keverets @keverets@librem.one

⚡ Today is a momentous day for Internet competition in Canada — not quite "mission accomplished", but a very important and long-awaited step: As of today, you can finally buy full fibre service from competitors like TekSavvy! (some conditions apply sorry I'm a lawyer I have to say things like this ;-)

Let me explain more:
👇🏼🧵 #CRTC #CdnPoli #TekSavvy
1/8

“They cut speed limits, changed street design, removed space for cars…Now it appears that work is paying off. #Oslo and #Helsinki are reaping the rewards of committed action on making their roads safer, reducing pedestrian fatalities to zero last year.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-and-oslo-cut-pedestrian-deaths-to-zero

"Work on something that matters, if only to you.
Work on something that helps people, even in small ways.
Work on making things understandable."

http://www.rntz.net/post/against-software-development.html

I can't believe a paid OS needs a tool like this. Here's a GUI tool called OFGB (Oh Frick Go Back) to remove all the ads in Windows 11. It's understandable if a free OS or app needs ad support, but this is just crazy https://github.com/xM4ddy/OFGB

If you really want to get upset about something going on in open source / open data space, I would suggest considering Niantic.

After years of refusing any communication with #OpenStreetMap, not to mention -any- kind of support. Niantic joined the Linux Foundations Overture (for substantial amounts of money), but its customers continue to vandalize OSM, burning lots of volunteer time at multiple levels.

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/beware-of-fake-beaches-pokemon-go/112413

“We found there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship. If a city increased its road capacity by 10%, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10%.”

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

#Infrastructure #Roads #InducedDemand #Cities

Completely mind boggling to me that we threw away 5 billion phones in 2022.

Some of those could have been repurposed: smartphones are hardly innovating any more. The most eco-friendly phone is the one you already have.

We need to publicly support communities like @postmarketOS who work on making these phones repurposable, and @gnome that work on making a polished mobile experience that serves people, not creepy corporations.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63245150

In which I ask meta.ai a few questions about myself and the world. No real *new* news here: The answers are plausible but wrong: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/18/Meta-AI-oh-my

Decent entertainment value; still waiting for progress on modeling meaning.

Open access paper titled "The impact of real-time carbon dioxide awareness on occupant behavior and ventilation rates in student dwellings"

Highlights:

- Air quality awareness led to reduced median CO2 levels in 77% of bedrooms.

- Air quality awareness doubled the ventilation rates in 70% of dwellings.

- Display-integrated CO2 monitoring is an effective air quality intervention in student dwellings.

#IndoorAir #IAQ
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778824002482

Just watched a demo of a couple of ML models (image-to-text + text-to-voice) used as an accessibility feature to read text from an image. It's one of the very few use-cases I've seen lately that is actually compelling and solves a genuine problem that needs solving. Unsurprisingly these models run locally and don't need a mega data-center and your credit card number.

This is a great piece, and confirms the broader scale of a piece I did a long time ago: Apple has "must shred" agreements with e-waste recyclers that require them to destroy devices that could easily be repaired/refurbished/reused after having data wiped

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-18/apple-iphone-recycling-program-has-secrets?embedded-checkout=true

That being said, matrix offers room management like IRC did and fits better, and is developed for corporate environments, whereas delta is focused on private messenging purposes. Evolving delta to have discoverable many-user channels is feasible and there are promising experiments (using good old mailman) but it's not a primary focus for now. We have a strong focus on stability and improving the base experience to rival WhatsApp ... But we also prepare some surprises for the next release :)

Messaging transports better be dumb and do the bare minimum to get the job done for end-to-end encrypting apps .... Compared to #matrix homeservers #chatmail servers are two orders of magnitude more dumb, consume two orders of magnitude less resources and are blazing fast and don't require extra (central?!) identity and integration servers. With delta all intelligence, including general purpose https://webxdc.org/apps , lives on the end devices, including security against compromised networks.

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you *don't* have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale *without* paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.

Glad to see more companies partnering with iFixIt - https://goodereader.com/blog/kobo-ereader-news/new-kobo-e-readers-are-repairable