Les frères Jacques… Des années que je n’avais plus entendu leur nom et plus songé à eux!

Merci doublement, donc. Pour cet excellent souvenir (et pour ce que je prends très volontiers comme un compliment, aussi ;)

Do you use the ability at all?

nope. I’m getting old enough, and my health is not that great, to not be keenly aware of how short life is. No matter the ratio of the exchange. I’m definitely not an Achilles ;)

If I was to answer that type of argument, I would consider those:

• why do you close the door of the bathroom when you use it?
• Can I watch you fuck?
• Show me your last income declaration
• Give me your credit card
• Why do you wear clothing?
• Why do you lock the door of the house?

but I tend to ignore people using the “I have nothing to hide” argument

Excellent! & congrats times 2.

1. for reducing e-waste, which sounds much nicer than ‘trash diving’ :)
2. and more importantly, for managing to set up something that neat for your spouse!

After years using it, both my spouse and I happily supporting it with our Premium subs, maybe it’s time for a change as I see nothing new that would be worth the almost doubling of the price.

le parallèle avec les imprimantes est peut-être un signe que les régimes qui rendent ces traceurs obligatoires ne veulent pas le bien de l’humanité.

Peut-être, oui.

Tu laisses de l’ADN sur tes papiers et c’est probablement plus facile de te tracer comme ça.

Mouahahaha! (ça, c’est mon rire de savant fou/psychopate/parano de base. Rayez les mentions inutiles, s’il y en a) : justement non, car je porte systématiquement une paire de gants et une de ces combinaisons et bonnet blanc qui te fait ressembler à un spermatozoïde géant et bipède chaque fois que j’écris un courrier anonyme (1). Ah oui, et c’est le chihuahua de la voisine qui lèche le timbre, et vu que je sais qu’il a pas de casier ils pourront jamais l’identifier. Je suis pas un des cas amateurs, vois-tu.

1: c’est-à-dire jamais (sauf la fois où j’ai demandé une remise pour bonne conduite aux services des impôts, ils m’ont même pas répondu), selon les dernières statistiques collectées à mon sujet par les services de renseignement. D’ailleurs, les gars des services secrets, puisque vous lisez ça et si vous avez trouvé ma carte d’identité (égarée y 5 jours max), merci de la glisser dans ma boite à lettre.

Merci pour le partage. Mon premier réflexe en voyant la miniature et le titre a été de me dire : funk, encore un lien vers une video sans le moindre petit commentaire explicatif, je passe mon tour. Mais bon, il se fait aussi que j’avais besoin de me changer les idées et du coup j’ai quand même cliqué. Et c’était très intéressant. Comme je disais : merci ;)

Un grand bravo à l’auteur de cette vidéo, aussi : il propose quelque chose qui est à la fois didactique et très progressif dans ses explications, tout en se permettant d’aller assez loin pour donner une bonne idée d’ensemble même quand, comme moi, on y connaît à peu près rien du tout. Le tout étant très bien emballé, ce qui ne gâche rien.

Pour ce qui est des stegomalwares dans les pubs sur les sites Web… vive les bloqueurs de pub, donc? Et aussi, vive les sites web statiques mais là je fais carrément de la pub dissimulée pour mon petit blog perso (qui n’affiche pas de pub, mais c’est surtout parce que personne ou presque ne le lit. Sans cela, je me priverais pas de mettre de la pub partout, moi aussi je veux devenir milliardaire, ouais, millionnaire ce serait déjà pas mal, voire-même juste… à l’aise ;)

D’une manière presque anecdotique, cette histoire de pages imprimées sans anonymat possible (du moins avec les lasers couleurs) ça me conforte dans mon choix de privilégier la plume et le papier.

Mon stylo plume (et billes, et mes crayons, aussi) et le papier respectent ma vie privée et mon anonymat (eussé-je l’idée d’écrire ou de dessiner anonymement)… Quoi que ? Chaque plume étant potentiellement unique (sans même parler des types d’encres utilisées), il devrait être possible de distinguer chaque trait de plume de tous les autres? Un peu comme il était possible d’identifier une machine à écrire sur base des caractères qu’elle imprimait dans le papier, chacun avec de petits défauts uniques. Mais au moins, cette faille dans l’anonymat de mes outils low-tech n’est que ça, une faille et non pas un choix volontaire.

Une conclusion, peut-être un peu hâtive, serait de se dire que c’est une bien belle société que cette société industrielle que nous avons fabriquée tous en coeur.

for music: mpv to play good old audio files saved on a hard drive, from ripped CDs.

Agreed.

Yes I was asking you, as I thought you were the author. My bad.

I would not say I see substack as problematic. I mean, I don’t use it (I had a look, even created an account) but I have no issue with people not sharing my values or having their values I deeply disagree with. My question was really all about the choice of hosting a site about solarpunk using a tool/service that is not, well, not much in the vein of solarpunk tech. At least, not as I understand it.

Certainly, and I did not delete my account either ;)

I’d argue that in some applications, this is fine.

It sure can be. Like I said, a bit like an address book has its purpose. But even if it has pages and printed text in it, an address book is not a book anyone would want to read, it’s just a stack of pages.

I have not considered UBI to be honest, maybe I should give it more consideration.
What I worry a lot more about is the way ‘creativity’ (as the OP tried to frame it) is being hijacked and privatised by very few corporations/private interests. The same that pillaged so many of our art history and creations in order to make their own version of it they want to sell us back.

recurring topics. My answer won’t change:

• More quality content/comments. People will go where they find what they’re looking for. No matter teh sad show reddit has turned into it is still filled with quality content (even more so in ‘niche’ communities).
• Less preaching. Does anyone really think that by telling people they’re doing it wrong or worse that they’re being dumb (because they’re using this or that) we will encourage them to change their habits?
• Less politics. My very first impression of Lemmy was almost enough to make delete my account. Politics, not the most subtle one, and memes were everywhere. Not really the type of content I was looking for (I’m fine discussing politics with anyone willing to discuss it provided we can go above the mere ‘you’re wrong because I don’t agree with you’ or the ‘you’re fascist if you don’t hate what I hate’ type of discussion).
  Everyone should be able to chose what they’re exposed to (including politics and memes, btw) but forcing them to taste it out of the box may not be the… most seducing default.

How do you feel about the fact that art created by AI this year is not much different from art created by humans? I think those who have seen it themselves understand what I mean.

I would say It’s quite… challenging to hope to hold any discussion about an hypothesis that requires all participants to already agree on it. That’s more akin to entering a cult.

But here are a few remarks worth keeping in mind imho:

1. Art is not limited to visual art. Far from it.
2. Visual art is not about portraying something in such or such specific manner (be it realism, surrealism, or whatever else) it is about sharing an experience (which no AI can do, as it doesn’t live and can’t experience shit by itself) and it is about sharing an emotion that can be ranging from the pure emotional one to the most cerebral. Things that no AI, no matter how sophisticated it is, can experiment either as it certainly has no soul and it has no mind. At best, an AI is a complex set of statistical textual analyses. At best. Hence it’s ability to spit out pure non-sense with the same seriousness as it will spit out factual data.
3. Randomly copying and iterating randomly is not ‘creating’ anything it’s playing with volumes of data (and violating copyright). Art is all about making decisions and following one’s own path.
4. AI art is boring. Like reading an address book would be (edit: still, even boring it can be useful like an actual address book). People are more then welcome to enjoy boring, like they’re more than welcome to watch shit shows on the TV, if that’s really what they want to get out of their life. I’d rather not and therefore I focus my time on less boring (and human made) art.

How do you feel about the fact that now and in the future, AI will do most of the creative work

If by creative you mean mimicking/monkeying what human do, well… AI can ‘do’ all the ‘creative’ work it can. It won’t make me enter any art gallery or museum to look at it and it will certainly not make me willing to spend a cent accessing it either.

No more than, say, good (bad?) old Microsoft Clippy ever pushed me to enter a bookshop in order to check if it had published anything under its name.

How do you feel

And you, how do you feel about asking questions that aren’t questions? And what do you get out of trying to portray AI as what it is not?

Edit: some clarifications + typos.

Thx, a lot for sharing.

The endless attempts at defining solarpunk is something that has surprised me, to be honest.

Why the need to find one right definition, and worse ‘to be right’ (making all the others wrong in the process)? I mean is there any other reason beside feeling good about oneself?

To me, solarpunk is a way to look differently at tech. I could end my definition here.

I could also go on talking about how it’s empathy-focused and how human centric it is.
Or talk about the flavors I like the best (low-tech would be my obvious pick) but that’s just words hiding what I think is solarpunk core principle: a desire to provide another way to look at tech. To any tech, and for any use. For good and for bad as well… And that is where I think all the ‘preachiness’ going on around solarpunk fells short.

With solarpunk, tech is once again a tool. Not that magical-like (super) power that stays out of our reach—like fatality or like Gods, be they bene or malevolent. Not what our very own CEO want us to believe tech is: something we can’t get over, something we can’t live without, something we can’t replace ever, save with whatever new piece of tech they hand down to us

Solarpunk makes tech what it used to be: a tool in our own hands. A tool made with our own hands. Our tool. A tool we learn to use and then to master, and whose mastery can then be taught/transmitted from one generation to the next—or to the previous generation, if one was to make time traveling solarpunk a thing?

A personal question, if I may : is there any specific reason you’re using Substack?

I mean, I know it works well and it seems quite popular among ‘literary’ people but isn’t it another one of those centralized (social media-like) type of tool that keep full control of tech out of our hands, something solaprpunk wants to offer an alternative to? It’s a genuine question, I’m not trying to troll or blame, I’m curious to know.

Should we tell people Lemmy exists

Tell them, sure. Preach it to them, a little less so imho. I often see people being such a pain in the you know where insisting on making other people using whatever it is they’re using, or proving them wrong when they don’t want to. It’s not the best way to make it attractive to anyone.

or is the organic slow growth much better long term?

There is no assurance it will get better. The reality is that it can fail, like it so frequently happen with anything ‘organic’. Living things can grow for sure, but they can also not grow at all and die. For many reasons, including the lack of care and… excessive care too (try giving too much water to a plant, or too much food to some creature).

What I do is tell people wanting to reach me I don’t use centralized social media at all. And that they can find me around here (or on my blog, or through email).

A few will indeed reach out to me using those, while most will simply not bother trying. Quite normally, I would say, as most don’t care about reaching out to me specifically (or anyone else, for that matter), they care about getting an answer (from anyone) to whatever is bothering them, or getting instant feedback/validation. And they care about it as easily as possible, putting in as little efforts as possible… meaning they’re not looking forward to trying new and less popular ways.

Did you manage to cut or phase Microsoft out?

I cut Apple out of mine, never was much into Microsoft but I have been an Apple user since the early 80s. But, yeah I cut it out (to regain my privacy and stop wasting perfectly fine device because of forced upgrade cycles), and I do not miss Apple the slightest. That was 6 years ago, maybe a little more.

Depends how long you keep them in the fridge.

Well, I’d guess that 99% of WWW pages do advertising and tracking, and if you include personal pages on Facebook, Instagram and whatnot, it is probably over 99.99%. With Wikipedia and Arch Wiki as notable exceptions that comes to my mind.

I’m not much into the guessing game. I’m also not a gambler.

In the meantime, exactly 0.0 % of gemini protocol pages do advertising and tracking. How come?

I’m more interested in encouraging people to transition toward more open and more accessible technologies than preaching them to ‘adopt’ a ‘we-the-happy-few’ technology for not other reason than me fancying it (you may have noticed I did not mention the tool I’m using to create my static website: the tool matters not. It should not.)

I’m glad to know you’ve found whatever it was you were looking for in using Gemini. Alas, you have not answered any of my questions. Your conviction is just a personal opinion, it is not information or facts I can use to reconsider my own choices, and it certainly doesn’t give me any hint on why Gemini would be a better choice than the tool I’ve been using so far.

Yeah but then you need a web server,

Don’t you need one to host your Gemini files?

complex config for it,

Two questions:

• What do you mean ‘complex’? I have configured nothing on my web server, I just created a few folders. It’s a static website, like a Gemini one would be, everything is done locally on my computer and only after that the static copy (HTML+CSS) is automatically copied to that host, making the static website accessible to the public. That’s how all static websites work: they need no script, no configuration on the server. They’re wonderful and I say that after decades dealing with WordPress on all my personal and pro websites ;)
• How do you make your Gemini website? And how is it less complex than copying a bunch of HTML files from one’s computer to one’s web server?

security updates, and so on.

There is no security update to worry about with a static website (it’s static, it can’t run anything, there is no CMS, no script, nothing).

Gemini is far simpler and the reader has certainty that he/she is not served any advertising.

Far? You seem very willing to assert Gemini is simpler, I can hear you but don’t forget repeating it doesn’t demonstrate much.

For me, Gemini is a different and a very interesting take on static website publication, but it is still a static website generator and it certainly is not simpler.

At the very least because it requires a dedicated set of tools/software in order to make that website accessible to the public and another set of dedicated tools in order to access it.

On a much more personal level, take it for what it’s worth it’s merely my own personal experience: I consider it too complex for my level of ‘expertise’ as I failed to use Gemini properly (hosting it on the same web server I use to host my blog) whereas I have zero issue running a static HTML/CSS website on the same server. Note that it may also be I’m just too dumb to understand the magical simplicity of Gemini, I will happily grant you that possibility but at least I tried my best ;)

So, tell me how exactly is hosting a set of static Gemini pages is simpler than hosting a set of static HTML pages?

and the reader has certainty that he/she is not served any advertising.

How so?

Like I explain on my own blog: I decided to support all costs of running the blog and to not display any ads, For the same reason I run zero tracking, and zero script (I have no idea who if anyone is reading my posts) because I don’t want to spy on my readers and because there is already way too much ads everywhere online and I wanted to remind people of what the Web used to be before its corporate/marketing take-over.

It’s a choice. A choice anyone anyone is free to do, or to no do.

Note that if Gemini does not support visual ads and tracking (which Is great but not exclusive to Gemini) it doesn’t prevent anyone to use textual advertisements or even to masquerade ads as standard content… One would obviously not get paid on clicks but there is always to get compensation. Like it’s too often the case in too many written press outlets: there is no click and no tracking on a print page, but advertisers do pay for putting ads in those.

edit: typos.