Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

French rail 💩 - again

https://rmc.bfmtv.com/actualites/societe/transports/sncf-pourquoi-certaines-gares-tgv-pourraient-disparaitre_AV-202411040464.html

No, competition is NOT to blame for St Malo, Chambery, Le Creusot being in danger of losing TGV services

It's France’s inability to provide connecting TER services that is to blame here!

Run once hourly TER small town to big city, and once hourly big city to big city. Job done. As any sensible railway does

That's better than a handful of direct TGVs to Paris from small towns each day

As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access.

A thread, with links:

Chirag Shah and I wrote about this in two academic papers:
2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816
2024: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468

We also have an op-ed from Dec 2022:
https://iai.tv/articles/all-knowing-machines-are-a-fantasy-auid-2334

>>

A small but praiseworthy thing hidden in the budget: double-cab pickup trucks are to be treated as cars in the company-vehicle-tax rules. At the moment, these are considered commercial vehicles, but quite commonly used as a tax dodge to buy a massive vehicle that is mostly used as a giant estate car whilst paying much lower tax. I hope to see fewer of them on the roads in future!

Please people who put on events I'm begging you, have a mailing list or a physical website where I can look up dates in advance. Just saw a post on Instagram about a craft workshop I would have liked to go to but didn't see before hand, asked the artist if she had a mailing list and was told "no but I post all my upcoming workshops on Instagram and Facebook". I don't think a lot of people realise these don't show most of your posts to your followers, and what they do show isn't chronological?

This is, in my opinion, the most severe problem with the Fediverse. People were warning about this issue as early as 2016 and we still don't have a solution. I'm shocked more people don't quit the Fediverse entire when this happens to them

https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/

I'm not saying the operator of botsin.space made the wrong decision here. But it's broken we have a network architecture where making this decision inherently means the fediverse permanently losing a domain name and a block of history

Without FFmpeg, we couldn't watch YouTube, yet the people who maintain FFmpeg don't get paid. Tell your employer to join the Pledge and #PayTheMaintainers!

One of the realities of open source is that while programmers willing and able to volunteer their time to a community project are relatively common, artists who can afford to do so are much less so. And you really don't want to see my attempts at art.

So I'm pleased to announce that the ngscopeclient / libscopehal project has received a $5000 donation from @aleksorsist and the ThunderScope project to support development!

This donation covered the $3812.88 I had paid out-of-pocket to artists and GUI design consultants in 2024, leaving another $1187.12 available to pay for additional UI polish work that's still in the pipeline.

https://stallman-report.org/

The thing that frustrates me about this is that the #FreeSoftware community wastes so much fucking time on #Stallman. So much time and effort is wasted on the eccentricities of one man, even though anyone with a gram of sense can see that this man is unfit to lead the social movement for our digital liberation.

And we are so utterly beholden to him. So much of our language and framing is Stallmanesque, sometimes undeservedly. My biggest pet hate is the narrative that 'you, the user, will be free if you use Free Software'. No you won't, especially not if you are not technically inclined. We are freed together as a community, not as individuals. The system of collaboration and the sharing of our digital infrastructure makes this thing liberating for all of us, not my ability to patch better Esperanto support into glibc.

And it's not like this movement needs a single leader, or that there aren't already extremely talented and dedicated leader figures in our community.

And it's not like there aren't problems with our community that aren't related to Stallman. There are so many people (men…) who make this community less lovely than it is.

But instead of lifting up other voices, or addressing other toxicity, we're stuck endlessly dealing with this one eccentric man.

Turns out that LLM summaries are actually useful.

Not for *summarizing* text -- they're horrible for that. They're weighted statistical models and by their very nature they'll drop the least common or most unusual bits of things. Y'know, the parts of a message that are actually important.

No, where they're great is as a writing check. If an LLM summary of your work is accurate that indicates what you wrote doesn't really have much interesting information in it and maybe you should try harder.

"Wow this is so cool, the scorpion is actually *paying* me to ride across the river on his back!"

https://mastodon.social/@verge/113352494354774252

Choosing a bike rather than a car for short trips would save the public in Montreal more than 1 billion/year, a report reveals…if each 1-way trip of 10km or less was by bike or public transport, around 1.7 billion could be saved each year. #CityMakingMath in French.
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2024-06-09/etude-de-hec/la-voiture-mode-de-transport-le-plus-onereux.php

Now the only hard part becomes, as a species, surviving the gap where companies that think "AI" is real are running nuclear power plants. Imagine a nuclear power plant safety manual written by AI. Perhaps this is the "Great Filter" spoken of by science fiction authors

Way to fix global warming is extremely simple actually
- Increase investments in "AI"
- This takes so much power the tech corps have to bring a lot of nuclear power plants online
- Develop an AI capable of general reasoning
- Tell the general reasoning AI to solve global warming
- The general reasoning AI will immediately conclude the best way to fix global warming is to stop doing AI, and delete itself
- With no more AI the nuke plants will now displace fossil fuel burn
- No more global warming

We, the anonymous editors of the Stallman report, have published our investigation of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation today to a general audience:

https://stallman-report.org

Our report exhaustively catalogues, analyzes, and offers a rebuttal of Richard Stallman's political program of sexual violence, catalogues credible allegations of misconduct, and documents the misconduct of the #FSF circa 2019 and 2021. Please read and share our work.

Boosts encouraged.

#freesoftware

Neither @K1ngdaKa88 nor I like the ads stuck on the trains here. We of course found a carriage without ads 🙂 #CrossBorderRail

All the brilliant foreign researchers I have recruited in France have been through administrative nightmares which have had direct consequences on their wellbeing and on their work. The way we treat our scientific colleagues is really scandalous (of course it is also true, or worse, for many other categories of people).

We're not living "in the age of AI". We're living in a moment of unproven AI-related claims.

These are profoundly different scenarios.

And it's disturbing how many folks in education are eagerly, uncritically amplifying the first framing.

You may recall that for a while BP was asserting it was going 'Beyond Petroleum'; well, no longer; BP has now abandoned plans to reduce oil output over the next five years.

Just in case you thought the fossil fuels sector's concern for the environment was anything other than cynical politicking.... once any shifts started looking like they might impact short-term profit(s) they were off the table again.

So much for leopards changing their spots!

#climate #FossilFuels
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/07/bp-abandoning-plan-to-cut-oil-output-angers-green-groups

The rise of Mastodon has made me so much more aware of government services requiring us to use private companies’ systems to communicate with them and access services.

Sitting on a Dutch train just now I was shown on a screen “feeling unsafe in the train? Contact us via WhatsApp”.

What if I don’t use WhatsApp? (I do, but I wish I didn’t have to) I’m forced to share my data with Meta to use it.

Public systems should not require use of private services.

#NS #Netherlands #FOSS #privacy