@openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

People who think/wish that worsening climate fundamentals leading to #heatwave events will suddenly sensitize society to environmental #sustainability are probably counting themselves prematurely rich. Just a few years ago we had a planetary scale biological #pandemic risk event which is now almost forgotten. As soon as stress subsides prevalent cultures and mental models reassert themselves, like an elastic band that returns to its base state Real change does happen but is infuriatingly slow

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

"Towards a Post-Social Media Studies"

"For two decades, “social media” has been the master lens through which scholars have understood digital communication - an era defined by user-generated content, networked publics, and participatory culture. That era is drawing to a close"

A timely review of the transformation of #adtech #socialmedia (which were never really "social") into algorithmically driven content delivery platforms

Can the #fediverse somewho fill the gap?

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6nue7_v1

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

The #OpenSource Strategy is an important new statement from the EU - maybe the last chance towards European #digitalsovereignty

The aim is to strengthen Europe's open digital ecosystems by supporting the development, scaling, deployment and sustainability of open source technologies across both the public and private sectors.
Read about:

* Why it matters

* Who benefits

* Current challenges

* Concrete approaches

* The EU's Objectives

* EU actions already in place

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/open-source-strategy

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ironicbadger except that doesn't apply to the one device that billions of people now use as a "computer": their mobiles. While grateful for the gift of Linux, the revolution is still incomplete, the stars must align once more for a second miracle to happen. And when that transpires, the world will have changed, dramatically 🙏

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

RE: @BrentToderian@mastodon.online

The denser the urban environment, the less it makes sense to use cars as the primary means of transport.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@hongminhee@hollo.social activitypub has a top-down feel, abstracting "social web" concepts and indeed sticking (mostly) within the Web conventions. It is not very prescriptive about implementations. In comparison ATproto is more of a bottom-up design, in a sense the bluesky code is the documentation of the protocol. Important design choices target a certain type of "scaling". Its quite fascinating and revealing that such different approaches, help create the same "twitter" microblogging illusion.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@itsfoss oh noooo Now I need to move all my Projects-X, Projects-Y etc. under Projects🤣. Which is survivable I suppose, a one time hassle, but should it be Projects -- Projects-X or Projects -- X This is the type of existential question that keeps me awake at night 😅

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mosiwo @ironicbadger I have heard of them. And of Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS/Jolla etc. A tiny group of enthousiasts probably heard of other options too 🤣. There is simply no comparison. Linux on the desktop is now arguably the dominant option for general purpose computing. Holdouts are those locked on Windows-only games or Apple "creativity" tools. On mobile, the first question people ask: will I brick my phone. The second question: does it run banking apps. Very different level of maturity.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

Collecting, processing and making sense of the public data can be a cumbersome exercise and there are important #dataquality issues to overcome before the results are meaningful. For this purpose we are developing functionality within the #opensource #Equinox platform to support this task. In this post there is a brief description of the data models involved with some sample data. https://www.openriskmanagement.com/using-equinox-to-record-data-center-environmental-impact-data/ The code is here: https://github.com/open-risk/equinox

openriskmanagement.com

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jwildeboer @Reinald in the biophysical domain scarcity is more or less anchored on the planetary boundaries (and within reason, renewable energy is not constrained by them 💚, though it gets more complicated with supply chains and waste etc) In the human domain, what can I say, this magical silicon stuff is something humanity doesn't deserve. For decades visionaries waxed lyrical about its incredible potential and in practice all that happens is deeper levels of dystopia. Something's gotta give

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

The #fediverse uses the terms distributed (or decentralized) #socialnetworks a lot. There is even a Wikipedia entry [1] about them 🖖

Which is fine, except it is strangely redundant term as there are no "centralized" networks.

A network is either a network, or it is one of Zuck's databases to which everybody's browsers connect, *pretending* to be a network 🥶

People have been ranting about this for ever [2] but hope springs eternal 🙏

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

[2] https://archive.is/EAoMn

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@evan@cosocial.ca @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net There is a self-selection that gives the fedi a particular culture. E.g., I am here because I find targeted adtech social media disgusting human torture chambers. But to think of the fediverse as "positive" oriented is strange. There are recurring episodes of toxic attacks on anybody expressing an opinion that doesn't fit the echo chamber and that's just my limited graph. Being open source, decentralized etc is not a magic wand that fixes inherent limits of online worlds.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ronnylam@mastodon.social @seharinsights@mastodon.social @koen@procolix.social @bagder@mastodon.social makes visually quite explicit the idea of digital pubic goods on which the rest of digital society can be built 💚

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

RE: @afewbugs@social.coop

Same wish, but for us on planet Earth, not just the UK 😅

We'll probably never get rid of status symbols and conspicuous consumption has always been such a symbol, but maybe we can decouple them from massive environmental footprint.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

A very tangible way to think about how much we have lost from the decades-long oligopoly strangling digital tech is to compare desktop versus mobile capabilities around #creativecoding #algorithmicart #livecoding and similar creative pursuits across music and visual creations.

The #opensource frameworks available for desktops are mind boggling in diversity and capabilities, are arguably among the most sophisticated uses of personal computing.

Comparatively, there is almost nothing on mobile.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jschwa1 except its not simply "a sad state of affairs", it is potentially a lethal one. This level of inanity may eventually hit a complacent world that believes somehow choices, actions (and inactions) don't have consequences: its all a reality TV show, and there will always be a "deus ex machina" to sort things out. It is empirically true that the modern world does have enormous capacity to absorb malgovernance. But this only primes us for much larger pain when we reach the limits.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Reinald one would have to do the calculation but its not inconceivable that everybody of the 11 billion could have at least *some* "yacht" experience in their lives (and 50% would get sea-sick and hate it 🤣 ). Of course if we keep inventing materially wasteful status symbols to play paleolithic social dominance games via "ownership" and exlcusion, we do run against hard limits. So-called "space tourism" comes to mind as obvious example. @jwildeboer

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@juergen_hubert The challenge is primarily for academic researchers in this space (if there is anyone left that hasn't been bribed into becoming an "AI" bro with multi millions). The commercial chatbot / codingbot endpoints with the gigantic models behind them are carefully orchestrated to support the hype of extreme competence that can help fire half the workforce etc. What is needed is a deconstruction of the useful bits and a design of low level tools that stops with this charade.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@Joy_intl@mastodon.online @Gina@fosstodon.org it might be kinda useful to policy types - and I don't think I've ever seen such a thing - to have a sort of catalog of what are established uses of mobile devices and which of those need to be ring-fenced, protected from the surveillance cartel The list is quite long... from calls/messaging, to identity, location, camera/audio, health, payments, banking, any other sensitive commercial/personal interactions etc. The techbros know exactly what they are after, but we dont

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

Incorporating accurate #geospatial data is essential both for identifying the environment in which #datacenters operate but also providing a rough indicator of capacity, following the so-called floor space proxy method. Various methodologies people use for the estimation of GHG emissions and water usage are discussed and summarized in this post which identifies the key variables that must be sourced from public information. https://www.openriskmanagement.com/methodologies-for-estimating-data-center-environmental-impacts/

openriskmanagement.com

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

For those interested to dig into the topic, a review of the (rather technical) area of measuring #datacenters #environmental impact (GHG emissions, water usage), alongside the key literature references is available here. It highlights the challenges in terminology, measurement methodologies and disclosure practices, for the different business models (enterprise, colocation, cloud) which lead to contradicting and partial views. https://www.openriskmanagement.com/big-picture-around-data-center-environmental-impacts/

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@LeoKirke@retro.social #bookwyrm instances might be the natural place to organize this (see e.g., https://bookwyrm.social) Some new functionality: I've read / this book and now looking to swap etc. Instances are supposed to federate via activitypub: https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/federation.html No idea how this platform / community is doing these days but it always seemed to me like a wholesome initiative that can differentiate the fediverse from classic adtech social in good ways.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@evan so if all cities where to run instances they'd get 85% loyalty, or is my math wrong? (instances running cities is a bit too solarpunk)

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@europe I wouldn't be surprised if it was staged somehow around the llama that learned to do this (the rest just behaving instinctively). According to wikipedia Llamas can learn simple tasks after a few repetitions. The truth is people go to extraordinary lengths to get viral videos on adtech social. There is some money involved etc. We didn't really need "AI" to have shitty social media but it will get further downhill from here 😟 @Rainmaker1973 @druid

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@white_gecko @itsfoss yes many of my X,Y, Z's are quite close to your "spaces", e.g., github or gitlab hosted, public / private etc. temporary trials, old stuff to sort out in a subsequent reincarnation etc. 😅

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Jeremiah Food for the mind: https://museedesconfluences.fr/en/welcome-museum and plenty of normal food 🤣 (being the gourmet capital of France etc.)

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thesdev@social.vivaldi.net the European attitude towards the EU was shaped during the long Pax Americana when... nothing happened, so people could indulge their parochialism and play big fish in small ponds. Then we had the financial crisis, the Syria refugee crisis, Covid, Ukraine, Greenland, now Iran (and of course the Chinese juggernaut), blowing up any illusions of grandeur. But, alas, once a Homo Sapiens brain settles on some beliefs, it is only generational change that can help. @Sobex@social.sciences.re @underseamonkey@fosstodon.org

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@markhughes I think the Linux desktop has been reasonably usable for almost a decade now. The duopoly has cornered the mobile market much more effectively and we have at least "a lost decade", including all the failed projects (Firefox OS, Ubuntu etc.) And its not even obvious that there is now a clear path forward (e.g Android-based versus pure Linux etc.) @mosiwo @ironicbadger

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us yes, I have seen today an economist talk about the Wile E Coyote effect (in relation to the Iran war and the oil crisis). People seem to want to have their stock market party go on forever, decoupling it from annoying reality. But in the end, forecasting is hard, especially when it is about the future 🤣. A tech bubble burst has been predicted several times already. The monopoly position of those companies does give them remarkable resilience...

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us Oracle invoked the same argument. Extraordinary times whatever the interpretation. One possibility is that they don't think its a risky move. How can they be so sure? Only if they know they have a stranglehold on users and can push "AI" in all eventualities. Another possibility is that they are actually "bust", not literally - as in bankrupt - but in terms of defending their astronomical valuations: the risky bets aim to avoid a massive correction. Time will tell I suppose...

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ScottGrimmett This might be exceedingly idealistic. Going "rogue" would be strange for a company of that size, which depends on the government in countless ways. The real moral failure of Apple under Tim Cook, imho, concerns choices much more under their control. Despite marketing talk pitching #dataprivacy, they simply became an adjunct to #surveillancecapitalism In a sense Apple became an oversized Mozilla. An entity that provides a fig leaf to cover digital dystopia. @jfmezei @rbreich

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@AliceStollmeyer@eupolicy.social while tribalism is strong on both platforms, it totally makes sense to hedge. There are just too many uncertainties on how things will develop. Both technically (the ability to scale *and* decentralize), in terms of funding and adoption etc. Imho, if we really want to escape from the adtech black holes the more alternatives reach some sustainable state the better.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@stigcq@mstdn.dk yes, but I am specifically talking about the technical term many people use (included the wiki link for the avoidance of doubt 🤓), not the experience of connecting with other people using digital means. But it is indeed this conflation (the perception versus how it is achieved) that is a key factor behind the success of platforms like facebook etc. Most people don't really care how the "connection" experience is achieved. Big mistake.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@malteengeler European countries emulating dystopic US tech, the way e.g., China has done, is obviously not the digital society we want, and vigilance is required, but the risk it will happen is less. Such models cannot scale across Europe as new local digital overlords to replace the old remote ones. The challenge (and opportunity) for Europe is precisely its diversity of interests. In the short term the bigger risk imho is doing nothing, rather than doing something wrong and irreversible.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kjhealy The US is a morally bankrupt society that is collapsing. It's not that other societies are necessarily in better shape: corruption, collusion, capture are pervasive. It's just that for as long as the power edifice is intact it covers its sewage. When it starts falling apart, this allows us to peak through its normally opaque structures and get a glimpse of how things really work. And it is disgusting and frightening but also points to a reality: Without transparency we have no future.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@paco @sue looking for analogies with the financial crisis there *is* a real estate angle to "AI", all the data center REITs 🤣 But this episode doesn't seem to follow previous patterns. We had some "bailouts" already, Twitter was folded into xAI then into SpaceX, also Intel. The overall tech sector is both too big to fail (maybe the only thing going for the US) and has amassed enormous capital that is ultimately anchored in near total oligopoly. So whatever happens... it will be different

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@nixCraft@mastodon.social maybe personal (self-sovereign) computing was an aberration - a bit like democracy - and we are now reverting to the normal state of things (oligarchy, feudalism, peonage)? It would be comforting to dismiss these fears as dystopic nightmares but to do so credibly we need to identify the actors that don't just scream into the void but actually do change things: Somebody has to encourage competition, build affordable hardware, promote open software etc. Not as niche but for everybody.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@arstechnica its not the "Energy Information Agency", its the "International Energy Agency" 🙂

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

The concept of an "AI" PC keeps swirling around those days.

This time its #Nvidia with an #arm CPU and a GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores(...) but running... windoz 🤣

Anyway, #linux support might happen at some point but unclear if there will ever be a "new era" for #personalcomputing

After the explosion of #smartphones , #surveillancecapitalism and tech oligopolies the trend has been dumbification and disenfranchisement.

But one *can* envision a different timeline 🫩

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/nvidia-unveils-rtx-spark-superchip-at-computex-2026-new-platform-promises-to-turn-windows-into-an-agentic-ai-os-with-arm-cpu-blackwell-gpu-and-128gb-unified-memory

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

An awe-inspiring aspect of all these extaordinary space missions of the last decades (which we were the first generatio and so very lucky to witness🙏) is how *familiar* these alien landscapes, whether on a icy comet, on Mars etc. how they immediately generate a sense a "place".

Which in retrospect makes perfect sense: They are all just different fragments of the same icy-rocky disk round the Sun that Earth is part of. But before these missions we never had the vision

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_s_extraordinary_comet_landing_relived

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Daojoan@mastodon.social Insightful piece The idea that every uncertainty can become a market that creates a probability has had some economists drooling but it has been seen in practice in the credit derivatives market that it doesn't work: there is simply not enough interest for most individual company contracts, so they are simply creating a market manipulation mechanism. Arguably derivative contracts are least bad when there is already a spot market: society has already financialized the underlying good.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@cwebber not caring about people is the parasitic behavior that only survives while sufficient people care about people

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thefwguy yes and yes but no, this doesnt mean that mobile is anywhere close to what Linux on the desktop has achieved in *a shorter timeframe*. The Linux kernel was released in 91 (one decade after Microsoft MS-DOS (81). The first CDE desktop: 93. The first Nokia smartphone was in 2001. The iPhone 2007. Thats a quarter century ago(!) There are some valid reasons for the difference but overall the gap is undeniable and its impact is dramatic: many more people use mobiles. @ironicbadger

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DrPen@mastodon.social I don't think the Luddite movement will achieve lasting change. Ofcourse every contract *not* signed with the "AI" bros is a win. Every person with decision power nudged to think rather than mindlessly jump on the "AI" bandwagon is a win. But the overall phenomenon cannot be unseen anymore than computers or electricity. Digitization of society is a flood and applying algorithms is a dam building exercise that generates power. The choice we have is who, where and how taps into that power.

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@theyosh @me @jolla orange should make it particularly popular in NL 😆

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@claesdevreese where are they going?

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DrPen@mastodon.social The Luddite stance is a negation. The more recent example being the claim that there is nothing intrinsically useful in "AI" (LLM's etc.) The alternatives you mention (small / open / sovereign etc.) are not Luddite, they are positive efforts to build something. They start with the assumption that socially beneficial use of digital technology is possible - its just not coming from the bigtech universe. We need more of those, in every digital area there is intrinsic usefulness. 2 cents

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

RE: https://social.ftm.nl/@EricChrSmit/117036253076647168 #BigTech is an aberration and it is important to see it as that, rather than accepting "this is just how things are". Even in the context of our flawed democracies and economic systems the historically unprecedented concentration of power and influence in the hands of a tiny oligarchy is extraordinary. We actually have far worse and difficult #sustainability problems to solve, but we will simply not get there as long as big tech is the sole force shaping the digital sphere.

social.ftm.nl

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Open Risk @openrisk@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DrPen@mastodon.social the post somehow mixes too many challenges. To make the point with an extreme but not completely unrealistic example: Imagine the LMS is open source Moodle (which btw seems to be very pro "AI"), run by a non-profit, and using an open source LLM that has been trained on material the authors approved and released under some creative commons license. Even after removing all monetary profit-driven complications, the educational utility of courses that are LLM generated "assets" is not obvious

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