Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

One year ago, we converted a small piece of boring grass in front of our institute into a wildflower meadow. Now it's blooming for the second time, attracting many insects, and improving the biodiversity and the micro climate around our institute.

#Bloomscrolling #biodiversity

The same day I read about Google's expanded enthusiasm for AI with everything, here is their featured snippet at top of search for "gravity vs altitude".

Bring on the Idiocracy!

Same, Benny, same. 🤩 😆
Get your own 1" (25.4mm) Fibonacci128 here: https://www.tindie.com/products/31672/

@NanoRaptor
In some ways the only true offsite backups ever created are the golden discs on the Voyager probes

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

Imagine living 98 years.

Imagine seeing the bounty and diversity of this planet disappear catastrophically at the same time from a front row seat...

https://mastodonapp.uk/@RSPB/112404626877816493
@RSPB - To a man who has dedicated his life to conserving and understanding our natural world: Happy 98th Birthday! 🎉

Sir David Attenborough, thank you for your decades of devotion to our planet's wonders and wildlife.

Here's a brilliant neologism: "slop", for text generated entirely by LLMs and published, unwanted, on the Internet

> Watching in real time as "slop" becomes a term of art. the way that "spam" became the term for unwanted emails, "slop" is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content

Source: https://twitter.com/deepfates/status/1787472784106639418

Ah

Integrated public transport, don’t you just love it

I need to take a train at 06:03 from La Ciotat to Toulon tomorrow

First bus from town to the station: arrives 06:27, which also misses the train to Marseille as well *by 2 minutes* 👏

Look, when computer science departments have some of the worst learning outcomes of any department on campus maybe they SHOULDN'T be elevated as the experts on how students should "learn with AI" with the only reason being "computers"??? Just saying. I will gladly listen to the absolute heroes in CS who HAVE centered teaching and ARE incredible teachers but I guarantee their colleagues aren't.

Worsening Weather Is Igniting a $25 Billion Market

"Against a backdrop of rising climate volatility and social shifts, demand for #WeatherDerivatives is surging.

While a [catastrophe] bond may pay out if a 100-year storm tears through a community, a weather derivative can compensate a tourism business if there are too many rainy days, or a farmer if a hot summer stresses her crops."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-04/climate-change-costs-blunted-by-25-billion-weather-derivatives-market

Contrary to what I read on social media and in the mainstream press, when I think of the average software developer, I don't think of someone "moving fast and breaking things" in a cutting-edge tech start-up. I think of someone working in an established business on legacy systems that end users have come to rely on. Because that's what the vast majority of us actually do. Most software developers are in the distinctly not-cutting-edge business of keeping the proverbial lights on.

Chicago PD leaders say they’ve decided not to punish any officers whose names appeared on the leaked membership list of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government extremist group that played a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2024/05/02/chicago-police-no-discipline-officers-extremist-group

Governments play a key role in unlocking industrial electrification and overcoming the barriers.

What can policy makers do to help scale up industrial electrification?

Our new piece for the World Economic Forum.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/04/governments-could-be-the-gateway-to-industrial-electrification-and-a-sustainable-future/

Recently places like @SIDN (Dutch national operator of .NL) have been claiming that nobody in Europe can deliver their computer needs, and that they are therefore forced to outsource operations to American cloud providers. Meanwhile our own IT industry denies this. Here I delve into what's going on, and how Europe is being Cloud Naïve instead of Cloud Native.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-naive-europe-and-the-megascaler/

I've been catching glimpses of this mega payload cargo bike flitting around town for a couple months like a pedal-powered cryptid, but today I finally got a picture of it.

#weirdbikemastodon

Loops is a new platform for sharing short videos, and it's open source + federated using #ActivityPub

We're really excited to share this sneak peek that showcases the new onboarding flow and discovery features (Connect Mastodon) and look forward to the upcoming beta release!

Are you ready for #Loops ?

Did you know that #LibreOffice has a built-in QR and barcode generator? Now you do 😉 https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/01/qrcode.html #foss #opensource

Just imagine. You’re in one of the EU’s most significant cities. Lines to the second and third cities of the country, to Switzerland, Italy and Spain start here. Both regular lines and high speed.

And what do you do?

Let half the platforms - former autorail at Paris Bercy - simply rot and not be used. There’s place for at least 6 platforms there.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang will give a webinar about his project IRIS (Infra-Red, In-Situ) inspection of silicon. A project to facilitate the non-destructive verification of silicon chips.
He'll give a short talk about the project but will leave most of the time for a Q&A as he is interested to hear what people think about IRIS.
Bunnie is an open hardware hacker, and an activist for digital rights.
Join us Thursday May 2, 11.00 CEST. https://nlnet.nl/events/20240502/index.html

#openhardware #NGIZERO #NGI #opensource

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.