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Giovanni Toffetti

@gtof.bsky.social

960 followers 2.3K following 37 posts

Father of 2 girls, senior lecturer @ZHAW🇨🇭, interested in robots 🤖, AI 🧠, cloud ☁️ https://gtoff.github.io/

gtoff.github.io

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Giovanni Toffetti @gtof.bsky.social · Nov 27

I updated my GitHub page with a showcase of our recent work in robotics: gtoff.github.io

Giovanni Toffetti

A showcase of my recent professional work

gtoff.github.io

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4d

“One of the negative consequences AI is having on students is that it is hurting their ability to develop meaningful relationships with teachers, the report finds. Half of the students agree that using AI in class makes them feel less connected to their teachers.”

Rising Use of AI in Schools Comes With Big Downsides for Students

A report by the Center for Democracy and Technology looks at teachers' and students' experiences with the technology.

www.edweek.org

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Social Media Lab @socialmedialab.ca · Jan 12

“Images are becoming so realistic, we now question everything we see online,” @Gruzd.ca, a Toronto Metropolitan University professor and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies, said. “Society cannot operate if we don’t know what’s true and what’s not.”

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 6d

The state of LLMs is messy: Some AI features (like vision) lag others (like tool use) while others have blind spots (imagegen and clocks). And the expensive "heavy thinking" models are now very far ahead of all the other AIs that most people use, capable of real work

None of this is well-documented

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Parker Butler @parkerbutler.bsky.social · 9d

Last year, CNN ran a “fact check” of Kamala HQ that claimed we were lying for saying Trump’s plan is Project 2025.

Now Trump is outright admitting it’s his plan.

Legacy media failed the country.

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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 11d

Final blog post on the visualization medium.com/@mark-riedl/...

Visualizing the Influence of Federal Funding on the AI Boom

The Transformer was invented in Google. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) was not invented in industry labs, but is most…

medium.com

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The Register @theregister.com · 13d

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling Comment Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. Here's a fascinating glimpse of the view from the other side.…

dlvr.it

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The Onion @theonion.com · 18d

Returning Jesus Christ Downed By U.S. Missile Defense 30,000 Feet Before Making Landfall

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Kate from Kharkiv @kateinkharkiv.bsky.social · 19d

There’s a widespread misconception in Western society that repelling Russian provocations would lead to war. It’s a narrative fueled by Russian propaganda. In reality, the opposite is true: Russia will continue escalating its aggression and provocations until it is stopped.

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Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · 22d

Thoughts & prayers to the people who said grocery prices were the main reason they voted for a guy who campaigned on clear and specific economic policies that would very obviously raise grocery prices if he implemented them in exactly the way he promised he would, which he did.

n pr
Grocery prices have jumped up, and there's no relief in sight
Groceries saw their biggest jump in nearly three years last month, a worrisome sign for inflation-weary shoppers. Tariffs are contributing to higher prices for imported staples like bananas and coffee.

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Barack Obama @barackobama.bsky.social · 24d

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

Washington Post Columnist Says She Was Fired for Posts After Charlie Kirk Shooting

www.nytimes.com

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Chris Paxton @cpaxton.bsky.social · 26d

Figure just raised over a billion

In this blog post i estimated that building robot GPT would be a ~$1 billion USD project for a major company if you wanted to do it all in the real world

so i guess here we go

open.substack.com/pub/itcanthi...

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Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 27d

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink. The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours. Detained by US immigration authorities for eight days, the workers and their families expressed shock, describing human rights violations and absurdities they could not have imagined as ordinary Koreans living in 2025.

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Uncle_Wolf @demiurg.bsky.social · 29d

Denmark is truly leading the way forward for Europe.
We just can't defend ourselves against the US with US-built weapons.
EU must continue on the path of not relying on US arms from now on.

NOELREPORTS @noelreports.com · 29d

Denmark has chosen the Franco-Italian SAMP/T long-range air defense system over the US Patriot, signing a $9.1B deal for 8 units - the country’s largest single defense investment, FT reports. The first system is expected to be operational already in 2025.

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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 28d

Yet more of the levers slipping into the hands of the few.

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Euromaidan Press @euromaidanpress.bsky.social · 29d

EU's Kallas: "Territorial concessions to Russia would bring more war, not less"

Kaja Kallas identified a deliberate Russian pattern of demanding non-existent rights, issuing threats, then mobilizing Western voices to offer Moscow exactly what it never possessed
euromaidanpress.com/2025/09/13/e...

EU’s Kallas: “Territorial concessions to Russia would bring more war, not less”

The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas identified a deliberate Russian pattern of demanding non-existent rights, issuing threats, then mobilizing Western voices to offer Moscow exactly what it never…

euromaidanpress.com

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Ian Bond @cerianbond.bsky.social · Sep 10

I see why NATO members don't want to call this an armed attack, ie an Article 5 contingency. But @phillipspobrien.bsky.social is right. 17 yrs after Russia invaded Georgia, Western leaders still don't understand that Putin is provoked by weakness, not strength. Deterring him will require force.

Phillips OBrien @phillipspobrien.bsky.social · Sep 10

Just sent out this free post. Russia attacked Poland last night--and the NATO response indicates institutional and national failure. They were clearly not prepared, cannot even call the Russian attack an attack, and do not understand their real security concerns. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

NATO States Have Failed

They have not prepared and do not understand their national interests

open.substack.com

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Santiago Mayer @santiagomayer.com · Sep 8

No hyperbole this is what the Supreme Court just authorized ICE to do.

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Bluesky @bsky.app · Sep 8

v1.108 is rolling out today 🚚

Now live, at long last: Bookmarks, aka Saved Posts. For all those posts you'll definitely plan to come back to!

Update the app and give it a try. The button is right down there 👇

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · Sep 6

Incredible clip of tech CEOs fawning over Donald Trump. Someone store this clip in the underground archive vault

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Pie Thagoram @piethagoram.bsky.social · Sep 7

We remember
#RejoinEU

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Sep 4

This paper finds LLMs' ability to understand that others have different beliefs (Theory of Mind) comes from 0.001% of their parameters. Break those specific weights & the model loses both its ability to track what others know AND language comprehension

Interesting implications for models (& minds?)

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Kate from Kharkiv @kateinkharkiv.bsky.social · Sep 1

Very-very final wake-up call for Europe.

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Pills of Science🧬🦋 @mattscie.bsky.social · Aug 21

Si chiede/pretende di avere esperti con visioni diverse (tipo credere nell'efficacia dell'omeopatia, negare l'efficacia dei vax ecc) per parlare di vaccini. Quindi la NASA dovrebbe considerare anche il parere dei terrapiattisti e ascoltare la loro opinione quando si tratta di missioni spaziali? 1/2

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Giovanni Toffetti @gtof.bsky.social · Aug 22

I've also had a paper on hold for a few weeks once. Just backlog apparently

Reposted by Giovanni Toffetti

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · Aug 20

Sure, you could use AI to summarize papers and explain them at a level anyone could understand... or you can turn the abstracts into music videos for no reason.

The tools are obviously not perfect yet, but the disparate elements (consistent characters, lip syncing, etc.) are evolving fast

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