selfhoster1312

Yeah, i was not looking for a subscription but rather a one-off donation (either cash via post or bank wire).

I'm curious about what's missing for you in the current HTML export? I haven't tried it but i've read about people playing with it and it seems already quite comprehensive from an outsider's look?

> though I guess time will tell on that one

Interestingly, this article does not make a single argument why this is technically possible, but does point out that Musk and friends have no plan to make the wealth redistribution happen. The article does not quote a single researcher on extractivism, material sciences, ecology... This is religious dogma at its finest. You may be a believer, but that does not make it plausible.

On the other hand, there is an abundance of data points that ecological collapse is already happening. All scientists agree we are on a non-sustainable path. Many agree that this model's collapse is unavoidable, but the question remains: do you want to plan for a humanist degrowth making quality of life better for everyone and more sustainable? or do you want a Mad Max-like future where people fight for drinkable water?

That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.

A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.

It's not just a structure problem. The needs are different. And monoculture is always bad, so developing a plurality of solutions is a good idea.

I'm not saying every small administration of a 200-souls village needs to do this, but on the scale of a nation who has a GAFAM budget in the hundreds of millions of euros (probably, haven't made the calculation), it's not crazy to invest a few million on a side project like this to reduce dependency.

> the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows

That was 18 years ago: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

As someone who makes a professional use of typst, i'm curious how you support the project financially? It seems like they have a Github Sponsors setup, but their only commercial offering is for the web editor which IMO brings little value.

I was looking for a way to donate them a little cash the other day because i found typst super useful for my non-profit activities (and super easy to teach), but i didn't find one.

Not that i disagree, but at the time these people were called traitors to their nation by people who claim to be patriots. I guess it all depends whose interests your patriotism defends, which is why patriotism as a concept/value is not really useful.

A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.

With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.

This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.

Even incremental builds can be slow depending on eg. what macros you use. For example, i had bad surprises with askama which is a delight in most cases, but really makes compilation slower as you add more templates. On a project with ~20 templates, incremental build in debug mode now takes ~40s on a very fast machine.

I love python for some stuff, but i definitely would not say it has an expressive type system. Enums are a second-class citizen, and typed dicts are definitely not as convenient as i would like. And to my knowledge, type checkers don't support proper exception catching rules; rust also has no guarantee that a function won't panic, but usage of Result type makes it less of a problem (because panic is more or less exclusively for unrecoverable invariant violations), and there's ecosystem tools to make sure you don't ever panic.

> I agree that the ideology of growth at all costs is problematic, but it's how our society is structured right now

With this mindset, nothing ever changes. No social problem was ever solved without looking at it from a social/political perspective. If you agree that growth ideology is problematic, then that's what you need to dismantle.

> To be fair, the declining fertility rate will probably solve a bunch of environmental issues

I think this is just wrong. The problem is the lifestyle: the throwaway culture and abundant consumption of throwaway goods. We could be just as many billions living OK in our environment, but you could have just 100 million average middle-class westerners continuing to fuck up nature (just slightly slower).

> I think it's actually the most likely future.

Well that deserves some actual argument. This abundant future has been promised to us for generations and has served as a justification for precisely fucking everything up in the name of the brighter future. Yet now we have, to my knowledge, no indicator of things getting better, but all indicators going way worse than we thought.

> I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu"

Yes it is. It's about mindful production of useful products and services. Which is very much the same as reducing economic activity and energy consumption.

The degrowth movement is very fringe indeed. But its ideas are not, some have even been assimilated by the green-washing apparatus such as "reduce, reuse, recycle". I agree with your definition because it includes pollution, which is deciding factor for reducing production overall.

> Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption

The question is good but not the framing. How is pollution avoidable? Energy consumption is not the problem but it's the means by which the auxiliary problems arise, and therefore a correct proxy to measure them. One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.

It's like in software development when people consider CPU/RAM is unlimited and don't provide any optimization. That may be fine in hypothetical settings, but in the real world resources are finite. (the analogy stops because using too much CPU/RAM does not "pollute" the rest of the machine and create memory corruption or whatever)

You seem out of touch with actual ecologists. Just because some ecologist discourse you don't hear on CNN doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Of course ecologists are very concerned for solar and wind power, or rather for their industrial counterparts! I know quite a few activists who are very concerned with non-recyclable solar panels and wind plants, but build solar "boilers" and tiny wind generators from spare parts and renewable materials (such as wood).

Ecologists are also concerned with outsourced manufacturing. Not every ecologist is a caricature of a Silicon Valley engineer who says we'll save the planet by buying Tesla cars and building solar plants. In fact, 100% of the ecologists i know (who are actually involved in activism) will say that those people are not ecologists but merely green-washing.

Some technology carry politics as part of their essence. A knife or a hammer is a relatively neutral technology. An atomic bomb on the other hand is a political project in itself and has no charitable interpretation (game theory / mutually assured destruction aside).

I think AI falls into the second category. Even the most optimistic interpretations of AI, such as in Asimov, are very totalitarian. They're only positive because AI is automating away human work to create more resource/financial equality between people. In our real world though, AI is just as totalitarian, but there's not a single glimmer of hope that it will be used to better share resources. That sounds more political than technical.

You're redefining environmentalism with a very narrow and technical view. Goodhart's law does not only apply to computer science, but to ecology as well, and says that CO2 emission alone is not a good metrics.

I'm not saying energy consumption overall is a perfect metrics, but the degrowth movement is a philosophy / science that's not aligned on a specific metrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth

My two cents is there's some implicit arguments you're making here:

- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)

- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)

Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).

It's called capitalism. Whether that is sane, or individual self-interest without empathy is a trait of sociopaths, i'll leave up to psychologists and historians to debate.

Interesting! I would personally argue that AI as a political project is precisely very authoritarian. I recommend reading Al Khatib's definition to get an unorthodox perspective on the matter: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean

Does not mean it's a made up issue. That's classic whataboutism. Ecologists are not concerned just about nuclear activity, but precisely about the overall industry destroying our entire environment, and for whose profit?!

France is in that list (hello i'm from france too) because construction is heavily subsidized and decommission is overall not happening, not planned, and more or less not even approaching the planning stage. The few decommissions that are taking place are decades late and billions over budget.

It's not industry secret that if you count the entire life cycle, nuclear is the most expensive (in terms of euros) energy we have. Does that mean it's a bad investment? Not necessarily. If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth. Also, the nuclear industry is very much in bed with the military industrial complex, which is something you may be concerned about.

And that economic analysis does not even account for how "stolen" the uranium we use is. If France paid an actual fair price to the Françafrique countries pillaged for their uranium, it would probably be more expensive. TBH, i haven't followed developments in the last years in regards to french neocolonialism collapsing in sub-saharan africa, but here's a small article from 6 years ago: https://infokiosques.net/IMG/pdf/uranium_de_la_francafrique-...

Not always, but overall having cleaner code with less bugs, more documentation and tests, is not just an annoyance to you. It's a money-maker for your employer as well in the long term by virtue of reducing burnout rate, decreasing onboarding time, making any improvement possible at all...

Anti-globalization is not right-wing, at least here in France. Right parties and the extraparliamentary right are very happy to have cheap goods from China, oil from the middle east, and gaz from Russia. Hell, even the neo-fascist (which directly descends from actual nazis) Front National regularly has their propaganda manufactured in China.

Right-wing parties are very opposed to organic food and local production, and always defend transnational treaties. Hell, even Mercosur, which Marine Le Pen spent years arguing against, 100% of Front National MPs voted for it.

So beyond that words come out of these lying scumbags, i'd be curious how you came to this idea that anti-globalization is right and not left?

That's a good point, but i doubt we will find useful applications that require resources on that scale. The only usecase i can think of is more mass surveillance, which in my view is a net negative.

It's not just the data centers, but it's part of a bigger trend of massive industrial projects depleting natural resources for questionable benefits for humanity. There's basically two approaches to ecological problems: either pretend some wonder technology (AI?) is going to save us all and keep driving straight into the wall, or seriously question any industrial activity in a cost/benefit analysis.

Our society is currently headed in the first scenario, building ever more useless shit and accelerating environmental collapse, pretending CO2 capture, AI, unlimited energy storage, agro-bots, desalination and on-site recycling of complex materials will magically keep life sustainable despite any scientific evidence showing otherwise.

Oh, they're more than a drop in the ocean for sure. Which doesn't mean there's not other things to address, where population is definitely not the main problematic factor, but consumerism is (and throwaway culture). This kind of whataboutism is fallacious, you can do better.

EDIT: As a small anecdotal point, any new human activity that is measured in GW of power consumption is not a drop in the ocean. Admitted, some of these data centers projects are "only" in the 100s MW scale, but all of this combined is increasing electricity consumption by a vast amount overall.

That's like saying you just have to stop being a wage slave for a corporation and suddenly you're free.. but you still have to pay the bills. That's a fallacious argument.

All people i know around me who use LLMs and have subscriptions are forced upon them by their employers. But even for "willing" users, questions of addiction come into play.

I'd like to argue the other way around, it can be bad for some people while still being extinction-level bad for entire species. I'm not talking about sentient AI going Matrix, i'm talking about the real material impact of datacenters being built so that a small minority can enjoy funny tools.

That's a strawman argument. I'm pretty critical of LLMs and i don't use such tools. However, even in the strawman version, why dismiss the experiences of people suffering first hand from those tools?

I mean, to make a terribly bad analogy, i don't immediately discount the bad experiences of soldiers in regards to killing people, or of addicts in regards to drug abuse.

I'm fine with ambiguous rules. A non-profit is not a legislative body, though to be fair even actual laws are usually ambiguous and contradictory and that's why we have lawyers and judges and such.

Ambiguous rules with clear objectives is what gives a non-profit the power to be flexible in the way to accomplish common goals. It's based on human trust and is fine by me and others. If you ever were part of a non-profit, you know human trust is an essential component.