Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

I was particularly impressed by the High School makerspace stand - creative kids doing all sorts of recycling and enterprise. They collect and shred waste plastic and injection mould it into new things (like my gorgeous flowerpot which used to be milk bottle tops) using machines with open source designs (yes you can get the plans and build your own)

@lpoolmakefest

If people think American scientists are somehow going to land in Europe, I've got news for you about the difference between millions and billions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01629-4?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20250703&utm_source=nature_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CONR_41586_AWA1_GL_DTEC_054CI_TOC-250703

As our cities get hotter and hotter, dark coloured buildings make no rational sense, even if you like that aesthetic (I do).

The same goes for dark coloured roofs.

And dark coloured streets and parking lots with dark coloured asphalt.

That really should be obvious.

Shin Godzilla
Estampe en trois plaques
Dispo en huit exemplaires
Dimensions de la gravure: 15*21 cm

Boutique: https://levilain.fr/produit/shin-godzilla/

#shingodzilla #mastoart #linocut #godzilla #kaiju

A judge has ruled in favor of Meta, saying training AI from copyrighted and pirated books is fair use.

In a similar case a judge ruled in favour of Anthropic.

It is a sad day for book writers. You have been robbed of revenue by the world’s richest people. They will make tons of money while book writers struggle to pay rent and food. There is no justice for artists and writers. My heart goes out to them.

Step on snek

#linocut #catsofmastodon #mastoart #fediart

Some comments on "Creative Commons".

1. They released an "AI Signals" proposal today. I hate it. I will say nothing here further.

2. However simultaneous (per IA?) with posting this proposal, they also posted a document titled "Using CC-Licensed Works for AI Training": https://creativecommons.org/using-cc-licensed-works-for-ai-training-2/

I like this document! It clarifies the CC's own stances, and seems to in my read exclude most AI training of CC content (by, basically, affirming CC has to be followed, which modern "AI" can't)

(cont'd)

Dear @creativecommons ,

I read your article about your initiative for new licenses for dataset holders in the AI industry.

Let’s be clear: I do not want to re-license my hundreds of CC-By comic pages to please AI giants.

I wish you would support CC artists suffering from massive plagiarism. You should enforce your own existing licenses against AI mass crawling. It seems you’ve joined the battle only after the casualties and still managed to side with the wrong people.

https://creativecommons.org/2025/06/25/introducing-cc-signals-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai/

The recent European switch to attached bottle lids for recycling is very interesting to me, because as an American I've always been told that plastic bottle caps *cannot* be recycled, and should be thrown in the trash while only the bottle itself gets recycled.

Anybody know the origin for this? Was it just a desire to sell more single-use plastics? Are detached lids so small that the effort to extract them from the waste stream is too much to justify the amount of material you get? Something else?

The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #Google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street signs!), Google said "Sorry, we could not verify it".

Solution: Edit the street on #OpenStreetMap! A few months after I did this, Google seems to have stolen the data, as it regularly does, and now the street is correct in both datasets!

Hey Germans, please come up with a word that means "the fear of typing `return` vs `shift-return` because you don't know which inserts newline and which sends the message"

"The whole history of “artificial intelligence” since 1955 is making impressive demos that you can’t use for real work. Then they cut your funding off and it’s AI Winter again."
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/21/we-test-google-veo-impressive-demo-unusable-results/

Phew. Teardown talk tentatively complete. Went from having zero slides on Friday, to 285 slides yesterday, to 178 today. A lot left on the cutting room floor. Mostly I cut a lot of stuff that could have veered too far into the weeds, but I think what's left is stronger for it. Another timing run tomorrow night! https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025/long-talk/from-milliamperes-to-microamperes-lessons-in-low-power-gadgetmaking

Incredibly, with 30 hours to go, @peertube are less than €8500 from their stretch target of €75,000.
Part of the motivation of this drive was, as far as I can tell, to see if the #fediverse actually liked @Framasoft and their software, guess we know the answer to that one now then...

Bravo #Fedizens...
And Bravo #Framasoft for all your #FOSS work..

https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

Cognitive aids do not "make people dumb" and cognitive impairment does not change anything about someone's inherent worth as a member of our community. I am certainly troubled by the political alignment and uses of AI in the world but I will never sign on to a dehumanizing narrative about cognition just because I think it might work against the uses of AI I disagree with. We need better arguments than that.