Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

Twitter is falling apart. Reddit is falling apart. Facebook fell apart ages ago. Meta is a trashfire. Instagram is baloney. Google can't even search for anything you want anymore.

You know what website still miraculously works?

Wikipedia.

You should donate to keep it that way.

People keep acting surprised at the direction Reddit's taking, but it seemed inevitable. If you try to build community on a platform that's not owned by that community this will happen every time. You can protest, you can even attack the bottom line (which is the only thing that will get you anywhere), but at the end of the day you have no power and they'll just block you and re-add your deleted posts. Don't trade community ownership and power for convenience or you'll get burned every time.

Here are my slides "The Science of Growing Urban Bicycle Networks" from yesterday's workshop on sustainable mobility [pdf]: http://michael.szell.net/downloads/talk_szell2023sgu.pdf

On free transit fares, this piece is where I am: We need to focus on better service, maybe with income-sensitive discounts, not free fares for everyone. Exception: For smaller agencies where fare revenue was trivial, free fares may make sense for a while as they recover.
---
RT @bloom17_bloom
https://theconversation.com/low-cost-high-quality-public-transportation-will-serve-the-public-better-than-free-rides-202708
https://twitter.com/bloom17_bloom/status/1646885411405418497

Welp, I'm giving another talk on satellite pollution so I have to update the numbers in my slides.

*checks https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html and https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/table.php?GROUP=active&FORMAT=tle*

Oh crap, there are 150 more Starlinks than when I gave a talk on this topic 1 month ago.

3908 Starlink satellites out of 7545 total satellites.

52% of all sats now owned by one awful dude. Still with effectively no regulations. This is so bad.

I am completely overwhelmed by how to fit all my rage about for-profit satellites completely destroying the sky, the atmosphere, and low Earth orbit into a 15 minute Zoom talk and not just like...scream or sob into my computer. (I usually do an hour-long talk on this topic).

How do I present all this terrible stuff effectively to get other people to care about this problem without overwhelming them? (Truly an evergreen question for the 2020s)

@settinger designed and printed a comic sans typewriter ball so we're testing it on my IBM selectric this afternoon and it totally does work!

Crazy numbers from #Anthropocene Earth:

Weight of all wild mammals on land: 22 million tons

Weight of all wild mammals in ocean: 40 million tons

Weight of all humans: 390 million tons

Weight of all land animals domesticated by humans: 630 million tons

New Study in PNAS:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

Article in Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-up-call-total-weight-of-wild-mammals-less-than-10-of-humanitys

After some time I’ve found a way to upcycle Chromebooks to run the latest version of Ubuntu and boot to an external USB drive while maintaining the ChromeOS. The WiFi chips in these models also can create their own wifi networks so they can be short range routers.
What does this actually mean? Instead of requiring new hardware like a raspberry pi, we can take old Chromebooks that schools get rid of in the thousands and actually reuse them to create portable micro servers. Pack them full of offline books, maps, wikis, etc.
There is a major upside compared to using an old Chromebook over a raspberry pi, mainly that it's actually cheaper and can be free depending on how you source your chromebooks. I got 10 at $30 each which is cheaper than a pi or a pi alternative.

The battery life is also insane. I used it for close to 12 hours and it didn't even hit 50% battery loss. They also take very little time to charge so I'm interested to see how much power they might take up while attached to the off grid solar array.

So the plan is to make the docs and work some more on making these into portable offgrid information stations and packing them with info. https://anarchosolarpunk.substack.com/p/offgridserveruses
#solarpunk #permacomputing

Here's George Monbiot, with a long and deeply researched report on "Environmental Change and Food Security: Existential Risks to the Global Food System."

What follows is a brief excerpt. The full report is here -- https://www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/the-hunger-gap/
__________________________

By 2050, the human population of the planet will rise to between 9 and 10 billion. In principle, the world already produces enough food for between 10 and 14 billion. The problem is that an ever smaller proportion of this embarrassment of riches is feeding people directly.

While the human population growth rate has fallen to below 1% a year, the growth rate of the livestock population has risen to 2.4% a year. By 2050, to put it in brutal terms, the extra humans on the planet will weigh a little over 100 million tonnes, while, unless the current trend is disrupted, the extra farm animals will weigh 400 million tonnes. The real population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.

Since farming began, humans have concentrated in places with an average annual temperature of around 13°C, which tends to create the best natural conditions for growing crops and raising livestock. Vast numbers have made their homes in this temperature band. But it is about to shift, swiftly and catastrophically — in the next 50 years, this band will move further towards the poles than it has in the past 6,000 years.

#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Environment #Inequality

In March 1873, the very first ‘Cook’s Continental Time Tables & Tourist’s Hand Book’ was published. 150 years on, the latest edition has just arrived. http://europeanrailtimetable.eu

If you thought the 24h clock was a recent innovation, they’ve been using it since December 1919…

In 2013, Thomas Cook planned to ditch the Timetable, but a buyout by its dedicated production team saved it and they’ve continued publishing it to this day. Many happy returns, @EuropeanRailTT!

No, there is no sense in which Meta joining ActivityPub is a good thing.

Companies like Meta aren't going to join the Fediverse and play nice, they are going to join with the mentality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Sure, they'll play nice until they have 90% of the entire userbase, then they'll do whatever they like.

Don't want your posts indexed for search? Tough, they'll add it. So you'll Fediblock them? Fine, now you just cut yourself off from 90% the Fediverse, not the other way around.

I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support.

I would much rather you pirate anything I have made or worked on vs listening on streaming services, which are an objective nightmare for musicians. Even if you never intend to spend a penny, normalizing piracy is better for us than normalizing the current capitalist-realism nightmare where you get whatever you want and also get to relax into the fiction that you aren't exploiting musicians because you pay the price of one album per month to a giant corporation so you can feel ok about it.

i've come to realize that "programmable money" is code for "i'm about to say the most dystopian shit you've ever heard"

"this chart was pulled yesterday and it's already a little outdated but... uh, the principle remains"
"stablecoins are always, uh, notionally, pegged to the dollar"

Makin' the open-source things in NYC

#adafruit #electronics #opensource #manufacturing #nyc #womanowned

Hi cycling people :) I installed and maintain a free bicycle repair station on a cycle lane near were we live (rural Denmark).

Am always interested in what cycling service infrastructure is available elsewhere, so if you have something: share it here! :-)

#bicycle #cycling @mastobikes