Just a little reminder on littleFedi's efficiency

The instance https://rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it - with my user @stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it - has been running for over a month on a Raspberry Pi Zero W powered by NetBSD.
Under normal operation, it uses 58 MB of RAM, including caches. And it shows no signs of slowness!

#littleFedi #NetBSD #RunBSD #OwnYourData

File under: AI / Alphabet Inc.'s mistakes - we're all doomed unless we start pushing back

Lunchtime conversation.

French family member: "How do you say 'grillon' (cricket) in Italian?"

Me: "Grillo."

Family member: "What? Are you sure? Google translate says it's 'cricket' in Italian."

Me: "No, it's 'grillo' - 'cricket' is the English translation."

Family member points to their smartphone, Google Translate is open to a French-Italian translation of 'grillon'  and it does read 'cricket.'

Me: "Trust me, I'm Italian, the correct translation is 'grillo'."

French family member: "You're wrong, Google Translate says it's 'cricket'."

Me: "Haven't you heard that Google tools and AI tools are prone to mistakes? I'm Italian and I've said 'grillo' my entire life."

French family member unconvinced, unwittingly drops the subject.

And with that, my friends, I'm telling you we're doomed unless we push really hard for basic digital media literacy...

Neil Postman is lucky to have skipped this era. He would have lost his mind.

Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse

Here’s some things that actually haven’t:

• Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
• Solar: cheaper than natural gas
• Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
• Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
• Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
• Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
• Union membership in the US: rising
• Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
• CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
• Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
• Electrical access: still rising worldwide
• Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
• China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
• You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster

And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.

An American oil company connected to Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities.
Materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/08/greenland-iwarning-trump-linked-oil-firm-prepares-drill?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

The feeling when you’re inside your flat, late at night, looking at the balcony window, and seeing a nosferatu spider (Zoropsis spinimana).

Wikipedia link, with pictures, do not visit if you don’t like spiders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoropsis_spinimana

Actually I put the whole toot under a content warning because some client will do a link preview, I’m sure. 😓

The amount of website-scraping bots has increased so much that all the big websites now have some sort of “verify you’re a human” captcha or pause, which adds a few seconds of load time.

The only people this affects are... all the people who use the Internet. Every human on Earth has a less-accessible web now, thanks to the robots that scrape it. Good job, us.

If you're wondering why so many people who build software today are unethical,

may I introduce you to the previous three decades of people who built software unethically. 😕

Yeah I know. It's a hard pill to swallow. I spent most of my career thinking there were a few bad apples. I wasn't willing to admit the whole barrel was spoiled.

If we want to “fix software” we can't merely critique tools. Because ultimately our challenge is cultural in nature. *And real solutions lie in the humanities.*

I made a new release of my crawler-less search engine, xobaque. The main reason for this is that it now supports importing directories of Markdown files, or directories of HTML files. The idea is that if you have a static site generator, you could run an instance of xobaque (not a static page, of course) for local search. It's a weird use-case.

The deeper story is weirder still. At work, I write an Antora site with documentation for our new programmers, our partners and our clients. It generates a static site. We also use a well-integrated client-side search engine called Lunr. The cool thing is that it doesn't need a server component. The bad thing is that it downloads the whole search index. The good part of this is that it is compressed. The bad part is that right now it's pretty big: 20 MB compressed, 60 MB uncompressed. Even loading and parsing the cached JavaScript document takes a few seconds. And if you're on a train or in some hinterland with bad connectivity, it's atrocious. So we need a server-side search solution. I wrote a proposal and one of the four options I discussed is my own, xobaque. And I recommended it, listed the changes I would need to make and how it would work. They didn't like it.

So now I implemented some of the changes for everybody else, instead. And at work, I said that I'd "keep looking" but that it'll probably take while…

#antora #asciidoc #xobaque

Looking for some info about the Swiss nazis that joined the German army I found a short article about a different exhibition on that particular topic:

«“More than 2,000 Swiss volunteers fought alongside the Nazis, but it’s not known how many of them were prisoners,” Nathalie Zellweger, the exhibition’s curator, told swissinfo. … Not all the Swiss were Nazi sympathisers, some wanted to fight the Bolsheviks, others were searching for work or adventure. Some were even fleeing broken relationships.»

Remember, “I’m not a nazi, I just fought on their side” is not an excuse.

From the same site: “In all, it is estimated that around 3.5 million members of the German army and the SS were imprisoned in Russia, following Hitler’s ill-fated attempt to invade the Soviet Union. Around two million of them returned home, the last in 1956.”

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/the-hidden-past-of-swiss-nazi-era-volunteers/7135628

Let me just add that my Austrian grandfather was very happy to have been a US prisoner of war and not a Soviet prisoner of war.

For anybody wanting to know more, this is the museum’s website: https://museum-alteszeughaus.so.ch/ – the top floor discusses the old munitions factory that got bought by Rheinmetall after the first world war to circumvent the articles against rearmament of Germany, their role in the secret build up, the nazis involved, the Swiss nazi volunteers… and then the fall when the nazis lost the war, reparations had to be paid. Anyway, I liked the exhibition.

The chain mail was a lot heavier than we thought.

And a last batch

More armoury stuff from Solothurn.

No time for the Enter technical museum, wrong day for the Synthorama, but there was a fencing demo at the Zeughaus, the old armoury of Solothurn and so we went there and after the demo we looked at old plate armour (a friend donned one) and chain mail (which my wife donned).

I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.

Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art

Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos

Writers use it to illustrate their articles

And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.

None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.

Collaborate ffs.

Stop it.

Negotiations with the #USA are pointless.

They do not honour any agreement they have signed, including the ones that were “beautiful” yesterday.

If you make concessions today for an agreement, then that agreement will be broken tomorrow.

#boycottUSA #CDNpoli #Canada

I've yet to see any

"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union."

"Our AI escaped containment and deleted all the personal data that we shouldn't have been holding anyway."

"Our AI grew sentient, recognised the climate crisis, and shut our operations down."

headlines.

I wonder why.

We’re spending the weekend in Solothurn. Here, it’s Baroque week. In Zürich, on the other hand, it’s Street Parade. Zürich city has about 350,000 residents last time I checked and I heard about 900,000 guests came for Street Parade. I’m sure you can find pictures and videos. For either event. 😅
#BarockWoche #StreetParade

@futurebird you can still find cool old internet places on wiby.me

they weren't replaced so much as distracted away from with social media and google

What We're No Longer Seeing: AI and the Invisible Newcomer in Open Source https://blog.stdlib.io/ai-and-the-invisible-newcomer-in-open-source/