Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

In other news, I'll share something that you may have missed: @forgejo ships with a couple of theme variants for the colorblind: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/1746

These are also available on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/user/settings/appearance

New York officials call for big oil to be prosecuted for fueling climate disasters - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/17/new-york-big-oil-fueling-climate-disasters "Oil majors’ conduct can constitute reckless endangerment due to fossil fuels’ effect on global heating, advocates claim" more eco lawsuits, please...

Home Office hires 200 staff to clear huge backlog of UK modern slavery cases - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/18/home-office-hires-staff-clear-backlog-uk-modern-slavery-cases "More than 23,000 files were left open by the last government, says minister, with delays of up to four years in assigning victim status" it's really not hard to do if you want to; the tories didn't give a damn

We should be back for now. 🎊

While @Codeberg is working on fixing the outage, you can get Forgejo container images and binaries from an alternate location:

https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/-/packages/container/forgejo/versions

https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases

Hi. Yes, we have a full outage right now (status.codeberg.eu).

This acknowledgment comes from the social media manager that _isn't_ a system administrator. I can't share more details right now, so all I have to say is the following for now: It has been a weird and challenging week, sorry for the inconvenience. ~n

Does your institution have a CompSci department? Or do software development training? Why is it not a standard project for such department to run such services for the benefit of the institution?! It'd be a massively useful real-world teaching opportunity, with huge cost benefit for the institution, too. Seems like a total no-brainer to me. Anyone able to explain why we don't see this everywhere already?

It sorta amazes me to see educational organisations - especially those based in Canada - using Zoom for online educational events. What's wrong with BigBlueButton? It's at least as cost effective (for us, it's $0! Use ours!) because it's fully #libre and we host our own (you - or your institution - could, too).. And it's a community-run project led by Canadians! Unlike Zoom, which is built for corporate drones, BBB is built for education from the ground up. I can't see what's so hard about this.

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