toad.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mastodon server operated by David Troy, a tech pioneer and investigative journalist addressing threats to democracy. Thoughtful participation and discussion welcome.

Administered by:

Server stats:

218
active users

#demonstrate

1 post1 participant1 post today

Q: What's the difference between a U.S. person's right to demonstrate and protest, and a Canadian person's right to demonstrate and protest?

A: Canada doesn't have an orange moron who's all butthurt about it.

Good luck out there with the No Kings / No Tyrants protests, proud USAnians!

Replied in thread

@DigitalTaoist

What most ordinary people don't understand is that "the people united will never be defeated".

The people contain more power than anything else.

The only reason *anything* has started to shift on Palestine is public outcry.

Govts are afraid of their people - as they rightly should be.

Every single person can do something, even banging pots & pans in the street or repeatedly writing to their MPs demanding action.

#ResistFascism #strike #disobey #demonstrate @palestine .

Hands Off protest in downtown Chicago draws thousands criticizing Trump's policies
Also held in the suburbs and across the country, the demonstrations took aim at the administration’s recent actions, including layoffs of federal workers, cuts in funding for social services and research, and attempts to roll back protections for transgender people.

chicago.suntimes.com/news/2025

Chicago Sun-Times · Hands Off protest in downtown Chicago draws thousands criticizing Trump's policiesAlso held in the suburbs and across the country, the demonstrations are taking aim at the administration's recent actions, including layoffs of federal workers, cuts in funding for social services and removal of protections for transgender people.

KEEP IT UP, FOLKS! Anti-#DOGE #protests at #Tesla stores target #ElonMusk’s bottom line

By RODRIQUE NGOWI and JONATHAN J. COOPER
Updated 4:07 PM EST, March 2, 2025

BOSTON (AP) — Demonstrators gathered outside Tesla stores across the U.S. Saturday to protest the automaker’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, and his push to slash government spending on behalf of President Donald Trump.

The demonstrations are part of a growing backlash in North America and Europe to Musk’s disruptive role in Washington.

Critics of Trump and Musk hope to discourage and stigmatize purchases of Tesla, the electric car company that is the world’s most valuable automaker. Liberal groups for weeks have organized anti-Tesla protests in hopes of galvanizing opposition to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and energizing Democrats still demoralized by Trump’s November victory.

“We can get back at Elon,” said Nathan Phillips, a 58-year-old ecologist from Newton, Massachusetts, who was protesting in Boston on Saturday. “We can impose direct economic damage on Tesla by showing up at showrooms everywhere and boycotting Tesla and telling everyone else to get out, sell your stocks, sell your Teslas.'"

Read more:
apnews.com/article/elon-musk-t
#BadDOGE #Divest #Demonstrate #Destroy? 😝

AP News · Anti-DOGE protests at Tesla stores target Elon Musk's bottom lineBy Rodrique Ngowi

It's #CriticalMass time again in #Munich tomorrow, on the last #Friday of the month!

#Cyclists of all kind meet up at #BayrischeStaatsoper before 6pm, to have a lazily #bikeride to the #Bavaria monument where a 2nd round through the city of #München will start by 8pm.

Come dressed in #black for a #BlackFriday, to #demonstrate that it's OK to be part of the street #traffic in whatever clothes you fancy.

@mastobikes_de @fedibikes_de @CriticalMass #CM @CriticalMassMuenchen #BurnFatNotOil

VRT: Judge rejects Ghent University’s request to evict protesters from UFO Building

“A court in the East Flemish city of #Ghent has ruled that the #proPalestinian #protesters that have been staging a sit-in at #GhentUniversity’s (UGent) UFO Building for over a month should not be evicted for the time being. … The judge did not follow the university’s reasoning and said that the activists had a #right to #demonstrate peacefully.”

VRT NWS: news · Judge rejects Ghent University’s request to evict protesters from UFO Building
#news#EU#Belgium

In one popular robot training technique, called #imitation #learning, models learn to perform tasks by, for example, imitating the actions of a human teleoperating a robot or using a VR headset to collect data on a robot.

It’s a technique that has gone in and out of fashion over decades but has recently become more popular with robots that do manipulation tasks, says Russ Tedrake, vice president of robotics research at the Toyota Research Institute and an MIT professor.
By pairing this technique with #generative #AI, researchers at the Toyota Research Institute, Columbia University, and MIT have been able to quickly teach robots to do many new tasks.

They believe they have found a way to extend the technology propelling generative AI from the realm of text, images, and videos into the domain of robot movements. 
The idea is to start with a human, who manually controls the robot to #demonstrate #behaviors such as whisking eggs or picking up plates.

Using a technique called #diffusion #policy, the robot is then able to use the data fed into it to learn skills.
The researchers have taught robots more than 200 skills, such as peeling vegetables and pouring liquids, and say they are working toward teaching 1,000 skills by the end of the year. 

Many others have taken advantage of generative AI as well. #Covariant, a robotics startup that spun off from OpenAI’s now-shuttered robotics research unit, has built a multimodal model called RFM-1.
It can accept prompts in the form of text, image, video, robot instructions, or measurements. 
Generative AI allows the robot to both understand instructions and generate images or videos relating to those tasks. 

The Toyota Research Institute team hopes this will one day lead to
🔸 “large behavior models,” 🔸which are analogous to large language models, says Tedrake
“A lot of people think behavior cloning is going to get us to a ChatGPT moment for robotics,” he says. 

In a similar demonstration, earlier this year a team at Stanford managed to use a relatively cheap off-the-shelf robot costing $32,000 to do complex manipulation tasks such as cooking shrimp and cleaning stains. It learned those new skills quickly with AI. 

Called Mobile ALOHA (a loose acronym for “a low-cost open-source hardware teleoperation system”), the robot learned to cook shrimp with the help of just 20 human demonstrations and data from other tasks, such as tearing off a paper towel or piece of tape.
The Stanford researchers found that AI can help robots acquire transferable skills: training on one task can improve its performance for others

technologyreview.com/2024/04/1

MIT Technology Review · Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?By Melissa Heikkilä