Notices by Benjamin Geer (benjamingeer@piaille.fr)

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116736671610666006

"Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields.... One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit."

Three hours ago I reported a bug in an open-source program. Two hours later it was fixed and a new version was released. You won’t get that from Microsoft, that’s for sure. Nobody told me to try restarting my computer. The developer just thanked me and fixed the bug, end of story. ❤️

https://github.com/rvben/rumdl/issues/445

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #rustlang

Florida Introduces ‘Sanitized’ Sociology Textbook

"The volume was created after a state review found that existing course materials violated a law prohibiting general education courses from teaching about systemic inequality. So far, at least two universities have adopted it."

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2026/01/29/florida-introduces-sanitized-sociology-textbook

@ddrake This is very cool, but I wonder what the Rust code looks like: is it idiomatic Rust, which in many cases would require drastically changing the design of the original code? Is it something that a human would find maintainable? And (considering that it’s entirely possible to write unsafe code in Rust), is it provably safer than the original code? If not, maybe it would be better to pay human programmers to rewrite C code in Rust.

Does anyone know where I can find data files representing the Paris light rail network (métro and RER) as a graph in the mathematical sense, i.e. a list of nodes with one node per station (with its name), along with a list of edges? I haven't found anything like this on the Open Data web sites of the RATP or Île-de-France Mobilités: it looks like they have data on lines and stops, but not a graph of stations. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places? @Alon @bovine3dom #OpenData #Paris

@inthehands So I think for knowledge producers to ensure that they can do good work, they should control their own means of production: universities, newspapers, etc. The struggle has to be a struggle to establish better institutions, not just to fight bullshitification (Sisyphus-style) within the existing ones.

@inthehands I think you’re right, but to say that “we” didn’t uphold standards obscures who actually made those decisions: not the journalist who complained about having to write fluff, but their boss, who was ultimately answerable to investors. The choice between quality and rubbish has always depended on a power struggle.

@tract_linguistes @MedericGC Est-ce que j’ai mal compris ou est-ce que l’arabe, la deuxième langue la plus parlée en France, ne sera pas évoqué ?

Published in an Elsevier journal.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijscr.2024.110139

#science #PeerReview #AcademicPublishing