establishing group private message threads where by definition some members either don't know or don't like each other.
I don't like either option.

2026-06-19 14:56:20 UTC

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I don't actually think there would be a huge increase in crime.
I don't think there would be a substantial decrease in actual crime either unless funds currently spent on police departments were repurposed to support people currently engaging in crimes of desperation.
The question I have is not "What will we do when the world descends into chaos", but "What will the individual whose home has just been broken into do? Will there be a mechanism to identify the housebreaker and stop them from doing it again or from asking for protection money?"
If you abolish the police, there will still be segments of society with a privileged relationship to the exercise of violence - they will be the thugs (the people who are physically able to exercise violence) and the wealthy (the people who are able to pay thugs to exercise violence).
Other changes would need to be made in order for a society without police to function. I don't know what they would look like.

2026-06-18 11:07:14 UTC

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My point is that there's a disconnect between what their foundational purpose is (scholarship) and what you want them to provide (job prospects for individuals).
Which means that university program changes won't address your concern - they aren't designed to solve that problem.
If you aren't saying that universities should be doing a better job of (a) preparing people for jobs or (b) connecting student investment to future employability, what are you saying?

2026-06-18 09:59:37 UTC

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There's no such thing as "reliably get you an interesting job."
Every job has boring and interesting roles, and whether you luck into an interesting one is heavily dependent on things like whether you are the kind of person who is interested in many things or not.
I believe you are saying that one role of a university education is to provide job preparation, and that universities should be clear about which programs lead to jobs in that field and which don't. (Sub-text is that there is an implicit quid pro quo, where the university is taking your money on the understanding that you will receive training in something that will enable you to get an interesting job.)
But universities don't have that information. Only the job market could know which jobs are likely to exist for recent university graduates in the future, when they graduate, and recent events have been pretty clear that the job market sucks at having that information.
And universities aren't designed as stepping stones to a good career. They have hundreds of years of historical purpose as a reservoir of expertise where the development, collection, and dissemination of knowledge and understanding takes place. Job preparation is a side effect, not a foundational purpose. The foundational purpose is answering questions.

2026-06-10 16:22:05 UTC

There is a fundamental flaw in the idea that consciousness can be defined "functionally" (i.e. "it is what it does").
Consciousness is a purely internal state - we infer it in others through communication, but it is fundamentally something someone experiences about themself, not something defined by how other people perceive them.
Because it is an internally defined property, it *cannot* be defined on the basis of "what it does". It must be defined, at least in part, on the basis of "what it knows".
To take a simple example from robotics:
I have a robot with one gripper and two sensors that moves through its environment. One sensor (A) tells the robot whether its gripper is full or empty. The other sensor (B) tells the robot whether or not it is in the presence of something its gripper can pick up (an object, P).
The robot has three rules.
1. If no P, move in a random direction.
2. If gripper is empty and P sensed, pick up object and then move in a random direction.
3. If gripper is full and P sensed, drop object and then move in a random direction.
This robot has no concept of anything in its world except P/not P, gripper full/empty, and "move in a random direction".
Yet, externally, the effect of these rules is that the robot builds piles of objects [1].
Attributing consciousness to an LLM is the equivalent of saying our robot *intends* to build piles of objects.
1/3
Triggering article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/nobody-knows-what-theyre-talking
#LLMs #consciousness #robotics #theoryofmind

2026-06-02 13:54:08 UTC

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Your post came across my feed alone, and before I clicked through, my first thought was
"But .. isn't accurate measurement kind of important? And straight lines? I still use a ruler even though it's been years since grade school."

2026-05-21 17:36:59 UTC

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Depends on fabric and context.
Expensive fabric (any colors) worn to a special occasion? Spiffy.
Bright red in cheap fabric, clip-on bow tie to go to work at the DMV? Ridiculous.

2026-04-21 23:43:33 UTC

My Verification of Autonomous Systems book is finally out!
In addition to contributed chapters on theoretical and practical aspects of verifying autonomy*, the editors contributed an introduction on stakeholder perspectives and a chapter on the specific challenges autonomy introduces to verification.
Each chapter is cross-referenced to e challenges it addresses in a handy table to help readers find the information most useful to them.
I'm really proud of all our authors! So many thanks to everyone who contributed^, especially my co-editors, Mae Seto, Don Sofge, and John Sustersic!
E-book now available for download and hard copy coming soon!
* This book is about verifying autonomous embodied robots, not LLMs or AI models.
^ No AI was used in the generation of this book's content.
Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-88546-4
#Robotics #AutonomousSystems #Verification #VerificationOfAutonomy #Robots #AutonomousRobots #CyberPhysicalSystems #RobotTesting #FormalMethods #Modeling #Simulation

2026-04-20 10:31:21 UTC

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Re: the "democratization" argument.
I am not convinced this is a thing.
My ability to program has been impaired by long covid. I am occasionally able to sustain hand writing and debugging code for up to 15 minutes at a time, up to an hour a day, up to a few weeks.
There are lots of personal use programs I would like to create - games that don't further impair my cognitive capacity; a pacing assistant that can identify the features that my family uses to catch when I'm overdoing it and let me know; something to track not only my symptom severity but exertion type and capacity without me having to do duration math in a spreadsheet.
But let's work through the practica scenario where I try to write something with the help of an LLM.
Most will skip decomposing their idea and developing a spec for what they want and assume that knowing it when they see it will be enough.
Let's say I use a free model to (slowly!) iteratively generate a program that does the thing.
My app breaks because <software update> and I have to buy an annual subscription to that service to fix it.
The free LLM adds a created-by hash to my app. 3 years later, new rule: "You used the free app to build it? Our bad, you need to pay rent to let your app run."
Captured, not democratized.

2026-04-09 15:00:58 UTC

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This is one of the things grade school should be *for* - ensuring adults have basic process knowledge across a range of disciplines. Cooking, woodworking, sewing and mending, visual art, dance, cleaning, music, sculpture, managing one's finances, gardening, household repair and maintenance, metalworking....
(I'm still salty that as a girl, I had to take cooking and sewing and wasn't allowed to take woodworking and metalworking. I eventually learned woodworking, but metalworking seems so *cool*!)