Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

For the last year and a half, DoorDash has been silent as their delivery drivers have been hunted and even killed in the streets by ICE and other federal police.Now, the company has come out in vocal support of H.R. 9720, a blatant attack on communities here in Washington DC. This legislation would strip away basic power from DC's local elected government. DoorDash is pushing for it because they don't want to pay a 20-cent fee for food access programs for low-income families. All those things are not okay with us. DC communities are calling on all allies to #DeleteDoorDash until our demands are met.

The demands: 01 Immediately withdraw your support for H.R. 9720. 02 Issue a public statement against ICE and other federal police who are hunting and killing delivery drivers. 03 State publicly that the "DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force" should end.

jovo2021 has added a photo to the pool:

The Atrium
Federation Square, Melbourne

I've been coming to this place for more than 20 years, either to take photographs or to go to the art gallery, entered on the ground floor. On this last trip, I discovered a walkway at the top of the stairs that allows you a different view of the place entirely. Just goes to show, you should always keep your eyes open.

John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:

North Lakes is a very large housing development on previously rural land in Moreton Bay City Council area which is the next local government area heading north from Brisbane. The massive planned community of now multiple suburbs is centred around both the lake and a large town area. There is a beautiful walk around it where birds and Eastern Water Dragons thrive. This is one quiet end.

In an effort to "watermark" text that Claude has generated and comply with the EU AI Act, Anthropic unveiled a plan on Friday to modify its bots' choice of words in a way that would be detectable as AI. Traditional watermarks are patterns or images overlaid on currency, postage, or official documents as an assertion of authenticity. In the digital realm, the term is more flexible and can refer to a variety of techniques for applying an identifier to electronic data. Anthropic's approach involves influencing inconsequential word choices made by its models, a technique introduced in Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text paper. To oversimply things, large language models work by predicting the next word in a sequence of words. The AI biz explains that while composing sentence output like "The weather today was cold and…", a model like Claude might respond with words like "cold" or "gray" and would be unlikely to respond with a word like "sugary." That's the theory, but when actually asked to complete that sentence, Claude Opus 4.8 went a bit overboard: "…crisp, the kind of cold that nips at your fingertips and turns your breath to little clouds. The sky was a pale, washed-out blue, and everything felt sharp and clear. "Want me to take it somewhere specific — cozy, gloomy, cheerful? Or keep going with the same tone?" But remove whatever training has been applied to promote engagement and simulate literary style, and that's basically what Claude is doing here – predicting the next word in a sequence. Anthropic asserts that in most cases, the example sentence could be completed by either "cold" or "gray" and "the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way." The watermark gets generated by deviating from the predicted word to something else. A different source of randomness is used and that can be detected with a digital key. As Google DeepMind researchers explain in their paper, "Generative watermarking works by carefully modifying the next-token sampling procedure to inject subtle, context-specific modifications into the generated text distribution. Such modifications introduce a statistical signature into the generated text; during the watermark detection phase, the signature can be measured to determine whether the text was indeed generated by the watermarked LLM." Anthropic insists this will be done with low-stakes passages in a way that won't alter the meaning. "In internal testing, we’ve seen no impact of watermarking on the content, level of creativity, or readability of Claude’s text," the company said, adding that in a controlled study, human raters saw no difference in quality between watermarked and unwatermarked answers. That assumption hinges on not applying the watermark to any consequential text. As Anthropic puts it, "Watermarking is sparser on factual passages where there are fewer choices that can be made without decreasing the accuracy of the text." The biz goes on to say that the situation is similar with code – the watermarking algorithm can't simply start swapping method names. In the context of literature, the notion that some words are interchangeable is likely to raise a few hackles. While it may be a satisfying thought experiment to imagine Claude emitting, "It was the best of times, it was the least of times…" or "Telephone me Ishmael", anyone trying to pass off generated text as serious writing probably should face whatever social backlash watermarking may entail. On the plus side, Anthropic's flavor of watermarking isn't excessively intrusive. It doesn't involve any personally identifying information and only serves to indicate that Claude was probably involved at some stage of the creation of the marked text. What's more, the technique is expected to be only semi-effective. In its FAQs, Anthropic points out that some amount of editing should erase the watermark. "Light editing probably won’t remove the watermark completely; a complete rewrite where every word is replaced will," the company said. "In the latter case, of course, it’s arguable whether the text can any longer be described as AI-generated." In all likelihood, Anthropic doesn't care if its watermarking scheme can be defeated. The company's post makes clear that it is doing so as a matter of legal compliance and has chosen a solution that doesn't raise costs. "Watermarking has a negligible impact on the speed of models, and because it produces no extra tokens, the model is the same price to serve and use," the biz said. Hey Claude, what's another word for performative compliance? ®

uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA