Pirineos.

Firefox could position itself as "the browser that doesn't force AI on you" and people would love it. But no.

From dependence to leadership: Europe needs sovereign digital skills to achieve tech autonomy https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/opinion/from-dependence-to-leadership-why-europe-needs-sovereign-digital-skills-to-achieve-tech-autonomy/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=dlvr.it

Nice, thank you @robin for these remarks:

"If you create authoritarian #infrastructure, you will get an authoritarian society," and

"Tech #monopolies were not made by innovation and they won't be broken by #innovation."

“Why don't we have a label for cloud providers that would redistribute a part of their revenue to the #OpenSource projects that they deploy, and make that label required for 🇪🇺 procurement? There are these companies that make a shitload of money off the work of others.” — @robin
#NGIForum2025

"There are many people who want to build on digitally autonomous infrastructure, but there is nowhere for them to go to."

"We need to enable the people to govern the internet, by giving them agency - we need to teach them to *open source*"

So. Much. Yes. #ngiforum2025 #ngiforum25 #ngiforum

On my way to #ngiforum2025 to find out what I can do for the Next-Generation Internet.

Interested to learn what's brewing in open-source self-hosting, digital sovereignty, and open search!

Anyone open for a chat, sendme a DM. #ngi #ngiforum #ngiforum25

@queerthoughts There's a chance!

@queerthoughts Negative energy prices?

From a presentation I'm doing tomorrow, a great insight from Edsger Dijkstra, "Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better." - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD896.html

Sooner or later most technological species discover what Earthicans call the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem, and then—generally two or three generations later after the novelty has worn off—some Bright Young Thing applies it to quantum chromodynamics in order to produce the Baryonic Combination that expresses the statement “this particle does not exist”. After that the number of technological species in the cosmos goes down and the fraction of dark matter goes up, again.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

@hetzner Welcome on Mastodon! I've been using your VPS with a storagebox for data storage, and it is the best value on the market. I also uses hetzner's DNS as my primary nameserver for various domains, and it just works.

Betelgeuse, the Red supergiant star in Orion that is not pronounced ANYTHING like that movie godsdammit, does have one thing in common with it. Teetering on the brink of Supernova, variously predicted to blow up tomorrow, in the next 100 kiloyears, or already (modulo light speed lag), it waited to be called.

Our uncertainty about its state of assplodery stems from our uncertainty about its mass, which in turn arises from our uncertainty about its distance. The reason we’re not completely sure whether it’s 400 or 1200 light years away (far enough to be non-earth-shattering when it does kaboom, in any case) is that its death-throe fuzziness (this beast of a star would extend to the orbit of Jupiter if you swapped it for our sun) makes measurement of stellar parallax really frickin’ hard.

The Henrietta Swan Leavitt Tachyon Ranging Observatory was built to solve problems like this. It works like RADAR only it uses tachyons, those mirror particles of normal matter which can only travel /faster/ than light, never slower. This morning the HSL fired three tachyon bursts at Betelgeuse, awaiting echoes which ought to return in just minutes, not centuries. Two came back. The distance to Betelgeuse is 714.5 light years. That means light from its supernova explosion will arrive in 714 years, six months and five minutes. Whoops, our bad.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

It's a good day when one of your favorite post-rock bands releases a new song with the promise of a new album: https://welostthesea.bandcamp.com/album/a-single-flower #welostthesea #postrock

🔥

@hypha I like the simplicity of https://httpie.io over curl, and you can combine both with https://rs.github.io/curlie/

tfw I feel seen but also I think most of my stuff is working right now and maybe I should be grateful.

Hello EU people:

There is an EU citizen petition to ban the use of "conversion therapy" on LGBTQ+ folks (i.e., trying to de-LGBTQ us— a process often described as "torture"). If you're interested, you can sign it here:

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home

Please especially take note if you are a national of Spain, Slovenia, Belgium, or the Netherlands; the petition needs about 5x as many votes as it has now, but also needs to hit a threshold in four additional countries, and those are the four closest.

I wrote article about the (financial) cost of generative AI inference:

"Cheaper AI does not mean greener AI"

tl;dr: the capex of the servers dominates so there is not much incentive to save on energy use.

https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/cheaper-ai-is-not-greener-ai/

#FrugalComputing

I say this a bunch but one of the sheer joys of Mastodon is simply boosting stuff you like. I mean it's so silly but here, you get to be the algorithm. If you don't boost, it don't get boosted. So... whatever your reasons, boost, boost, boost!

Drop that goddam shyness that the other sites somehow programmed into you, as if your own stuff will get punished if you help others' along.

Also boost is nice word.

I can't find the original source but someone said something along the lines of "search engines provide you with sources, not answers" and that really hits the nail on the head, and is the big problem with AI/LLMs. Looking at sources and thinking critically about them in order to formulate an answer has gone out the window.