Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

By the way: If you're a "News Consumer" or someone who "Follows Politics" and you have recently cancelled your subscription to a newspaper in anger, can I again recommend a really good destination for your money is https://www.propublica.org

Not a general newspaper, doesn't have an opinion section or tell you what random thing the President of the United States did today. Just a steady stream of raw investigative journalism. The Good Stuff, the stuff you used to admire That Paper You Cancelled for

Science only exists if people see it. I pour time and effort into writing things like open access preprints, far more swiftly than the slow scientific publishing process, with the hope that these will reach someone who needs it. Sharing and amplifying work like this really directly helps me.

Here's our citation for now: Hicks, C. M., & Hevesi, A. (2024, November 21). A Cumulative Culture Theory for Developer Problem-Solving. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tfjyw

@anthrocypher

They gave me back the ability to kill spam reviews. I'm now destroying the tens of thousands I couldn't touch while reviews were read-only. It's bothered me as much as any of you, but security had to come first. Now I'm free, destroyer of spam reviews.

The best way to help those who are or will be under a dangerous political regime is to normalize the tools that protect them.

If you use Whatsapp, try to replace as many conversations as you can with Signal.

If you use Gmail or Outlook, switch to an independent privacy preserving provider, at least for your personal emails.

If you use Chrome, switch to Firefox.

By making those tools "normal", you are making them look less suspicious.

If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for others.

A reminder that, especially with the impending Trump regime making things worse for government surveillance and surveillance capitalism, you should install a good ad blocker.

Seriously, if you don't have one yet;

AD BLOCKERS
ARE
SECURITY TOOLS

Don't let anyone tell you different.

Install one on all of your devices, but be very wary of anything that claims to give you security via VPN, or by intercepting all of your traffic.

quick demo of untreated aluminum MNT Reform Next open hardware laptop prototype! (trackpad and port covers still missing here, and motherboard is upside down)

x.x.x.x - - [10/Nov/2024:00:02:37 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 162 "-" "okhttp/4.9.0"

You know what’s interesting about this log line? It repeats 56,686,963 times in www.kernel.org logs for yesterday, across 4 nodes. That’s about 700 times a second, and this has been going on for months.

These requests aren’t intentionally malicious – they issue a simple GET /, receive their 301 redirect, and terminate the connection. From what I can tell, this is some kind of appliance or software installed on mobile clients that uses “can I reach www.kernel.org” as a network test.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal – a single plaintext “GET /“ that triggers an immediate 301 is very cheap for us to generate, but the number of these requests has been steadily growing.

If you have any idea what this is and how to make it stop, please reach out?

French rail 💩 - again

https://rmc.bfmtv.com/actualites/societe/transports/sncf-pourquoi-certaines-gares-tgv-pourraient-disparaitre_AV-202411040464.html

No, competition is NOT to blame for St Malo, Chambery, Le Creusot being in danger of losing TGV services

It's France’s inability to provide connecting TER services that is to blame here!

Run once hourly TER small town to big city, and once hourly big city to big city. Job done. As any sensible railway does

That's better than a handful of direct TGVs to Paris from small towns each day

As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access.

A thread, with links:

Chirag Shah and I wrote about this in two academic papers:
2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816
2024: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468

We also have an op-ed from Dec 2022:
https://iai.tv/articles/all-knowing-machines-are-a-fantasy-auid-2334

>>

A small but praiseworthy thing hidden in the budget: double-cab pickup trucks are to be treated as cars in the company-vehicle-tax rules. At the moment, these are considered commercial vehicles, but quite commonly used as a tax dodge to buy a massive vehicle that is mostly used as a giant estate car whilst paying much lower tax. I hope to see fewer of them on the roads in future!

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