Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

Here's George Monbiot, with a long and deeply researched report on "Environmental Change and Food Security: Existential Risks to the Global Food System."

What follows is a brief excerpt. The full report is here -- https://www.monbiot.com/2023/03/09/the-hunger-gap/
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By 2050, the human population of the planet will rise to between 9 and 10 billion. In principle, the world already produces enough food for between 10 and 14 billion. The problem is that an ever smaller proportion of this embarrassment of riches is feeding people directly.

While the human population growth rate has fallen to below 1% a year, the growth rate of the livestock population has risen to 2.4% a year. By 2050, to put it in brutal terms, the extra humans on the planet will weigh a little over 100 million tonnes, while, unless the current trend is disrupted, the extra farm animals will weigh 400 million tonnes. The real population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.

Since farming began, humans have concentrated in places with an average annual temperature of around 13°C, which tends to create the best natural conditions for growing crops and raising livestock. Vast numbers have made their homes in this temperature band. But it is about to shift, swiftly and catastrophically — in the next 50 years, this band will move further towards the poles than it has in the past 6,000 years.

#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Environment #Inequality

In March 1873, the very first ‘Cook’s Continental Time Tables & Tourist’s Hand Book’ was published. 150 years on, the latest edition has just arrived. http://europeanrailtimetable.eu

If you thought the 24h clock was a recent innovation, they’ve been using it since December 1919…

In 2013, Thomas Cook planned to ditch the Timetable, but a buyout by its dedicated production team saved it and they’ve continued publishing it to this day. Many happy returns, @EuropeanRailTT!

No, there is no sense in which Meta joining ActivityPub is a good thing.

Companies like Meta aren't going to join the Fediverse and play nice, they are going to join with the mentality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Sure, they'll play nice until they have 90% of the entire userbase, then they'll do whatever they like.

Don't want your posts indexed for search? Tough, they'll add it. So you'll Fediblock them? Fine, now you just cut yourself off from 90% the Fediverse, not the other way around.

I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support.

I would much rather you pirate anything I have made or worked on vs listening on streaming services, which are an objective nightmare for musicians. Even if you never intend to spend a penny, normalizing piracy is better for us than normalizing the current capitalist-realism nightmare where you get whatever you want and also get to relax into the fiction that you aren't exploiting musicians because you pay the price of one album per month to a giant corporation so you can feel ok about it.

i've come to realize that "programmable money" is code for "i'm about to say the most dystopian shit you've ever heard"

"this chart was pulled yesterday and it's already a little outdated but... uh, the principle remains"
"stablecoins are always, uh, notionally, pegged to the dollar"

Makin' the open-source things in NYC

#adafruit #electronics #opensource #manufacturing #nyc #womanowned

Hi cycling people :) I installed and maintain a free bicycle repair station on a cycle lane near were we live (rural Denmark).

Am always interested in what cycling service infrastructure is available elsewhere, so if you have something: share it here! :-)

#bicycle #cycling @mastobikes

Obviously, these aren't actually the opinions of Bing or the AI. It's a Large Language Model, so it doesn't have any opinions or knowledge at all. It's just able to string together sentences based on it's training data. Because the training data was ingested from the internet, it's likely full of divisive opinions, misinformation, hateful rhetoric, etc. The developers basically just came along and slapped a couple rule on top that basically says "if the user asks about this, just say no".

As I've said many times before, I think it is a huge mistake to be connecting these things to the internet and encouraging users to treat them as omniscient AIs. That is fundamentally not how they work, or what they're meant for, and users are not going to understand that.

Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science 📢

👩‍🔬The world needs women
👩🏽‍🎓Science needs women
👩🏿‍🦱The SDGs need women
🧕#Biodiversity needs women

Today & every day together for greater diversity in science! 🌎

#IDWGIS #ForNature #WomenInScience

Once AI works out how to do hands then this deepfake crap is going to be one of the biggest problems the world has faced. It has the potential to be extremely damaging and we are sleepwalking into a nightmare with this. I hate everything about it.

Hey, today is XML’s 25th birthday. Back in the day I wrote a lot about it: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/XML/

Probably the most important: Neither XML’s father nor inventor: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/22/Not-the-Inventor-of-XML

Amusing: “XML People”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/10/XML-People

Quoting from “What XML Means” (2007): “XML is the first successful instance of a data packaging system that is simultaneously (human) language-independent and (computer) system-independent. It’s the existence proof that such a thing can be built and be useful.”

BREAKING: Slovakian heat pump market almost doubles in 2022.

Air to water systems installation rates grew by a whopping 142%.

This is remarkable in a country where about 90% of homes heat with fossil gas.

The 10 EU #CrossBorderRail pilot projects:
- were proposed by the rail industry and national governments, not the Commission

- if something’s missing no one proposed it

- they are not a complete plan to fix international rail in EU

- the list isn’t exclusive as there are many other ongoing projects

- there’s no extra EU money for any of them, but there is EU money for railways in general

- looking systematically at individual connections makes sense, so these pilots are a small step forward

Friendly reminder that everything you ever print on a label maker is transferred from an ink tape that is left in the cartridge, so when you finish a cartridge you can take a walk down memory lane of all the projects you worked on.

And then make sure to handle this duplicate of all your labels accordingly.

Thousands of archivists and librarians over here gesticulating *yes, finally, we've been saying this for a decade+*

#ChatGPT as #ConMan:

"People love ChatGPT. People have confidence in it.

"They want to use it for everything—legal work, medical advice, term papers, or even writing Substack columns. "

* give people what they ask for

* don’t worry whether it’s true or not—ethical scruples aren’t part of your job

* If you get caught in a lie, serve up another lie

* always act sure of yourself— your confidence seals the deal

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/introducing-the-slickest-con-artist

(h/t @kottke)

"You are helping by cycling when you can"
British WWII propaganda poster
ca. 1940

Still true today