Profile for alex

Header for alex
Display name
Alex Schroeder
Username
@alex@social.alexschroeder.ch
Role
admin

About alex

Bio

Biology, Plants, Birds, Photography, Switzerland, Emacs, Wiki, Programming, Perl, Go, Tea, Drawing, Music.
Languages: gsw de en fr pt.
He/him.
Born at 330ppm of CO₂

Stats

Joined
Posts
522
Followed by
773
Following
601

Recent posts

I think I wrote 173 blog posts in 2024. Nice! My blog organisation is by year, so at the end of the year, I move the links to the year's posts to an archive page. As the feed for the front page is based on the blog page links, I leave a handful of links to blog posts so that my feed doesn't shrink to zero items. And tomorrow, a new year. Yay!

I read somewhere else today that they wished us all "a boring 2025". I agree. Health, hapiness, love for us all; peace, tolerance, progress, justice and positive change for the world at large. May we all find joy.

Open thread at this post

I would like myself to continue writing four digit years instead of slipping back to two digit years. Some of us learn our lesson at the turn of the century and already I can feel myself backsliding. It took 25 years for this particular lesson to wear off.

Open thread at this post

If you're a humanitarian, a person who gets a job is a person who gets a job, with all the good that it entails (also work, most likely). Such a thing makes you happy.

Then again, if you happen to think that some jobs should be reserved for some people only, preferably for people that happen to be born in the same country as you, you're not a humanitarian.

I'm sure the Germans have a great word for just this very specific sense of caring for fellow humans. Something about nations and socialism, is my guess. There's probably a short four-letter word, too.

Open thread at this post

“We analysed excess mortality in 2020 for 2141 Swiss municipalities using a Bayesian spatiotemporal model fitted to 2011–19 data. Areas most affected included the Ticino, the Romandie and the Northeast. Rural areas, municipalities within cross-border labour markets, of lower socioeconomic position and with less support for control measures in the popular vote on the COVID-19 Act had greater excess mortality.”
– Area-level excess mortality in times of COVID-19 in Switzerland: geographical, socioeconomic and political determinants
https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/2/415/7588785?login=false
#corona #covid

Open thread at this post

This is what I'm fighting, too! #butlerianjihad

"Summing up the top UA groups, it looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again. Oh, and of course, they don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don’t give a single flying fuck about robots.txt, because why should they. And the best thing of all: they crawl the stupidest pages possible. Recently, both ChatGPT and Amazon were - at the same time - crawling the entire edit history of the wiki. And I mean that - they indexed every single diff on every page for every change ever made. Frequently with spikes of more than 10req/s. Of course, this made MediaWiki and my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users."
https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163

CO₂ for the CO₂ God!

Open thread at this post

"si vous n’êtes pas terrifié par la crise climatique c’est que vous n’y avez rien compris" -- from the bio of @joachim

When we were up in the mountains we talked to somebody who told us that it was hubris to think that we could influence the weather and that his grandfather (!) had told him that there have always been warm winters and cold summers … we didn't know quite what to say. I was thinking of saying that it seemed more like a failure of imagination on his part but my wife just said "well, I disagree" and smiled until he left. 😬

Open thread at this post

An intriguing blurb for a book with free epub and pdf options:
"When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians."
https://nathanschneider.info/books/governable-spaces/
@ntnsndr

Open thread at this post