Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

TED offered a vision of the world where complex societal issues could be solved with a lightbulb moment and a well-designed PowerPoint presentation.

Climate change? There's an app for that.

Poverty? A social entrepreneur with a TED talk has it figured out.

It was a worldview that flattered millennials' sense of ourselves as changemakers while conveniently ignoring the systemic barriers to real change.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/ted-talks-the-picotop-of-millennial-pop-intellectualism

Excuse me while I go ugly-cry: “Gilead’s experimental twice-yearly medicine to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial, the company said Thursday.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/20/gilead-prep-lenacapavir-succeeds-in-phase-3-trial.html

"Last month (...) Edinburgh’s city council voted to ban fossil fuel advertisements on city property, undermining the ability of not only oil companies, but also car manufacturers, airlines and cruise ships, to promote their products. The ban targeted arms manufacturers as well."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/06/15/fossil-fuel-advertising-bans-edinburgh/

A little gull bathes for the first time ever.

#birds #linnut #lokkivahti

Deliberately undermining one of the most powerful tools against the threat of global pandemics from novel emerging infectious diseases is not only evil — it’s stunningly shortsighted zero-sum thinking that puts the US population at risk as well.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

In UI circles you sometimes see a (usually derogatory) label of "hover tunnel" given to a UI widget, like a clickless contextual menu, which requires you hover over an element then continue to hover over specific elements in order to keep the widget active. I would like to propose the term "Reverse Hover Tunnel" for the current YouTube front page, where you must move the mouse in strict and meticulous paths to avoid it beginning to autoplay random crap, possibly forever showing it as 10% watched

How fast can you assemble and disassemble your #EMC chamber? Magnets are still not perfectly aligned but it sounds and feels great when they jump on place! This chamber is #EMARD idea and design. Material is leftover that I get every time I order PCB stencil. @NGIZero

“Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow”

https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team-for-you/

> By not hiring and training up junior engineers, we are cannibalizing our own future. We need to stop doing that.

Any industry that stops hiring entry-level workers is in for a very, very bad time a decade down the line.

Good piece on the #HungaTonga eruption and it's (tiny to non-existent) impact on our climate from @andrewdessler .
I think my biggest takeaway from the attribution work is that (some) people will do almost anything to avoid accepting human emissions are driving climate change. https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatebrink/p/the-real-lesson-of-the-hunga-tonga

There should be a Mad Max / Waterworld crossover that takes place on a beach

Microsoft really needs to clean up their management teams for Windows.
It would really not be that hard for Windows to be good, trustable OS.

That they fuck up this hard is really just a cycle of absurd incompetence that seems to wave over every other Windows release.

Somehow competent product managers make it in after every fucked up release and then after a while things repeat.

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.