Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem De Kooning (1/3)

This project was for a gift exchange, so I couldn't share it until now. It's a (large!) laptop bag/backpack with 100 LEDs in the front flap arranged in a Fibonacci spiral (inspired by @jasoncoon ) and diffused through a Voronoi arrangement of 3D printed translucent black PETG tiles.

Everyone talks about how the first 'computers' were people (usually women), but how about the first packet switches? #ComputerHistory

oh dang

the headline is "randomware," the bigger exploit is _lying to the user about applied torque so that they inadequately torque bolts_.

like on that boeing just now.

are these used in aircraft assembly and maintenance? because one of the things they were able to do was change bolt tightness while making it look correct on the screen.

has this been quietly exploited already? is this already a zero-day?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/network-connected-wrenches-used-in-factories-can-be-hacked-for-sabotage-or-ransomware/

The Problem with Trolley Car Problems

I started out saying this as a joke, but gradually, over time, I've come to realize it's actually accurate.

The true solution to almost all "trolley car" problems is to find who keeps tying people to the tracks.

In trolley car problems, the people tied to the tracks always represent some disadvantaged sector of society — poor people, homeless people, no healthcare, minorites, etc — or even just (pardon the expression) "regular" lower class people.

And the "problem" is always "do you let those people be run over in order to save a billionaire, or a corporation, or the banking industry, or some sector of the economy, etc.

And again ... why are those people tied to the tracks in the first place? What is wrong with our economy/society/legal system, that we have those people stuck in those disadvantaged positions?

So the next time you see a trolley car problem — even the comedy/shitpost/joke problems — ask yourself, "who are those people tied to the track, and how did they get there in the first place?

this is such bullshit. language has nothing to do with preferred timestamp format. please don't assume things like this.

In Oulu, #Finland, temperatures will be down to -20 C this week.

Yet 12% of all journeys in the city will be by bicycle.

How do they do it? Good wayfinding for starters, with symbols projected onto the snow...❄️ 🚲 🧵

A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts about how I think LLMs will be a net negative (at least in the near term), due to the extreme overhyping giving people unrealistic expectations of their ability. The direct result will be an overall degrade in internet usability as people begin flooding platforms with low quality spam that they erroneously believe to be high quality. Previously it was fairly easy to spot someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but now LLMs enable them to word things convincingly enough to waste the time of even domain experts.

Even now I'm still often surprised by all the creative ways that people are finding to waste other's time. I just saw this post from one of the curl maintainers reporting that they've been receiving nonsense bug bounty reports based on LLM hallucinations, which I imagine is likely due to people trying to automate bug hunting despite lacking the understanding to confirm their finding. They reported that in one case the submission was convincing enough that they went over the code 3 times before coming to the conclusion that no bug existed and the report was likely AI generate.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/

If you're using Firefox, your first add-on should be uBlock Origin. At this point, it's not just blocking ads. It's basic Internet hygiene.

However, especially if you handle sensitive sites like bank/payment portals or one to several social accounts, your second add-on should be this little thing called Firefox Multi-Account Containers.

It's extremely useful. You can keep the defaults or wipe them all and make your own. So long as you don't sign in to things outside of containers, things opened in Firefox by default won't have access to your accounts. Sites you sign in to will only be signed in on that specific container. Links followed in Fun will not have access to your already signed-in sites on Bank. Links opened from your social account in Personal don't risk accidental interactions from a different social account under Professional.

Social containers are even more helpful for sites that don't support account switching. Even if they do, all you have to do is use a different account in each container and you can view both accounts side-by-side.

Oh, and it's published by Mozilla themselves within Firefox's add-on repository. You can trust it about as much as you trust Firefox.

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.