Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

https://stallman-report.org/

The thing that frustrates me about this is that the #FreeSoftware community wastes so much fucking time on #Stallman. So much time and effort is wasted on the eccentricities of one man, even though anyone with a gram of sense can see that this man is unfit to lead the social movement for our digital liberation.

And we are so utterly beholden to him. So much of our language and framing is Stallmanesque, sometimes undeservedly. My biggest pet hate is the narrative that 'you, the user, will be free if you use Free Software'. No you won't, especially not if you are not technically inclined. We are freed together as a community, not as individuals. The system of collaboration and the sharing of our digital infrastructure makes this thing liberating for all of us, not my ability to patch better Esperanto support into glibc.

And it's not like this movement needs a single leader, or that there aren't already extremely talented and dedicated leader figures in our community.

And it's not like there aren't problems with our community that aren't related to Stallman. There are so many people (men…) who make this community less lovely than it is.

But instead of lifting up other voices, or addressing other toxicity, we're stuck endlessly dealing with this one eccentric man.

Turns out that LLM summaries are actually useful.

Not for *summarizing* text -- they're horrible for that. They're weighted statistical models and by their very nature they'll drop the least common or most unusual bits of things. Y'know, the parts of a message that are actually important.

No, where they're great is as a writing check. If an LLM summary of your work is accurate that indicates what you wrote doesn't really have much interesting information in it and maybe you should try harder.

"Wow this is so cool, the scorpion is actually *paying* me to ride across the river on his back!"

https://mastodon.social/@verge/113352494354774252

Choosing a bike rather than a car for short trips would save the public in Montreal more than 1 billion/year, a report reveals…if each 1-way trip of 10km or less was by bike or public transport, around 1.7 billion could be saved each year. #CityMakingMath in French.
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2024-06-09/etude-de-hec/la-voiture-mode-de-transport-le-plus-onereux.php

Now the only hard part becomes, as a species, surviving the gap where companies that think "AI" is real are running nuclear power plants. Imagine a nuclear power plant safety manual written by AI. Perhaps this is the "Great Filter" spoken of by science fiction authors

Way to fix global warming is extremely simple actually
- Increase investments in "AI"
- This takes so much power the tech corps have to bring a lot of nuclear power plants online
- Develop an AI capable of general reasoning
- Tell the general reasoning AI to solve global warming
- The general reasoning AI will immediately conclude the best way to fix global warming is to stop doing AI, and delete itself
- With no more AI the nuke plants will now displace fossil fuel burn
- No more global warming

We, the anonymous editors of the Stallman report, have published our investigation of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation today to a general audience:

https://stallman-report.org

Our report exhaustively catalogues, analyzes, and offers a rebuttal of Richard Stallman's political program of sexual violence, catalogues credible allegations of misconduct, and documents the misconduct of the #FSF circa 2019 and 2021. Please read and share our work.

Boosts encouraged.

#freesoftware

Neither @K1ngdaKa88 nor I like the ads stuck on the trains here. We of course found a carriage without ads 🙂 #CrossBorderRail

All the brilliant foreign researchers I have recruited in France have been through administrative nightmares which have had direct consequences on their wellbeing and on their work. The way we treat our scientific colleagues is really scandalous (of course it is also true, or worse, for many other categories of people).

We're not living "in the age of AI". We're living in a moment of unproven AI-related claims.

These are profoundly different scenarios.

And it's disturbing how many folks in education are eagerly, uncritically amplifying the first framing.

You may recall that for a while BP was asserting it was going 'Beyond Petroleum'; well, no longer; BP has now abandoned plans to reduce oil output over the next five years.

Just in case you thought the fossil fuels sector's concern for the environment was anything other than cynical politicking.... once any shifts started looking like they might impact short-term profit(s) they were off the table again.

So much for leopards changing their spots!

#climate #FossilFuels
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/07/bp-abandoning-plan-to-cut-oil-output-angers-green-groups

The rise of Mastodon has made me so much more aware of government services requiring us to use private companies’ systems to communicate with them and access services.

Sitting on a Dutch train just now I was shown on a screen “feeling unsafe in the train? Contact us via WhatsApp”.

What if I don’t use WhatsApp? (I do, but I wish I didn’t have to) I’m forced to share my data with Meta to use it.

Public systems should not require use of private services.

#NS #Netherlands #FOSS #privacy

My mentions are full of bad takes on Mozilla, privacy preserving measurement, and the economics of free software...which I will briefly address, now:

All non-consensual collection of telemetry is unethical.

No you can't just slap a "privacy preserving" label on a mechanism and have it be true.

Even if you could that doesn't bypass the consent obligation.

Yes, Funding free software is complex. developing free software is expensive. I'm a free software dev. I know this. First hand.

I'm sure it is just a coincidence that the disability and long-term sickness rates in three nations starting rising at the start of the #COVID19 pandemic and are still rising almost five years later, despite the fact the global health emergency ended.

Data shown is for Spain, the US, and the UK.

"The entire climate of the entire planet is gonna get WILD but I'm sure I'm fine here in this one spot on the Earth." Just... no.

Which is WHY each of us needs to demand our local state/county/city representatives make a Climate Action Plan, stop pumping carbon in the air & prepare for our local risks.

Even then... the climate will continually surprise us. This is an ongoing project for the next 100 years.

Or we can ignore it but the status quo is the riskiest option of all.

#ClimateChange