Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

I participated in an expert meeting at the Ministry for Agriculture on the use of wood for energy & products. Good that such meetings are being held.

But it's mind-boggling every time how very deep the differences in perspective, assessment & recommendations run btw scientists, & with industry, biomass interest groups, NGOs.

The seductive pull of "But it grows back! Therefore it's green!" remains strong. Someone said "let's not consider forests a CO2 museum". But a plantation is not a forest.

"Saving the First Draft of History:

When news sites suddenly shut down and former URLs are sold to the highest bidder, saving a publisher's archive becomes a time-consuming and rigorous full-time job in the digital age."

nice piece featuring @mark of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine!

https://niemanreports.org/articles/saving-the-first-draft-of-history/

HandBrake now supports encoding to FFV1, the professional digital preservation video codec! All it took was a suggestion in a Github issue, and the maintainers were happy to include it. Now if some of you #digipres colleagues would test that it works as intended, that would be even better. https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/releases/tag/1.8.0 #handbrake #ffv1

Such is the reality of science and engineering in a harsh environment: sometimes you’re lucky, often you’re unlucky. But I at least now have enough to write a methods paper about Cryoegg’s development.

All over Tallinn there are these app controlled bike racks. But I don’t want to have to download an app to park a bike. And I don’t think it even fits a Birdy, let alone a cargo bike. And the regular racks are poor…

Massive leak at #Google confirms what we have all known for years, just how much is tracked, stored, and monetized.

Even clearer now how Chrome tracks and reports EVERYTHING you do. For heavens' sake delete it now and move to Firefox

Also they've outright lied for years about their data collection and search practices.

Looks like 'Don't be evil' wasn't enough. ;)

https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166177/google-search-ranking-algorithm-leak-documents-link-seo

Just, get off Google products already!

https://www.optoutproject.net/the-best-non-google-search-engine/

*This guy is attempting to categoriza common AI search blunders, and it's interesting that most of them are not about LLM "halliucination," they're about AI's lack of common-sense context

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/googles-ai-overview-can-give-false-misleading-and-dangerous-answers/

*Well, we're ten years into the future of that prediction, and the future today is about even older people, in even bigger cities, even more afraid of the sky

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/the-future-is-about-old-people-in-big-cities-afraid-of-the-sky/284459/

The story goes extremely deep on Stark Industries, a UK company serving as a global proxy for Russian attacks, not to mention global criminal enterprises. Totally fascinating.

@rsf92 @pluralistic I spent 15 years, from 2005 to 2020, working with my neighbors to build a fiber network in our rural town (Plainfield, Mass. pop. 600) in western Massachusetts. Most of that time was dealing with funding and regulatory issues, but by the time everyone stayed home to avoid the pandemic in 2020, working with the local municipal gas/electric/fiber department in the city of Westfield we had the network in place and most of the homes installed. 1 Gbps for $85, symmetrical, uncapped. It meant that while families in other towns were driving to library parking lots so their kids could use the WiFi to do their schoolwork, in our town they had faster broadband in their homes.

4 years later and we have not had to change prices. We are now interconnected with 5 neighboring towns in a mesh to share diverse backhaul paths and get increased economies of scale. We are building a stabilization fund to cover insurance deductibles, equipment replacement, and upgrades, and we are keeping more dollars in the regional economy instead of having it siphoned off to Verizon shareholders.

#MuniBroadband #FFTW

As always, domestic abuse is _the_ flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm.

That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence.

CompilerFax: Sending C source code via telefax to a compiler-as-a-service which then faxes you the output of your program; demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-25-pRhpY git: https://github.com/lexbailey/compilerfax intended for #emfcamp #retronetworking #whatagreathack

Someone needs to make a version of doom that works like those 1960s flight simulators that NASA used, where it's a physical model and the controls are just driving a video camera around it

"At least tens of millions of dollars flow to the paper mill industry each year, estimates Matt Hodgkinson of the independent charity UK Research Integrity Office. (...)
Hodgkinson recalls hearing one publisher say it “had to sack 300 editors for manipulative behavior.” He adds, “These are organized crime rings that are committing large-scale fraud.”"
https://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds

Sometimes I think about how I am expected to be in dozens of different discord servers. This is just the normal use case for Discord.

See something interesting? You are supposed to join their discord. Need information about a project? Better join their discord. It's inhumane.

This project was such a success Ghibli Studio asked for the production of a new one based on My Neighbor Totoro, even bigger than the previous tapestries produced. This one is from Howl's Moving Castle.

#design #craftmanship #ghibli #miyazaki

Yesterday I went to The Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie d'Aubusson in France. Aubusson tapestry is a six centuries old luxury product, a craftsmanship of excellence and local tradition, permanently renewed through contemporary creation.
Since 2020, the museum has produced five tapestries from Hayao Miyazaki's movies, with his approval. You have to see it to understand the beauty of the achievement.

#design #ghibli #miyazaki #craftmanship

"it's hard to get excited about these new electric vehicles...." @tomgauld