keverets @keverets@librem.one

"Meta's Threads Now Has More Daily US Users Than Musk's X"

Users: "we did it, Patrick! We saved the city!"

You traded a smallish platform ran by an alt-right memelord for a platform operated by a privacy-hostile conglomerate that controls how 3.5 billion people get their news.

Whatever you think ails the internet, Facebook is far more to blame than Twitter was.

“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

@DavidM_yeg Back in 2020 — when I used to still read the National Post — someone commented that renewables don’t work for Calgary because of how far north it is. I was able to share the BBC article that stated Scotland (whose southern border is approximately the same latitude as Fort McMurray) had achieved 97% of its power from renewables.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424

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

For rainy days we have a treadmill but it's locked into the vendor's subscription service if you want to watch videos.

Except...tap the bottom left 10 times, wait 7 seconds, tap 10 more times, up pops a number, use that as a seed to generate a number with lrand48, reduce modulo 999999 (not 1000000!) and type that number back in, and now you have an Android tablet with web browser and access to YouTube.

"but e-mail !1!!!" Is probably still a number one objection from experts and power users who refuse to fathom that e-mail protocols are a viable option for instant messaging even if it demonstrably works, is fast and secure :) We'd be happy if someone engaged in a proper comparison with xmpp and matrix specs and impls, really the only three messenging protocols deployed and implemented at scale. (Can't compare that with Signal or WhatsApp which don't have wire specs!). https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/blob/main/standards.md

Does your public library use on Overdrive/Libby for ebooks or audiobooks? ⚠️

In the US and Canada, the answer is probably yes. And you might want to speak to your library staff and commission about it.

Libby is now owned by a private equity firm & making sketchy changes: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

The latest development is that their overbroad privacy policy allows them to sell your borrowing history to advertisers: https://infosec.exchange/@longobord/112243098104196246

Thank you @karawynn and @longobord!

#Privacy #Libraries

"Spotify’s CEO is now a billionaire but it takes artists 334 streams to make $1. The company just enacted a plan to completely demonetize smaller artists. Under the new policy, tracks that get under a certain threshold of annual streams will receive no money from the company. Groups like United Musicians and Allied Workers (ig: weareumaw) are fighting to save their industry."

#Union #capitalism

PumpkinOS: A Modern Reimplementation of PalmOS for Today’s Platforms https://hackaday.com/2024/04/08/pumpkinos-a-modern-reimplementation-of-palmos-for-todays-platforms/ #Retrocomputing #PalmOS #palm #pda

After reviewing the privacy policies of all 3 apps, I find that a deceptively broad interpretation of the Overdrive/Libbyapp privacy policy enables them to share your checkout history with advertisers.

3/x
#privacy #library