Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

Remember, the fact that they can confidently generate vast amounts of text doesn’t mean there’s any actual intellectual capacity inside the tech billionaire.

Our home cable-based internet had 10kBit/s upload speed yesterday and I needed to get 200Mb to a printshop.

Do not ever underestimate the data transfer rate of a guy with a thumbdrive and a bike!

#bicycles #data #commuting #internet

But the clock is ticking because google is so big and so powerful that its own internal enshittification process has massive spillover effects on the entire WWW.

For the first time in a quarter-century I can imagine the death of the web as we know it, into a wasteland of GPT-6 content—the output of a model trained on mostly on the output of GPT-5—trawled only by chatbots pretending to be human readers to scrape up what ever remnants of long-term contract ad dollars are left to be had.

/fin

One issue is Google's degree of culpability. Google is a search engine, not an encyclopedia. Ask a stupid question? Get a stupid answer. And seriously who is going to ask are there countries in Africa that start with K?

My view is that Google's culpability was radically transformed when it went from simply returning web pages as search results to presenting results from web pages as definitive answers, via its "featured snippets", "knowledge panels", and "people also ask" feature.

The really awful thing about #23andMe and their ilk is that while you can choose not to do your own test, close family members can and probably will (just look at how families typically behave on #Facebook for example) and then your data is quite easily determinable too.

A good summary from @carnage4life
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/111194881886981667

Future generations are going to look at this generation’s laxity with genetic data and privacy in the sane way we look back at smoking, Jim Crow laws and fossil fuels.

You can’t change your genetic data like you can a password and once it gets out it not only affects you both your relatives and your offspring.

You carry a gene for a chronic disease that’s inherited? Now insurance companies know that about you, your kids and grandkids.

Unbelievable privacy self own.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/private-23andme-user-data-is-up-for-sale-after-online-scraping-spree/

A new report from the International Energy Agency admits that high-tech fixes to the climate crisis like carbon capture and hydrogen fuels are not living up to the hype and will deliver less emissions reduction than previously predicted.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23889066/climate-change-international-energy-agency-roadmap-hydrogen-carbon-capture

#tech #climate #climatechange

Never forget that when Seoul, Korea removed the Cheonggyecheon expressway in 2003 and replaced it with a restored stream, 1000 acre park and improved transit, not only did it transform the city’s public life & economic success, but the traffic got better.

The traffic got BETTER.

In a lot of ways, Facebook has a classic IBM problem

1. Won big early, and accumulated a war chest that let them absorb hits instead of adapting
2. Facilitated genocide

Yes, it's a long train ride, but I have commented on 2 reports, cleared a week's worth of emails and now I'm going to enjoy a delicious vegetable Bolognese with a fine beer and read my book in the @diningcar while speeding through northern Germany at 200km/hr.
Later I will review a paper.

#Rail #FlyingLess #CrossBorderRail #LivingInTheFuture

My #CDR friends on twitter got mad at me for pointing out that the four regional Direct Air Capture (#DAC) Hubs under the Inflation Reduction Act (#IRA) specify a minimum CO₂ removal capacity of 50,000 tonnes/year.

Hence, each DAC Hub is a #time #machine that takes us back only about 40 seconds a year!

It's important to point this out because some people think CDR is a replacement for #decarbonization and that can never be the case.

https://www.energy.gov/oced/four-regional-clean-direct-air-capture-hubs

🚨 BREAKING: We have sent a letter to decision-makers across Europe.

Along with 80 organisations, our demands are simple:
1. Ban private jets
2. Ban frequent flyer programs
3. Tax frequent flying

More in 4 languages here: https://stay-grounded.org/ban-private-jets/

#BanPrivateJets

NEW ANALYSIS: Heat pumps have seen huge growth in Nordic countries.

Heat pumps sold over 30 years contributed to a -72% drop in CO2 emissions from heating in Finland, -83% in Norway & -95% in Sweden.

How has this been achieved?

My piece for Carbon Brief.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-heat-pumps-became-a-nordic-success-story/?_thumbnail_id=48213&utm_content=buffer302f3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

“The team ran a regional climate model simulating the Chicago metro area and three types of #roof: cool (painted a heat-reflecting white), green (vegetation) and solar panels.
[All] three types of roofs reduced the near-surface temperature and AC consumption demand during daytime hours when air temperature is the highest. Cool roofs reduced the near-surface temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius, followed by 1.2 degrees for green roofs and 0.6 degrees for solar panel roofs.”
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-09-roof-material-cool-air-energy.html

The level of enshittification of the Internet from LLMs is truly spectacular.

Search for anything (in my case my ice maker doesn’t produce ice correctly) is now an exercise in futility.

Wonder if we can ever dig ourselves out of this level of shit.

Thanks, tech bros. Really super awesome stuff.

As the #ClimateCrisis deepens, many scientists try to fly less, if at all. Supported by e.g. @StayGrounded_net, www.flyingless.org, and the 'green offices' of many universities.

The Kiel Institute however threatens to fire social psychologist Gianluca Grimalda because he refuses to fly. Read & spread his story! 👇

https://twitter.com/GGrimalda/status/1708177672583725453