Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

Selective soldering 🔧🔬🔥

I switched to Firefox a few weeks ago and it was remarkably painless for something absolutely critical that I need to work reliably, with zero additional friction, every single day.
I cannot stress how low-hassle it is to switch from Chrome to a browser with a business model that doesn't rely on tracking you.
Do it.

Thinking to myself this morning “Threads can’t be as bad as I recall…”

First post in my feed: Instagram influencer with a cup of coffee watching the sunrise from her balcony in a $1000/night hotel built with slave labor in a country where women can’t drive, telling me about how she has discovered that the secret to life is learning to savor the little things.

No, apparently the secret to life is to be born rich, white, and beautiful.

Anyway, that’s enough Threads for 2024.

An inspiring talk at #37c3 included this graphic. It shows how 500
developers each making 10 small optimisations of 1 cpu-second that happen 20 times a day for each of 1.5 million users, can save power equivalent to 30,000 two-person households.

Another form of that is, if you have 100 thousand users of your software,
and make a 1 cpu-second optimisation that will occur 50 times a day,
then you can save the power of a single two-person household.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/software_licensing_for_a_circular_economy/

#37c3 Badges!

Now that I got your attention, come to the Solder Party Badge Workshop at the @xHain_hackspace Assembly today (Day 2) at 18:00.

We bring the canvas, you just bring the art 😊

Oh, did we mention they're free? 😄

https://youtu.be/Jz16kHqB4e0

A blog is a newsletter that you can run on your own server that you don’t have to share with nazis, and doesn’t have to have annoying JavaScript popups that interrupt people when they are reading things. Well worth looking into.

Measuring methane intensity is a key step on the path to net zero https://theconversation.com/measuring-methane-intensity-is-a-key-step-on-the-path-to-net-zero-218976?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #ClimateChange

Robs third attempt for a solar powered weather station finally survived Canadian winter. Intially he used a 18650 battery and now a 750 Farad lithium ion capacitor. https://github.com/roblatour/SolarWeatherStationIII

Peertube is an absolutely *excellent* self-hosted tool, not just as a public fedi thing. one-click import from youtube or WHEREVER using yt-dlp built in, transcoding, private links, playlists, collections... this is gonna completely replace how i've been self-archiving videos, and gonna work on moving some of my stuff into a plugin. what a delightful find. yunohost can install with no fuss.

How nice this new @Framasoft funding campaign is 😍
https://soutenir.framasoft.org/en/

Being hopeful about the future isn’t some vapid techno-optimism. Quite the opposite. It’s engaging with our *actual* reality—that we have the tech now to build more functional, resilient, sustainable, and equitable systems, but now we *all* need to do the social, economic, and political work to go in that direction.

Here’s my 2022 essay on the same theme: “Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization”:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

"When you're infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it's ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what's good and what's bad almost from scratch."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia (Nov. 2021 — how did I miss this?!)

The eruption has started north of Grindavík town. This is not a tourist friendly eruption.

https://icelandgeology.net/?p=12214

You'll find a blow-by-blow in my latest Lost Supper dispatch:

https://lostsupper.substack.com/p/a-visit-to-the-neighborhood-miller