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Just switched over from birdy (@kst_stadler).

Research Software Engineer at the Industrial Ecology Programme doing data wrangling for quantitative sustainability analysis.

Leading the IndEcol Digital Lab (iedl.no/), programming in , , trying and .

Originally from , living in () now.

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Industrial Ecology Lighthouse Toot

Currently (Nov 22) there is no industrial ecology content (hashtags etc.) on Mastodon. So here a beacon to help us connect, please boost to pass on.











IKEA in the spotlight: Flatpack furniture linked to ‘systematic destruction’ of Romanian forests.

Greenpeace says the company’s suppliers are benefitting from a corrupt environment in the country. IKEA has been accused of contributing to the rapid deterioration of Romania’s biologically rich forests. #ClimateChange

euronews.com/green/2024/06/09/

#Job #vacancy:

Looking 👀 for a Research Software Engineer (#RSE) for Computational Science and High Performance Computing (#HPC)
to join my Computational Science group at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter.

Details at computational-science.mpsd.mpg

Do get in touch with any questions. 👍

Picture shows our new (and currently pretty empty) HPC server room. 😀

From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.

There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.

All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.

Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.

#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism

It is essential to stop using Chrome.

Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware.

Given Google's overwhelming presence in the browser market, this is unconscionable.

We should all despise the ad-tech business, and have no sympathy for the companies getting whacked by Google's actions. But we should not permit one monopolist to replace them all.

windows 12 is just gonna be linux running microsoft edge, a bullshit ai assistant, and nothing else. all legacy apps will run in a sketchy online “classic windows emulator” and the entire UI will be web based.

following the backlash, windows 13 will be CLI only, and the cycle will begin anew.

meanwhile, mac os xi will have only one feature: displaying a pretty photograph of a mountain, rendered so inefficiently and in so much detail it takes the whole capacity of a top-of-the-line GPU. all apps will no longer be supported. hardware will be supported for 5 years of new photos every month before you have to buy a new macbook for $100,000.

before reaching 7.0, the linux kernel will split into 20 completely separate lineages, each with 10 total developers who are themselves their only users. GNOME only supports one of them. KDE is mostly buttons.

Solar Orbiter captures high resolution video of the Sun, inside Mercury's orbit.

Nature journal under attack by Brexiteers and Covid Conspiracies group. And, almost as expected, ties to a Norwegian entrepreneur.

computerweekly.com/news/366553

Top science journal faced secret attacks from Covid conspiracy theory group | Computer Weekly

One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, was the target of a two-year long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times. The group attempted to have Nature and its staff put under surveillance and investigated by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad and Japanese and Australian intelligence agencies. They met Cabinet minister Michael Gove and later asked him to arrange phone taps and electronic surveillance. One member of the group led intrusive investigations into the intimate personal life and background circumstances of senior Nature staff the group suspected of “extreme Sinophile views”. When their campaign flopped and a Covid vaccine promoted by the group  failed to reach any form of clinical testing, the group arranged for unfounded accusations against Nature magazines and staff to be published by the Daily Telegraph and on other right wing news sites. They called themselves the “Covid Hunters”. Their allegations against science reporting helped fuel an explosion in “lab leak” claims on right-wing conspiracy sites. Pushing their “extraordinary, true story” to a top Hollywood producer during 2020, the group wrote self-adulatory biographies and explained how fate had brought them together (see Box – “Hunter Heroes who became victims”). The movie proposal portrayed them as victims of imagined Chinese-led information operations, aided and abetted by an imagined network of communist fellow travellers in the west. The movie idea “has all the ingredients of a major hit”, they blagged. The producer did not write back. No movie was made. The truth was that their campaign helped flame divisive and damaging rows, potentially hindering international Covid research.

www.computerweekly.com

A discussion paper released by Statistics Norway contains standard talking-points of climate denial and a crude statistical model of selected temperature measurements which is unable to detect anything. This blog-post identifies a number of falsehoods and explains why the statistical model is flawed.

blog.indecol.no/climate-scepti

New paper out in Nature communications: the built environment (buildings, highways, streets) per capita are nearly as influential in driving GHG emissions as GDP, analyzing high resolution data from 113 countries

rdcu.be/df2sb

Industrial Ecology Lighthouse Toot

Currently (Nov 22) there is no industrial ecology content (hashtags etc.) on Mastodon. So here a beacon to help us connect, please boost to pass on.











“AI” enthusiast: i have made a chatbot that answers your questions

Software developers: you fucked up a perfectly good search engine is what you did. look at it. it's got hallucinations

@EU_Commission Portugal continues to be completely isolated from the European train network. Even the Madrid-Lisbon connection is dead. But the focus here is on building new airports.

Here's ChatGPT masterfully channeling the spirit of the Bastard Operator From Hell:

"CO2 is just a trace gas." A trace of truth is expanded, blown up as a bulging balloon of bunk.

Superficially, "a few parts per million" is appealing, effective on minds seeking a path of motivated reasoning leading to "business as usual."

But close analogies abound and hence it's -perhaps- possible to dislodge the "it's only a trace gas" climate fallacy.

Our rebuttal, is updated with a fresh full deck of analogies. Are there more? Read ours, let us know!

skepticalscience.com/at-a-glan

Starting our account in the Fediverse. We are a group of young scientists from Latin America aiming to promote networking, integrated science and soft skills.

Our main motivation is to understand and explain interactions within atmos-, bios-, cryos- and hydrosphere and how this knowledge can help us to solve the huge socio-environmental challenges we are facing.

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