Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The Navajo build thriving farms in parched landscapes
Using traditional rock and stick structures like the ones built by Indigenous peoples to capture water before the arrival of Europeans, Navajo communities in Arizona are defying changing conditions to create productive farms. Scientists confirm that these structures mitigate erosion and increase downstream water availability. Yale Environment 360 https://buff.ly/4h4SJdQ
#ShareGoodNewsToo

Outstanding.

"The pro-car zealots at the city council insist on ramming car lanes through the city even though no one in my limited social circle supports them. I personally do not drive a car to work, and therefore I cannot comprehend how a car lane might be useful for someone else.

You cannot turn Wellington into Houston or Los Angeles. The city is different – it has hills, winding roads, and sometimes there is weather. There isn’t enough room to sprawl out with the motorways and wide arterial roads you need for a good car-based transport network.

It’s time someone said what everyone is thinking: the car lanes have no cars. I went out to Kent Terrace at 6am on a Sunday and couldn’t see a car. A survey in 2023 found that just 28% of people in Wellington city usually drive to work. Why are we designing our entire city around a hobby for a small minority of middle-aged men? "

https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/18-10-2024/a-ghost-town-car-lanes-in-the-city-are-stuffing-up-wellington

@lwriemen
> I wish people would add content warnings to posts that contain links to Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, etc

Or just ... not post links to them at all? Like any sociopath or narcissist, giving those DataFarmers' platforms attention just encourages them ...

After a "Technology is Not Your Friend" induced hiatus, the next episode of the audiobook podcast of The Points Between is finally online!

https://eviscerati.libsyn.com/the-points-between-episode-two-dust-to-daylight

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