Russian general is killed in Moscow.

- Top Bluesky searches produce media sources (NYT, Guardian)
- Twitter algorithm results: Crazypants conspiracy tweets

Twitter's advantage used to be breaking news. No longer.

Serious pressure on OpenAI. Mid-size models are close to and exceeding GPT-4o model performance in certain use cases.

Google's Gemini 2 Flash looks *fantastic*. Llama 3.3 70B is a big step up for open weights models. Claude Sonnet 3.5 has been killing GPT models on coding tasks for a while now.

South Africa is making progress with its land reform
wandilesihlobo.com/2024/12/09/s...

Doing some research into folding proteins (making an omelette)

All Protocol Observed

Welcome to Issue 185 of The Continent

France isn't having a great month. This week, its government collapsed. And last week, not one but two of its former African colonies told it to get lost. A lot of western analysts are blaming Russia. This misses the point.

bit.ly/TC185

The deep goal of bluesky is to decentralize the social internet so that every individual controls their experience of it rather than having it be controlled by 5 random billionaires. Everyone thinks they signed up for a demuskified twitter...we actually signed an exciting and bizarre experiment.

ML practitioners have forgotten a fundamental lesson from statistics: correlation does not imply causation. Not only do most state-of-the-art methods neglect this crucial principle, but by doing so they often produce nonsensical or flawed causal models, akin to social astrology or physiognomy.

No want to be awake.

Before & After: I don’t think people realize the extent to which parked cars degrade public space.

Just my 2 cents. But my goal is to ignore the trolls. Give them zero attention. Block them if they annoy me.

I think the worst thing we can do on this site is re-create the ad hominem/ personal attacks that occur across comments on Twitter/insta/tiktok/ etc

There’s one thing I know for sure after 33 years working in cities all over the world — there’s nothing inevitable or unchangeable about the way your city is. Your city is the result of decisions & choices. Like every city. Different decisions or choices could have been made, and STILL can be made.

CONTAINMENT PROCEDURE:
The object's effect is subdued by shutting front door.
DESCRIPTION:
If an entity approaches the object while door is open, music from [REDACTED] begins playing with sounds of people celebrating. However, open windows display no signs of life. If entered, a human's skin is...

Bluesky tip for newbies: Bluesky has no real algorithm. Likes here do nothing but show the poster that you enjoyed their content.

That kindness is always going to be appreciated by creators, but if you want to help to boost something here, you have to repost it so others see it. 🙂

I learned some stuff about Bluesky I did not know by reading this.

Maybe worth passing it on to others so we can all start getting the full benefit of the 🦋.

AI is advancing every day.

You know you've settled in a new city when you don't go for your dental checkups when you visit family in the city you grew up in.

What are the farmers planning?!?!!

Today in relatable science: Gulls making a mysterious daily trip that turned out to be to a potato chip factory

What is the strategy for getting a Skyfeed that is full of your interests?
Looking for South African content, Swedish content, science, farming, AI & Ml.