Author: leobard

https://www.leobard.net/blog/about-leo-sauermann/
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LLM AIs will lead you to fact-based sources, if you are willing to pay for it

Su_G

@the_roamer @leobard @scottmiller42

An interesting observation in itself! The movement between automated finding to automated production… & the output quality degrades along the way…

A Spanish educator just published a multipart thread pulling together various AI-related data points, one of which tracked memory & another measured brain activity. Students using LLMs couldn’t quote what they wrote; & had the lowest brain activity (cf using a search function or native own brain).

As I see it then, the AI “disruption” is in the zombification direction.

2025-07-26, 04:05 0 boosts 2 favorites

@Su_G @the_roamer @scottmiller42 – IMHO the way out is that students and other LLM users can see hyperlinks to fact-checked sources to judge themselfes if a genai text is legit. Instead of marketing/ads, I would like to see micropayments to content creators. Good ol “explainable AI” rolled 🌯 into a business model.

1️⃣ Users 🙂

  • must be motivated to pay for “good ai system 🤖” and
  • compare the true cost of AI with “RTFM and use my own 🧠 to generate answer”

2️⃣ Generative AI LLM 🤖

  • must honor copyright on training data
  • must micropay author when generating content based on authors IP if author wants that
  • must fact check using the same criteria human fact checkers apply (author? who paid for this content? Original content or bias-generated by Marketing/Russians/QAnon…? Does it reference source? Other reliable source for same exists?
  • can use knowledge graphs for answer generation at IMHO 0.1% of the cost compared to an LLM

3️⃣ content creators

  • needs to add context metadata (i.e. schema.org or any other RDF vocab will do) about
  • author (= liable if this is 💩, payable if this is helpful 👍🏻)
  • copyright
  • links to sources where “facts” were copy pasted from
  • machine readable content representation (linked data, ActivityPub, …)

Micropayment for content use was first proposed by Ted Nelson in Xanadu in 1960 and has been refined in the W3C micropayment initiative : “Semantic Web and […] Micropayments provide an alternative to […] advertising as a source of revenue“

As an exercise for the interested reader I invite you to answer the question “how can that Leobard dude reply using hyperlinks and list formatting?” The rabbit hole out of which I communicate to you is exciting since 2019 and IMHO shows the author & markup solutions I outline above in action.

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How to reply from WordPress to activitypub/mastodon and mention people?

leobard

I just established a monthly sponsorship of @syncthing / syncthing.net/

Go sponsor those open source dependencies/projects that you want to keep!

2025-06-09, 18:24 0 boosts 0 favorites

This is a post to find out how to reply from WordPress to a post on ActivityPub/Mastodon/Fediverse while mentioning people using their mastodon handles. In this example I mention @leobard , @gromgull , and @bobschi trusting on our mutual goal to advance human knowledge in a sea of idiocracy by supporting open source and the fediverse.

How-to? Just mention the person in the text using the format “@ name @ example.com” (without spaces) in the article text.

WordPress ActivityPub will automagically transform this

  • to a html link when rendering on your WordPress page
  • to a mastodon link when publishing on the Fediverse
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Beton aus Müll für die Kreislaufwirtschaft: Brantner + Wopfinger

Um Müll 🗑️ wieder als Baustoff zu verwenden ♻️ braucht es ein verlässliches Verfahren. Will ich mineralische Schlacke aus der Restmüll- Verbrennung in Beton mischen, brauch ich ein Datenblatt für den Müll. In Österreich gibt es nun zertifizierte Schlacke. Jetzt kann man daraus nachhaltigen, statisch berechenbaren Beton machen. CO2 sparen. Weniger Müll. Danke an die Menschen, die gemeinsam daran gearbeitet haben: Brantner green solutions aus Krems, Wopfinger Transportbeton aus Oberwaltersdorf, MA 48 Wien, LINZ AG Bereich Abfall, Christian-Doppler-Labor TU Wien.

So eine Zertifizierung dauert und ist Aufwand 💪🏻. Gut gemacht, ihr seid Helden! 🙂🙏🏻

Continue reading “Beton aus Müll für die Kreislaufwirtschaft: Brantner + Wopfinger”
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This unique 100hz sound alleviates sea sickness

A research group led by Takumi Kagawa and Masashi Kato at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine has discovered that stimulating the inner ear with a 100hz sound reduces motion sickness afterwards. They tested it on mice and men. If you are sailing and prone to sea sickness, you may want to replicate their findings by listening to the sound for at least one minute. Here is a 100hz sine wave mp3 I made myself for you to download.

Read “A unique sound alleviates motion sickness” to learn more about this effect. I would appreciate a comment on your experience. Takumi Kagawa and Masashi Kato maybe too.

https://www.nagoya-u.ac.jp/researchinfo/result-en/2025/04/20250408-01.html

Continue reading “This unique 100hz sound alleviates sea sickness”
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the copilot delusion creates unsustainable software

The text "knowing code can lead to effective code" above LuceneSailExample.java

tante

Loving this: "The Copilot Delusion"

Quotes:
"Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, "Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it's good code. Let’s deploy it." Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down."

"The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays."

"At that point, you’re not working with a copilot. You’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded dependency graph."

"But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity."

deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusio

2025-05-23, 11:57 441 boosts 556 favorites

“The copilot delusion” is about the necessity of using your brain when programming. Stop wasting energy with shitty code. Todays temptation is to only rely on #AI assistants like GitHub CoPilot, who firmly copy the first answer from StackOverflow, believing it is the best for you. A get code that is barely working which may fix the ticket in this sprint while enshittificating the codebase.

@tante and @bobschi – thanks for sharing!

@gromgull – this article contains language and message you will probably like.

“When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning.”

“Most engineers already write bloated, abstracted, glacial code that burns CPU cycles like a California wildfire. Clean code? Ha! You’re writing for other programmers’ academic circlejerk, not the hardware. You’ve forgotten that the machine matters.”

“Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays. Milliseconds at a time, seconds at a time, each click a tax on your apathy. 50 million users have an extra 3 seconds of unnecessary lag in a day because you wanted to hit tab rather than write code?”

“[AI Code Assistant] is shouting over your shoulder, “Let me code that bit real quick, I saw it in a Slashdot comment!””

Read here:
https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion

I add my conclusions:

  • The result are the shitty apps we use every day in 2025. Apps demand the latest flagship smartphone because each app grabs 1000MB RAM, 8 CPU cores, and each installs the same 250MB dependencies — to achieve the same features that engineers were squeezing out of 50MB RAM, 1 CPU core, and 1MB of linking to platform-specific operating system call header libs on the 2008 iPhone.
  • AI enterpreneurs lure us on a trajectory leading to a year 2030 when we will waste gigawatts of electricity for AIs writing shitty code that will waste gigawatts of CPU when running – contradicting the UN sustainability goal of reducing CO2 emissions, reducing energy use, switching to renewable energy.
  • Each year we have to invest into new hardware, the latest supercomputer smartphone or laptop, to be able to run a simple webbrowser and check the weather. Software investors decided to make their profits by saving on developers. The planned obsolescence of hardware is our collective loss leading to our hardware turning into trash and landfill.

We need pull requests that make a codebase faster and simpler.

Using limited energy and CPU cycles wisely.

Making todays hardware work for us for another decade.

By understanding how minimal software can actually be.

Illustration: LuceneSail.java, a clever piece of code I and others hacked after years of learning.