Sadly true

Quite frankly, in the last two years, I’ve accepted the AI term because that’s pretty close to what we expected sci-fi AI to be.

Something that you talk to that understands from the context what you mean and that calls the appropriate tool is exactly things like Jarvis, like HAL 9000.

AI can be fine, I cringed at the mention of Starlink, even though that’s a case where it makes sense.

I suspect voice control + a small LLM for tool uses qualifies it as “AI”

I am sure that anarchism as it is today still has tons to learn and understand, and changes to make, but if you hang out with anarchists who think decolonization, feminism or anti-racism are optional stances, heh, you may not be with what most would call anarchists. That’s widely considered part of the package nowadays.

The microscope thingy takes me to something that is not visible to a naked eye because it’s tiny. For me intersectionality is the opposite of that.

I prefer the way you present it. However, I think I see what they mean by that. A microscope allows to observe the cells in order to understand the organism. Intersectionalism will look at individual situations, which are by essence unique, to understand broader issues and how they interact.

In my experience, there is also a “negative photography” aspect, which would probably be a metaphor for another aspect of intersectionality: by accumulating different experiences of different oppression, you start noticing patterns, not in the oppressed, but in the oppressors. If you were too see only the footsteps of people in a forest, it would teach you where the trees are implicitly, and also where the passages and the bridges are.

I feel we need inverse buddhism: instead of “compassion to the world”, which required a huge imagination effort in the times of Buddha, we are now overflowed with the vision of the world’s suffering and we need re-align our compassion with the other fields that matter: the portion of the world we can act upon and that can act upon us.

You are not going to stop the bombs that are right now flying towards people. But you are going to receive the news of the suffering they cause, and if you are even slightly empathic, you will feel the pain of the people these bomb will make grieve.

What matters is that you can make good where you are. Don’t be ignorant of the world’s pain, but protect yourself.

The world just grew its nervous system and it fires its pain receptors like crazy. Do what you need to stay sane.

I’ll be honest, I thought the top one was an ‘eco village’ in construction.

The critics of these policies have been unironically almost on that level.

We have one that wants to bring back cars and considers that there are many elders afraid to cross streets because there are too many bikes.

Honestly they are embarrassed a how popular this policy turned out to be. For years they have lambasted the chaos caused by the many changes and public works that blocked accesses but now that the results are there, they are hard to argue against.

I guess Metropolis solar?

I like tech and I want sustainability. We “just” need to get rid of capitalism and finish the transition out of fossil fuels but all the tools are there.

Quite frankly I assumed it from the title. Storing data on mushrooms would be something new and it would start at a few KB. Jumping directly to 8GB would require several miniaturization iterations

Awesome document! I never realized it was only so late, I guess there is a difference between balloons and “serious record-breaking ballons”!

(Mainland France) When I was a kid, my parents decide to move to a big ancient house with thick stone walls with a lot of repairs, we talked a lot about these things. back then, in the 90s, stone walls were considered superior than average insulation, as it was mostly inexistant at the time.

Nowadays, it is much inferior and you really need to add insulation to be a bit efficient.

If you have more thermal mass, for example in caves or underground structures, you can have the mean temperature of an entire year.

Yep, here 13-14°C is the temperature of all the caves (that are not high in the mountains, altitude is a factor) and incidentally the temperature considered ideal to keep red wine.

This can be used with heat wells: have a way to exchange deep heat, with circulating water for instance, and in winter you can pre-heat your home at 14°C before adding energy. It is heavy work though to bury these pipes, and the efficiency of heat pumps nowadays makes this a bit irrelevant, but it is a nice low-tech possibility.

Ads make the web human-hostile and such disgraceful behaviors by scrapping bots force to make it bot-hostile too.

I am sad and depressed. I went into AI to solve the problems of the world and I still think that the progresses made in machine learning are a huge step to to improve the world, but seeing what capitalism turned these tools into… sigh.

I don’t even have the strength anymore to explain that “AI companies” and "AI"are not the same thing…

There should be ways to behave correctly. Robot.txt should be legally enforced, rate limitation should be respected and prosecuted. Sites with information they are willing to share with models should just provide a datadump and individual requests should be reserved for human usage.

But an internet where everyone is understanding of each other and business actors do not act like psychopaths does not exist.

It sounds like a technical problem but it is a political one. You need an entity that is independent from the malicious actors wanting to use surveillance for control. Once you have that, giving that entity able to manage all aspects without bleeding private information is a technical problem, but if you don’t have one to begin with, it is without hope.

If some people have the right to enter any building and any computer to sniff data without restriction, you can’t have privacy. It is a political problem.

People do care. But there are a lot of people. Not everyone does.

When one does things, you end up with other people who do things. Won’t be your neighbor, won’t be your colleagues (unless you do the Good Thing™ professionally) so do not waste time trying to convince them.

Do your own thing. Life is short and there are billions of people out there. Spend it on the millions that want change, that’s a big enough crowd.

Since I discovered that Freebox (the set-top box of a common ISP in France, without about 8 million installed) are welcoming to users running their own docker images, I wonder if I should not write a specific guide about how to install an alternative to Google services on these, and have a huge local impact…

What’s up?

Apparently not my nginx >_<

Small trick that took me far too much time to realize and that may interest other French out there: if you own a relatively recent freebox (The box given by Free Telecom, one of our main ISPs) you can run docker images on it! That’s a way to set up a server really easily and painlessly.

Gaza is a religious war. It is actually bad for business. It is yet another level over the stupidity of capitalism.

At one point we had a long back and forth with my cousin, a post-apo fan, about the credibility of various scenarios, various shortage, various technological regressions. My conclusion: if humanity loses the ability and the knowledge to make CPUs, then CPUs are not the first thing you will miss.

It would have meant that a generation-long obscurantist crusade would have purposefully destroyed that knowledge.

I don’t see anything natural nor a human-made disaster that could durably erase all knowledge and industries on a global scale. You would need an intelligence geared at destroying knowledge specifically.

Yes, my last link points to a discussion about this very article and why one needs actually a bit more nuance. The guillotine is indeed both the symbol of revolution but also of the death penalty by an oppressive state. It has a double meaning and one must know both and be careful when handling that symbol.