Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Open letter to "Forests" after they offered me a 100% discount for publishing one of my papers:

Dear Ms. Kira,

I am sorry but I no longer trust your journal. I was asked to referee a paper that was clearly badly flawed. I pointed out the flaw and you published it anyway. As far as I can see Forests is a predatory journal and I don't want anything to do with it.

Kind regards,
Euan Mason

#science

There are certain... I don't know, let's call them "foundational tenets" in library work. You'll find many of them in the Five Laws of Library Science, but there are many more beyond those. Some pop up through the course of a career and others are learned in schools.

But there is one that stands near the top I'd like to share with you. It goes something like this:

"It is better to have no information than it is to have wrong information.”

And once you understand that, you'll understand why I, as a librarian, have a massive problem with AI.

‘I’ve seen the dark, fat grease stuck to the leaves’: oil and gas encroach on #Peru’s uncontacted peoples - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/oct/17/ive-seen-the-dark-fat-grease-stuck-to-the-leaves-oil-and-gas-encroach-on-perus-uncontacted-peoples "The government is auctioning off plots of pristine Indigenous reserves for fossil fuel projects, with campaigners warning of a ‘silent genocide’"

"No one trying to steer Liberia’s tribunal from Washington has admitted that the US and its corporate interests fueled the mass violence, which killed as many as 250,000 Liberians. While purporting to champion accountability, Washington has neglected its own complicity."

https://africasacountry.com/2024/10/when-justice-means-impunity

Comrades, the #Guix Science channels have moved from GitHub to Codeberg 👇
https://codeberg.org/guix-science/

Migration was very easy and complete, with pull requests migrated without loss. We have yet to see how contributors can resume work on PRs opened pre-migration, but it looks great so far!

@klmr @tomstoneham @publictorsten

This is in keeping with the TechBro mantra, "Move fast and break things."

Which is how we have quickly gotten to a world full of broken things.

not to be 'we told you so' but when disabled people said that labour were going to be just as awful to us as the tories and non-disabled people refused to believe us

Coinbase’s “Stand With Crypto” lobbying group has released a list of 39 candidates they endorse. After noticing some conspicuous absences, I discovered they’re just endorsing candidates with a high likelihood of winning — presumably to later claim a blowout in favor of crypto.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #CitationNeeded #USpol #USpolitics #Coinbase

Although my usual reaction to cultured meat is "that can't *possibly* be the right answer," I don't think that Telegraph article accurately describes where the current scientific consensus is.  I have a close colleague who does LCA research on cultured meat and she's said that the case that cultured meat is environmentally preferable to beef is pretty easy to make, and that it's only when compared to intensively produced poultry that the relative sustainability starts to look like a wash.  

Against that backdrop, the idea that it would be *25 times* worse than beef is staggering.  It might match my intuition, but the cited unpublished study seems to be an outlier in the very limited scientific literature on the sustainability of cultured meat.

I did a search for Raymond Pierrehumbert, who is mentioned in the last paragraph, and he seems to have published a 2019 LCA paper (#^https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31535087/) that takes a decidedly softer tone:

"Under continuous high global consumption, cultured meat results in less warming than cattle initially, but this gap narrows in the long term and in some cases cattle production causes far less warming, as CH4 emissions do not accumulate, unlike CO2."

Digging into his paper a bit more, the really striking difference appears to be when comparing meat sourcing in the present while assuming that all meat consumption is subsequently and rapidly *phased out* entirely, which produces the graph in Figure 2e (attached).



Even then, the idea that cellular meat climate impacts are many times higher than beef production depends on the specific scenario considered.  Only one estimated of heating from cultured meat remains higher than Western U.S. beef production by 1000 years in the future, and there is at least one cultured meat scenario that is comparable to the lower long term heating of Brazilian and Swedish beef production.

Whether "cellular agriculture" makes *economic* sense is a different question, and on that question I think the scientific consensus is much closer to the ideas put forward in the Telegraph article.

I think the bottom line (which most scientists would agree on) is that meat consumption needs to decrease.  

My own view is that animals can play a functional role in diversified farms, something that vat-grown meat can never do, and the tradeoffs also change if meat is treated as a secondary product of other animal products (e.g. milk and eggs, see #^https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/science/article/pii/S0308521X16308034), but when animals are not primarily grown for meat, we end up with a lot less meat regardless.

"Enshittification isn’t merely the result of greed or foolishness — it is the inevitable consequence of a captive userbase.

A service that isn’t federated is unfit for purpose, and the managers who decided not to federate it demonstrate by their acts that they are not worthy of our trust."

#CoryDoctorow, August 2023

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again

#enshittification #federation

I wonder how much organisations who've invested in software development to integrate generative LLM services into their products and services will be willing to fork out when #bigtech starts to recoup the massive (eye watering) cost of those services? Clearly, bigtech is expecting that some will end up paying a LOT, and bigtech has a LOT of experience of how much they can mint with lock-in.

Big Tech is borrowing a page from Big Tobacco's playbook to wage war on your privacy, according Jake Snow of ACLU of Northern California . We agree—but there’s still time to stop them. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/preemption-playbook-big-techs-blueprint-comes-straight-big-tobacco

Just updated a couple Gitlabs and upgraded my Forgejo from 8.0.3 to 9.0.0. Every day with #libre software makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. This stuff just keeps getting better.

For those still wondering about why they were "not allowed" to scan the other QR code: I suspect this is related to potential abuse vectors via QR codes (yes, we know, requiring the hacker to spoof it via a fake app instead of an ebook is not the answer).

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIcbAMO6sxo or read https://www.revk.uk/2020/01/eicar-test-qr.html for some background.

~f

We’re hiring a full-time Senior IT/Infrastructure Engineer based in New York. You’ll respond to IT/infrastructure needs for our small Brooklyn office and our remote workers, and help with general infrastructure maintenance tasks.

If you’re based in NY, or willing to relocate from within the U.S., please consider applying.

https://grnh.se/2a150e355us

Marge's Wacky Weather Forecast, with scattered showers of batshit libel. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/10/11/congresss-climate-quack/