Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

Engineering professor and materials scientist @debcha's new book *How Infrastructure Works* is a hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way - forever:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

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Rishi Sunak, the Posh EconoRobot who is currently PM, has put the nail in the coffin of Britain's high-speed rail...and done a radical U-turn on getting the UK to Net Zero.

I write about why political expediency could prove to be the death of the best laid climate plans... 🧵

A very inspiring book i'm sinking into right now is a free read of "Art + DIY Electronics" by Garnet Hertz.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5589/Art-DIY-Electronics

#art #diy #electronics #book #mit #edu

Flight-free travel: The best new European train routes launching in 2023 and 2024
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/08/16/flight-free-travel-europes-new-long-distance-train-routes-for-2022
#Trains #PublicTransport

I've gone through 3 million manuals in the Internet Archive's collections and produced a "Manuals Showcase", a few dozen manuals that are sure to catch your eye here and there. Readable online, downloadable, and ad-free.

https://archive.org/details/manuals_showcase

Look who's got fall colors

How retro kick ass is that? Flash is resurrected sans the neglected, proprietary, security ridden, plugin bs of Adobe; thanks to Rust, and modern day sandboxed WebAssembly. No plugin required; small, compact, compatible engine, that unlocks decades of lost SWF content in all its vector visuals, MP3 stereo, and ActionScript-y glory. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle #flash #adobe #webdev #javascript #rust #retrogaming

Now available: Skill Tree poster sets! This is a digital download available on my shop to support the continuing growth of the open source skill trees project.
Colour in the boxes, show off your skills and get inspired to keep levelling up. Also wanting to get these available as physical posters: Black and white or Black with gold foil? Posters here: https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/makerqueenau

Hey folks, I've seen a lot of talk going around about adblockers lately. I worked in the advertising technology and security industry for five years and the one core piece of advice I have is:

Holy fuck never give an advertiser your data. You cannot believe how bad it is. Don't. I run three layers of ad block protection and I'd run more if it was feasible. If you want to support creators give them money.

Hacker leaks millions of 23andme genetic data profiles.

Please resequence your DNA asap, make sure you use at least four different letters and a minimum length of at least 3.2*10⁹ characters.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker-leaks-millions-of-new-23andme-genetic-data-profiles/

It's funny: Both Bandcamp and Patreon had the easiest and most straightforwardly long-term profitable business models imaginable: Sit between indie creatives and their fans, provide some basic services for mediation (comment sections, media posts, semi-global payment) and take enough of a cut of any payments to cover the costs and then some.

But because that business model wouldn't scale forever, they are instead being gutted, because ever _increasing_ growth is the only model capital accepts

No wonder they get so worked up about language models, they truly see themselves in them?

Remember, the fact that they can confidently generate vast amounts of text doesn’t mean there’s any actual intellectual capacity inside the tech billionaire.

Our home cable-based internet had 10kBit/s upload speed yesterday and I needed to get 200Mb to a printshop.

Do not ever underestimate the data transfer rate of a guy with a thumbdrive and a bike!

#bicycles #data #commuting #internet

But the clock is ticking because google is so big and so powerful that its own internal enshittification process has massive spillover effects on the entire WWW.

For the first time in a quarter-century I can imagine the death of the web as we know it, into a wasteland of GPT-6 content—the output of a model trained on mostly on the output of GPT-5—trawled only by chatbots pretending to be human readers to scrape up what ever remnants of long-term contract ad dollars are left to be had.

/fin

One issue is Google's degree of culpability. Google is a search engine, not an encyclopedia. Ask a stupid question? Get a stupid answer. And seriously who is going to ask are there countries in Africa that start with K?

My view is that Google's culpability was radically transformed when it went from simply returning web pages as search results to presenting results from web pages as definitive answers, via its "featured snippets", "knowledge panels", and "people also ask" feature.

The really awful thing about #23andMe and their ilk is that while you can choose not to do your own test, close family members can and probably will (just look at how families typically behave on #Facebook for example) and then your data is quite easily determinable too.

A good summary from @carnage4life
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/111194881886981667