Notices by Chris Adams (mrchrisadams@mastodon.social)

Dear Brussels fediverse peeps. If you have a fave quiet cafe near Bruxelles MIDI/Zuid that you like and *have personal experience with*, and is within walking distance, would you share a recommendation.

I can Google, but I’m looking for recommendations based on personal experience if possible.

I thought I would arrive in time to make it to the hotel
I’m staying at, and I’ve learned the train was delayed overnight (I’m on a sleeper train from Berlin to Brussels for #FOSDEM)

TIL I discovered that JSON Query is a thing. I can totally see this becoming popular - it feels a bit like jq in that it’s a nice way to work with json output, but it the syntax feels more intuitive at first glance.
https://jsonquerylang.org/

I want to take this article and replace every mention of the term word “AI”, with “Expensive External Consultants and Systems Integrators”, because it's strategically about as smart.

Sure, there are some places where AI and machine learning can be helpful and very valuable, but this blind faith in a piece of tech, when you see something like an 80% failure rate for internal AI projects (see the rand corp report in next post) should be ringing SO many alarm bells.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai

/1

This is pretty neat!

Presumably, if you knew some sensible assumptions to make about the likely CO2 per car in traffic, you'd be able to estimate the carbon reductions / air quality improvements from the congestion charge in something close to real time with this.

https://bsky.app/profile/cdsamii.bsky.social/post/3lez5zsbvf22c

I posted about air quality / indoor CO2 in rooms yesterday in #FOSDEM, and this project here appears to set up a fairly accurate in-room CO2 sensor (a SCD4x one) with a tiny ESP32 minicomputer.

The box can join wifi, and then expose the live CO2 values for scraping via Prometheus/Grafana, a well known monitoring/observability stack.

It even includes a 3D model for 3D printing the box, and sample code and links to buy the kit, for 30-40 EUR total.

Not bad!
https://tech.lgbt/@alxndr/112051071094122231

TIL: At CCC various rooms already have CO2 sensors, and there are grafana charts for various rooms. Check the link below:

https://dashboard.eventinfra.org/dashboard/snapshot/fCrkSAdp52O1FN7fHLUmQ4HqeymzxpQ2?orgId=1

And the post that led me to this discovery:
https://chaos.social/@flangey/113754256433628704

Thanks @baconandcoconut - you can see the pic of what I assume is the air filter mentioned in the legal and policy room in the FOSDEM2024 in the post below.

It also contains a link to some useful guidance on how much air you'd need to move to effectively clean the air in a room of the size of the policy dev room.

Can you expand on “Conservancy staff” I don't know what that is.

https://rtl.chrisadams.me.uk/2024/12/whats-the-air-quality-like-in-rooms-at-fosdem/

/cc @karen

I posted yesterday about air quality in packed rooms at #FOSDEM, and this came up in my feed here.

I think it's serious, and if I'm gonna go through the faff of learning about some of the HVAC and HEPA jargon I figure it might be worth repurposing what I'm learning along the way into an article for it, if nothing else, right?
https://social.cryptography.dog/@fluconf/113736089021529360

I'm going to #FOSDEM in Feb. If you know if any of the teams who organise devrooms or similar spaces would be open to having CO2 sensors running in the rooms, and making the values visible to participants, I'd love to know.

It feels like an affordable project to do, and quite scalable too.

Actually… I'm doing a talk in the #inclusiveweb dev room anyway. I'm happy to start with bringing a sensor of my own if there's nothing better available.

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/inclusive-web/

Anyone else up for it?

I must be missing something obvious. Is there a nice way to do threads in one go with Mastodon?

There isn't an obvious UI element see in Ivory, nor the official Mastodon client, and yet I see people like @molly0xfff doing absolutely epic long ones.

I think this is because very post has to be a reply to the previous one, so there's no ID to link to, but surely this has been solved already, right?

If there's a good published how to, I’d really welcome a link to it.

👍 ?

Y'know that #solarpunk trope of floating wind turbines in the sky, tethered to the ground, and feeding power down to denizens below?

This is in China, serving 50KW at 500m, which is power for between 40 to 140 households.

The figure changes depending on which country you use. USA is around ~1KW per house, and in Europe it's closer to 300-400W on average).

I wonder what the economics are like for these. I you have seen numbers, do plz share.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202410/12/WS6709ce66a310f1265a1c7306.html

Wow, this @sovtechfund fellowship looks great - if you live in Germany and are a maintainer of a widely used yet poorly funded open source project, they basically pay you to maintain it for a whole year at something pretty close to market rates, with the perks of being an employee like paid holidays and all the rest.

More info below.

Please look there before asking questions Here. I don’t work for them, but I like what they do.

https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/news/apply-to-the-fellowship-for-maintainers

For context, BTW, I think having a browser not funded by advertising would be wonderful, that was answerable to users, rather than being designed for advertising like Chrome, or tightly coupled to hardware sales and app stores strategies like Apple.

State funding might not be ideal especially if it came from just one country, but I think Mozilla’s annual budget would be the same as about 4 or 5 F35 fighters jets by comparison.

Signal app is ~0.5 jet fighters BTW

https://simpleflying.com/how-much-does-an-f-35-cost

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Hello internet. Have you come across any good analysis of the new ad changes in the Firefox browser by a group that meets the following criteria?

a) knows privacy really well
b) knows the economics of how browsers are funded well
c) is not Mozilla (hard to be impartial in this case)

I understand Mozilla globally to have an annual budget of maybe 4-500m USD. The money has to come from somewhere, ands it’s historically been advertising (although I use and recommend ad blockers too)

/1

Dear carbon curious fediverse ppl: we don’t use Fastly at present where I work, but their recent announcement of a free tier had a couple of interesting things I'd appreciate some help learning more about.

First, here's the link to the free plan - Cloudflare style CDN service, but without the problematic policies around hosting some *extremely* questionable content - huzzah!

https://www.fastly.com/pricing/

This caught my eye though - the sustainability reporting thing here. /1

This is an industrial designed exercise bike from Lithuania that can store 2KWh of electricity generated by your own exercise.

The electricity can then be used for loads of stuff - it has a bunch of DC outputs, like USB-C (up to 60W) and USB-A, and AC outputs (can output up to 2KW - enough for an oven!)

It can also be fed from a solar panel, or the mains.

It’s about 3K EUR, so not much more than a high end Peloton , but obvs serving a *very* different market…

https://www.tukasev.com/en/

Hi gang.

I'm looking for people to follow who write about people on the front line of climate and env justice struggles, to learn about what kind of operational support these ppl have access to, in the face of increasing surveillance and ever more draconian laws stopping protest.

I know there are groups who provide kind of support outside of climate protest, but there's historically been less overlap than you might think.

Recommendations gratefully accepted - I'll share a summary.

Hello Fediverse, I wonder if you can help me.

I am looking for peer reviewed papers and reports which document pro–climate action by unions or other forms of employee organisation inside firms in the recent decades.

I had assumed they have been net force of climate delay more than progress - I’m trying to change my view.

👍?

@glynmoody thank you for sharing this - it made my morning ?️