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.

Live reports (in French) with several pictures: https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/economie-et-social/100925/bloquons-tout-la-journee-de-mobilisation-du-10-septembre-en-direct

https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/i2ip80/the_people_deserve_a_guillotine_emoji/

https://www.change.org/p/unicode-guillotine-emoji

This was a recurrent demand!

And also careful about this concept. We use it as a meme, but it also has a history linked with capital punishment here that most people do not want to see back.

Interesting. Is there a specific cause, a specific motto? There are huge protests planned on the 10th here in France and strikes on the 18th.

Haha I should have guessed! Thanks for the info

That would be really great! Codeberg.org has been a bit involved in the fediverse, they may be open to the idea too.

Reminder that Americans only took sides when they were attacked directly in a 9/11-like attack.

I go back and forth between these positions. Not jut on IT but on infrastructure as a whole, you can’t just do like you can be independent from society and live in a totally untrustworthy world. There is a strong link between privacy and democracy. Some tools allows us to bypass temporary authoritarian restrictions, but at one point, when goons come to take your servers away, technical solutions are not enough.

Even the most self-hosted decentralized solution bases itself on legal assumption and freedoms defended by laws.

Take the dire situation of smartphones for instance. It is very hard to connect to a 5G network without giving your ID. The few ways that remain are seen as loopholes by authorities and are being plugged quickly. Same could happen for hosting. “Want to open a port on a public IP? ISPs require proof of ID for that” “Want to run an encrypted service there? You need to register your keys with the police for the port to be open”

There is no clean separation between the technical and political side there, privacy can’t hinge on a purely technical solution. I understand that trust is seen as fundamentally less solid that crypto algorithms, but it is unavoidable at a certain level.

I have a Peugeot iON. Bought it second hand, I doubt the constructor even knows my name. No app, no GPS, I plug my charger in our AC outlet when I park. Never had to charge it outside home.

I agree that the more open source, the more freedom, but there is a world between “We will upload your every move to feed MechaHitler” and a full open source car.

Trust is a fascist political structure.

I see what you mean but I have a strong disagreement with that formulation. Trust is a fundamental tool in building a society. But trust must be earned and chosen, not forced on someone.

DC motors will tend to be optimal only at a set speed/torque whereas BLDC motors do need a microcontroller to be driven, but are able to optimize the flow in a much wider range. Coils in a DC motor are basically ON or OFF whereas they can ramp up in a BLDC depending on the speed.

Yeah, that kind of stuff. Any you’d recommend?

A bit dated but Cousteau’s documentaries, while it mentions environmental problems, do that from a discovery point of view.