Güntzel Schmidt @gntzl@mastodon.gougere.fr

We're living in a microplastic world.

"Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers."

#Plastics #MicroPlastics #Pollution #Environment

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/12/raining-plastic-colorado-usgs-microplastics

For people looking for an alternative to Facebook events that isn't spammy like evite and the like, I recommend checking out https://gath.io

It requires no login, basically you provide an email address, you get a unique editing URL, you make a nice looking event form, and people can RSVP there. Your event and all related info is deleted from their DB 2 weeks after the event is over.

Gestern hat der Der Europäische Gerichtshof (EuGH) festgestellt: Websites, die Facebooks "Like"-Button einbinden, müssen bei den Nutzern eine Einwilligung einholen.

Das wäre doch nun eigentlich die perfekte Gelegenheit, sich vollständig von diesem Mist zu verabschieden, liebe Webseitenbetreiber. Keine Zwei-Klick-Lösung oder Ähnliches. Einfach weg damit.

Chers automobilistes, pour mémoire ces panneaux signalent un danger : vous.

The idea that "Western civilization" is somehow tied to "whiteness" is intentional in removing people of color from our role in history. The concept of race based on skin tones wasn't an idea in roman times. That's why Septimius Serverus wasn't seen by his people as a "black african emperor married to a brown syrian woman" but just naturally seen as a "Roman Emperor". Thinking of greek/roman culture as a white society is just factually incorrect, there were tons of people of color who were just as important and as much of the society as those with light skin. There's also the failure to realize that the Roman Empire would conquer areas and then the people were seen to be just as much part of "roman" society as others, many african and "middle eastern" traditions, arts, music, etc. were combined with those of rome/greek traditions. Looking at this map it's hard to think that all the people in the confines of the roman empire were somehow white?

I went to brunch with my partner and her wife today. The restaurant was loud and busy.

The TV over the bar was set to ESPN. After a commercial break, there was a brief news segment.

Pictures from the camps were on screen for a moment. Then a bartender reached up and changed the channel.

I guess this is what it feels like to live under fascism.

I wonder if there was a moment in pre war Germany when some queer trans person was having breakfast in a restaurant, the radio started giving a news brief between music, and the bartender changed the station so he wouldn't have to hear about the camps.

I'm coming to the view that microblogs (tweets) and normal blogs are too time focused. There's a pressure for novel ideas, ideas must be polished, and they assume you don't want to edit old ideas.

Perhaps a bliki is a better model? https://martinfowler.com/bliki/WhatIsaBliki.html

Alb is a programming language created entirely in arabic, built to "[highlight] cultural biases of computer science and [challenge] the assumptions we make about programming."

it is a tree-walking interpreter in JavaScript. you can watch its creator talk about the language in the vid below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77KAHPZUR8g

@22 @ipfactor
I dug into this and wrote a blog post about it a while ago:

"Why does Japanese have kanji for very large numbers?"

http://quickandtastycooking.org.uk/articles/japanese-large-numbers/

After Microsoft moves its servers back to the USA, German state's privacy commissioner advises schools not to use Office 365 / Boing Boing
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/11/hesse-nein-danke.html

Today I was reminded of something that, despite living in Louisiana my entire life, I never learned about until I was almost 25 years old. This is the story of Bogalusa, Louisiana, and the struggle for equal rights and living wages for its workers, and how capitalism’s oppressive nature led to the death of those trying to defend that struggle.

Physical (de)centralization of XMPP servers – we took 1000+ XMPP servers and looked at their hosters:

https://gist.github.com/infosec-handbook/19f96587511d6d8ab79b564a7e0b3bdf

– about 50% of these servers are hosted by only 7 companies in 3 countries
– logical decentralization obviously doesn't imply physical decentralization
– more than 50% of servers are hosted in Germany, followed by the USA (10%) and France (7%)

#xmpp #decentralization #centralization #statistics

Physical (de)centralization of Mastodon servers – after our XMPP scan, we took 1000+ random Mastodon servers and looked at their hosters:

https://gist.github.com/infosec-handbook/0cdb8da86cfe63be657fcf44bde291d1

– about 50% of these servers are hosted by only 5 companies in 4 countries
– 26% of servers are hosted in Japan, followed by the USA (24%) and France (23%)

#mastodon #decentralization #centralization #statistics

Arbeiten mit Freier Software ist wie Abnehmen:
* muss man wollen
* geht gemeinsam besser
* selber machen muss man am Ende trotzdem
* irgendwann fühlt man sich leichter

Während das Internet hinsichtlich des Datenverkehrs noch immer exponentiell wächst, schrumpft die Zahl der Quellen, denen dieser Datenverkehr entspringt.

Das Internet wird immer zentralisierter und immer mehr bestimmt von großen Playern.

Das ist traurig, denn so geht uns Vielfalt und auch Innovationskultur verloren!

Für weniger zentralisierte Dienste. Macht mehr selbst!

#Google wird von der Suchmaschine immer mehr zum Gatekeeper - würdet ihr den Googlebot von Euren Websites aussperren, um ein Zeichen zu setzen? https://bradleytaunt.com/stop-crawling-google/

Don't