Konstantin Stadler @kst@qoto.org

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

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/06/09/ikea-in-the-spotlight-flatpack-furniture-linked-to-systematic-destruction-of-romanian-fore

#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 https://computational-science.mpsd.mpg.de/vacancies.html

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.

@Microsoft email servers quarantine emails containing the NewClimate URL since Oct 17, causing widespread disruptions in the climate community's email communication. E.g. sharing the @IPCC_CH AR6 WG3 as attachment is currently not possible.

https://bit.ly/NewClimate_MicrosoftStatement

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.

The procurement contract for #JUPITER, the first EuroHPC #exascale #supercomputer to be deployed
at JSC, has been signed by @EuroHPC_JU and a consortium comprising of Eviden (Atos spin-off) and ParTec

https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/procurement-contract-jupiter-first-european-exascale-supercomputer-signed-2023-10-03-0_en

#HPC #AI

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.

https://blog.indecol.no/climate-sceptic-talking-point-published-by-statistics-norway/

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

https://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.

#IndustrialEcology
#IndEcol
#InputOutput #MultiRegionalInputOutput
#MRIO
#EEMRIO
#lifecycleassessment
#lca
#MaterialFlowAnalysis
#mfa
#QuantitativeSustainability
#sustainability

“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!

https://skepticalscience.com/at-a-glance-trace.html?utm-source=mastodon&utm-campaign=socialnetworks&term=sks

Loading bars explained:

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.