Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

Please people who put on events I'm begging you, have a mailing list or a physical website where I can look up dates in advance. Just saw a post on Instagram about a craft workshop I would have liked to go to but didn't see before hand, asked the artist if she had a mailing list and was told "no but I post all my upcoming workshops on Instagram and Facebook". I don't think a lot of people realise these don't show most of your posts to your followers, and what they do show isn't chronological?

This is, in my opinion, the most severe problem with the Fediverse. People were warning about this issue as early as 2016 and we still don't have a solution. I'm shocked more people don't quit the Fediverse entire when this happens to them

https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/

I'm not saying the operator of botsin.space made the wrong decision here. But it's broken we have a network architecture where making this decision inherently means the fediverse permanently losing a domain name and a block of history

Without FFmpeg, we couldn't watch YouTube, yet the people who maintain FFmpeg don't get paid. Tell your employer to join the Pledge and #PayTheMaintainers!

One of the realities of open source is that while programmers willing and able to volunteer their time to a community project are relatively common, artists who can afford to do so are much less so. And you really don't want to see my attempts at art.

So I'm pleased to announce that the ngscopeclient / libscopehal project has received a $5000 donation from @aleksorsist and the ThunderScope project to support development!

This donation covered the $3812.88 I had paid out-of-pocket to artists and GUI design consultants in 2024, leaving another $1187.12 available to pay for additional UI polish work that's still in the pipeline.

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.

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.