black_puppydog

> most people just talk it out and find some convenient balance

That is decidedly not the way I've seen most people handle the convenience/privacy tradeoffs we all face every hour of every day. So I'll put a question mark on that..

I found this discussion (French but with subtitles) of the painting interesting, since it highlights an often-missed aspect of the painting.

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/092036-004-A/look-but-don-t-to...

On the contrary, sabotaging things that impact everyday life and give a generalized feeling of decline throughout society is water on the mills of Russia's allies in Europe, notably the nationalist and populist parties.

Worth pointing out that Germany is having an ongoing battle over our FOIA equivalent, in which a host of people who were bitten badly by it (most notably Jens Spahn) are proposing to allow exactly this kind of prohibitive fee, as well as reducing access to natural persons (so the individual reporter, not the newspaper) and only to people who have a reasonable interest, etc.

Sure, the current form of the law has some issues on the receiving end, but boy is this an obvious move to cover their own corruption better...

Actually your premise is already wrong, although to be fair I'm not sure what bearing that has on the conclusion.

Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.

But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.

Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.

We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.

Yeah, kinda like the spirals used for (air?) temperature:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/

Well, for a techno-utopian perspective, a page called "Low Tech Magazine" might not be the right place to search. :)

Besides, the page linked is actually powered entirely by solar panels, although intentionally not battery backed in this instance.

As ever, Volts did a really good episode on this:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as

Worth a listen, both to learn about how ridiculous the US situation is, and just how good the "news" of abundant solar is.

The article reads like the act of landing the drilling equipment in Greenland was in itself illegal. Not the same as drilling, and ofc IANAL, but still...

That's what's called a life cycle assessment and these are standard in products like this for a long time. If they came out negatively, you can be damn sure that the fossil fuel industry would make us know.

Also no more limit on the cost they can bill you for providing the information. This can easily be 5 figures and isn't known before it's too late.

> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere

This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.

BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...

I've been mapping out shops, their contacts, cuisines (for restaurants), opening hours etc in my area. It's a lot of work and much of the information will actually simply not be available to me without a shop owner. So I'm trying to get some of them to update their own shop information. But I'm really struggling to find good arguments. Small shop owners often have quite stressful days already and taking even five minutes to update some information only makes sense if I can present them with a case that this will help their business.

Does anybody here know of ways that OSM data is used and products that people actually use to find businesses? I have heard rumors that Apple pulls data from OSM every now and again in areas where their own datasets are sparse. But do we have anything more meaningful or more concrete that would work in an area like France where data is not necessarily sparse in Apple's maps? (I'm saying this looking at Google Maps here in southern France where half of the shops that it displays just don't exist anymore for years...)

well, I sure don't get to have access to all the pokémon data even if I ask very nicely, do I? I'd think that's a (related but important) difference

It's not just trains. You might have a look at this book that I can't recommend enough: https://www.leslibraires.fr/livre/24410316-quand-le-parisian...

FWIW yes, TERs need much, much, much more love in France. Instead, the govt is still refusing to finance repairs to re-open e.g. the "massif central" line.

Even people in some French cities don't get it. Here in Toulon (southern France, between Nice and Marseille) it's hard to get the point across. Lack of public transit, lackluster bike infrastructure, and decades of car-first policy have left people without a positive vision. For them it's all just about "how do we get more parking into the city?" and "There are too many traffic jams, we need more lanes."

To an outsider (I lived in Grenoble before) it's so obvious that I joined some mobility associations as soon as I moved here, and I wasn't even politicized about this before, nor was I in any real sense active in the associative milieu.

Wow, the link to the petition is buried halfway down the page. How is this not part of the first visible content?

You're roughly describing Chromatone and their Muto method of notation: https://muto-method.com/en/index.html

Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.

Yep, I changed town a few years ago and my new social circles are mostly like that.

Either it works right away without any further questions, or they'll not do it.

Sadly, also if they can't do it on their phone, they will not do it. It's actually very hard to get people motivated to do anything that has to do with sitting down at an actual computer anymore. Which is a bit hard if you're in a very technical political advocacy group, kinda makes me the guy to do everything remotely complex... XD

check volts.wtf and notably these recent podcast episodes:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

https://www.volts.wtf/p/giving-clean-electricity-a-political

errr... so anything related to UGC now has a lower bound of 3-4 FTE? Sure, I'll hire a team of content moderators next time I think about putting a comment form under my blog...

You've clearly not been hanging out with French retirees.

I gave up on Google's language and region settings a long time ago, years before giving up on google as a product.

To this day they still think I'm in Sweden sometimes, in Paris other times, or in Germany, while I haven't lived in any of those places for years.

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I have to remind them every time lest they come back with "uh, didn't find anything relevant, here take some hallucinations instead."

So, given the anglo-centrism of current models, my confidence in American providers giving any shits about non-american users/use-cases is pretty low. And lower the smaller the language community is.

Nothing opposes a setup like this to collective action. Given that most of modern technology or at least most of the internet is built to actively distract you as much as possible to extract profit, it's just a sane choice to disconnect from this every now and again if you want to work on things that actually matter. And this can totally include things that are for the collective good, and in collective efforts.

Hey, welcome on my favorite soapbox!

That many people don't know what a file is, is most probably down to the very explicit war of one company, namely Apple, on the very concept of a file. And I fully agree that it is a terrible idea that makes people completely forget that what they're handling is actually a computer that could be doing so much more than what Apple allows them to do.

In a very similar situation to OP, this move totally broke a volunteer-run platform that allows (allowed...) users to report issues with bicycle lanes, missing racks, dangerous spots for cyclists etc...

https://app.vigilo.city/

The app is very basic, but has amazingly little barriers to entry. Notably you don't need an account to just report things, what I'd call an "open door" app. Sadly, without gps exif, this is much higher friction now. Pretty pissed at this. It's not hard to design a clean flow that permits to inform the user specifically of location sharing in the picker.

Thank you for explaining this! I've been feeling this on my girlfriend's macbook for years and I've always wondered what the hell that was. :D