keepthepace

C’est la France de la décence : celle qui n’agresse pas, ne fraude pas, qui travaille dur, paie ses impôts et élève bien ses enfants. C’est la France des évidences : celle qui pense qu’un délinquant est un délinquant et pas une victime de la société, celle qui sait que l’immigration n’est plus une chance, que l’assistanat n’est plus possible et que l’État doit d’abord se serrer la ceinture plutôt que de faire les poches des Français.

Ça me rappelle furieusement le ton du Figaro du 19e siècle. Ça me donne très envie de passer 3 heures sur Gallica pour trouver les textes sur ce thème, je suis à peu près sur de trouver un texte sur le même ton, qui conclurait que "c'est donc celle de la royauté et de l'église, certainement pas celle des républicains"

I found the boat + bikes solution pretty cool. Boats typically have much lower emission per kg.km of transported goods.

Pour les amoureux du ciel

Googling about an event in a Europen micro-nation, I ended up in an archive of the 1957 LIFE magazine. I was shocked at how reminiscent it is of modern news website, with advertisement everywhere that does its best to blend in and pretend it is content.

J'aimerais soutenir Blast, j'aimerais soutenir Mediapart, j'aimerais soutenir également Le Monde qui fait des lives qui sont bien. J'aimerais soutenir ma presse locale. Mais si je fais tout ça, je vais m'en sortir pour 60 euros par mois. Il n'y a pas une offre groupée pour ce genre de choses ? Pourquoi ils ne développent pas une espèce d'abonnement global ?

Je sais que la BNF permet d'accéder à des archives, mais je cherche un moyen de soutenir sans non plus s'abonner à 10 médias différents.

I am doing some review for farm robotics and I stumbled upon that project, which I thought was pretty cool. I have met the people who are doing it 6 years ago, when they described themselves as "hippies working off the sustainability budget of Sony Research" and looks like now they manage to live off public European funding and open sourced their designs.

*Envahisseurs de la place

Appuie sur le numéro '4' de ton téléphone pour aller à gauche, '6' pour aller à droite!

I'm part of a group that promotes light electric vehicles (hybrids between electric bikes and cars) and I'm also a huge user of deep learning technologies. As a part of that I am also involved in a fablab, where we often use things that are weirdly cataloged as low-tech despite being high-tech, like DIY electronics. Discussions about what's beneficial, what's compromise, what's something to avoid crop daily and I would like to clear a few points out. I hope it will be useful, and I hope it will bring some interesting discussions here.

Our transition to a sustainable society requires us to make choices, often tech choices, in a way that's aligned with the final objective. There is a general misunderstanding about the different types of accounting you need to do at the individual level, organizational level, national level and global level in order to achieve true sustainability on a global scale.

CO2-equivalent accounting (which is by the way not the only metric that matters, but is still a crucial one) is generally divided into 3 scopes:

• Scope 1 is the CO2 that's directly emitted by the subject. You burn fuel in a generator or in a thermal engine, that's scope 1 emissions.
• Scope 2 is the CO2 that's emitted by the energy that you are using, mostly electricity, but can be heat and cooling.
• Scope 3 is the CO2 that's emitted by your production chain. In other words, that's CO2 that you don't directly emit, but that through your activity, you make others emit. For instance, you're asking for the delivery of something. The CO2 emitted by the truck that brings it is scope 3.

Note that CO2 that's accounted in your scope 2 & 3 is actually somewhere in the scope 1 of someone.

If you on a personal level or on an organizational level you want to minimize your impact on global CO2 emissions you need to have all three into account and 1, 2, 3 is kind of a good priority order.

The tricky part is that as soon as you have a higher point of view, be it at the regional, national or global level, you should not add these different scopes because that makes you count emissions several times depending on the length of your supply chain.

Consider a paperclip factory. Let's say that extracting material to make one paperclip emits one gram of CO2, that the transport of the raw material to the factory emits another gram, and that the transformation uses electricity that emits one more gram. If we consider it's the same company that does the mining, the transport, the electricity production, and the transformation, it has a scope 1 of 3 grams of CO2. That is the actual real number of gas emitted.

Now imagine if the mining, the transport, the electricity production and the manufacturing factory are actually separated entities:

• Mining: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Transport: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Electricity produciton: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Transformation: 0g in scope1, 1g in scope2, 2g in scope3

Add all of this, through the magic of accounting, we have twice the amount of emissions! Now my point is not to debate whether this exists as a genuine tool to reach carbon neutrality or as a greenwashing tool to make fake savings easier. I think it has a purpose and a use but it needs to be used carefully, because a naive reading of that would be that we can cut CO2 total emissions by just concentrating companies into a few zaibatsus.

Especially when you are trying to decide if a specific technology could be part of a sustainable society on the longer term, only scope 1 actually matters: a sustainable society is a society where all scope 1 are at 0, which means it will automatically make all scope 2 and 3 at zero too. In a transitional period, sustainable tech will need to deploy with some scope 2 & 3 emissions, it is unavoidable but as long as it diminishes the total sum of scope 1 out there, it is a net benefit.

As an engineer, scope 1 is usually what I'm looking at. But it also often makes me blind to other paths of action. When I am looking at the above example, I'm thinking that the transformation step is non-problematic and that we should focus on the other three sectors (mining, transport, electricity) in order to have a sustainable society. Thing is, this example is an oversimplified reality. As a company or individual, you usually have a choice between several alternatives, especially when it comes to electricity production or transport. And you can decide to pay more for something that emits less. So there is a point into pressuring organizations to reduce their scope 2 and scope 3 levels as well.

However, when it comes to evaluate not a company, but a technology, one should only look at its scope 1. We can produce electricity, transport things and mine materials without emitting CO2. Therefore, if your production only uses electricity, raw materials and transport, it can be part of a sustainable society, at least from the CO2 point of view. It does not mean that the companies producing/deploying that tech will automatically be carbon-neutral (scope 1,2,3 = 0), especially if we demand them to optimize their costs in the current industrial ecosystem, but then it is the business/industrial practices that need to be attacked.

This is a paradox that is present in electric vehicles and basically anything that mostly consumes electricity for use or production. If you make the accounting on a personal or organizational level, you can't dismiss the fact that the production of your electric vehicles will have emitted a lot of CO2 during production (scope 2 and 3). However, it is often missed that the most important part of making an EV switch is that it brings down your own scope 1 dramatically. Your scope 2 and scope 3 emissions are usually more than offset by the savings your scope 1 brings into other people's scope 3.

Bon bah voila, suite à ça j'ai décidé d'aller tracter avec des militants locaux, et... ben je me rendais pas compte que c'était aussi utile tout en étant un travail de fourmi.

En deux heures je suis à peu près sur d'avoir donné 4 voix au NFP (des gens qui ne savaient pas qu'ils étaient encore inscris à leurs listes électorales) et je pense franchement que j'en ai convaincu 3 autres, qui n'étaient pas au courant de la situation électorale ici.

7 voix, c'est pas énorme, mais c'est 800% plus que ce que je m'attendais à compter dans ces élections. On est quelques dizaines sur la circo, je vais essayer d'y retourner. On sait que ça se jouera à moins d'un pourcent ici.

Allez y, y a un tuto ici, ça n'a pas à prendre plus d'une heure et c'est sympa d'apprendre un peu la politique locale avec des jeunes et des vieux.

Someone (Dreamertist on reddit) got tired of depending on Huggingface for downloading models and proposes a torrent tracker to share more efficiently these huge blobs.

It just started, only a few models uploaded yet, but I think it is worth that we all put our local stash online there. Making a new torrent is super easy (one missing step though: when "re-downloading" the model you need to save it in the directory where it already exists. This way it will "resume" at 100% completion and switch to seeding mode)

I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a "firewall" layer between news and ourselves?

I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said "when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest". I feel it could become the norm.

EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.

EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as "incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!". The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.