Autonomie numérique et technologique

Code et idées pour un internet distribué

Linkothèque. Carnet de bord. Page 9

Cuántos tenemos que ser para hacer algo con Simona Levi de Xnet

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Hoy nos acompaña Simona Levi, una de las 25 personas que están dando forma al futuro según la revista “Rolling Stone”, para hablar de una de las características más básicas de las organizaciones: su tamaño.

Casi todos estamos de acuerdo en que la razón tras cualquier intento de organización es hacer algo, pero ¿Es inutil intentar cambiar nada sin la concurrencia de las masas como sugirieron diferentes corrientes políticas del s.XX o son los pequeños grupos decididos, insistentes y comprometidos los que cambian el mundo?

¿Qué límites impone la naturaleza, la sociedad y la cognición a la escala de nuestras organizaciones? En definitiva ¿cuantos tenemos que ser para hacer algo?

0 A.D. A free, open-source game of ancient warfare

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Pantallazo del juego 0 A. D.

0 A.D. (pronounced “zero-ey-dee”) is a free, open-source, historical Real Time Strategy (RTS) game currently under development by Wildfire Games, a global group of volunteer game developers. As the leader of an ancient civilization, you must gather the resources you need to raise a military force and dominate your enemies.

The Lab Book. Situated Practices in Media Studies

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The Lab Book cover

Despite their sudden visibility due to the burgeoning of the digital humanities, media labs have a surprisingly long history. As part of the historical avant-gardes, media arts labs were the sites where the new materials and aesthetics of technical modernity were developed. They often share a common ideology, tied not just to the neoliberal drive to privatize, innovate and disrupt, but to long-standing modernist ideas about creative destruction, quantification and the value of scientificity. The Lab Book will thoroughly document and explicate this significant cultural force.

Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia

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Gender is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of inequality. For example, English-language Wikipedia contains more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics, but less than 19% of these biographies are about women. To try and improve these statistics, activists host “edit-a-thons” to increase the visibility of notable women. While this strategy helps create several biographies previously inexistent, it fails to address a more inconspicuous form of gender exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantitative analysis of web-scraped metadata, this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies. This disproportionate rate is another dimension of gender inequality previously unexplored by social scientists and provides broader insights into how women’s achievements are (under)valued.

Boris Johnson’s obesity U-turn is a total Eton mess

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Have no doubt that these policies would have a profound impact on child health. Advertising restrictions work. A recent peer-reviewed study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine showed that thanks to the mayor of London’s junk food advertising restrictions on the capital’s buses and tube trains, families are now buying 1,000 fewer calories a week from food that is high in fat, salt and sugar.

The evidence could also not be clearer that policies that are good for child health can also be good for business. Before the Transport for London advertising restrictions came into force two years ago, the advertising and food industries were saying they would be hit hard and advertising revenues would tumble. What actually happened? Food companies simply started advertising their slightly healthier products and TfL advertising revenues actually increased by £2.3m that year.

MAAAP: creando un territorio inteligente desde la ciencia ciudadana

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La iniciativa MAAAP busca la creación del primer “Territorio inteligente” mapeado por sus propios ciudadanos. Esta es una propuesta interactiva de ciencia ciudadana que tiene como objetivo implicar al alumnado de 4º de ESO, 1º de Bachillerato y Ciclos formativos de FP de Aragón en el entrenamiento de un algoritmo que nos permita diseñar ciudades más habitables.

Groucho Marx y el Crack de 1929

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…Muy pronto un negocio mucho más atractivo que el teatral atrajo mi atención y la del país. Era un asuntillo llamado mercado de valores. Lo conocí por primera vez hacia 1926. Constituyó una sorpresa muy agradable descubrir que era un negociante muy astuto. O por lo menos eso parecía, porque todo lo que compraba aumentaba de valor. No tenía asesor financiero ¿Quién lo necesitaba? Podías cerrar los ojos, apoyar el dedo en cualquier punto del enorme tablero mural y la acción que acababas de comprar empezaba inmediatamente a subir. Nunca obtuve beneficios. Parecía absurdo vender una acción a treinta cuando se sabía que dentro del año doblaría o triplicaría su valor.

Sobre centros sociales autogestionados como infraestructura social. Alberto Nanclares en Efecto Doppler

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Sobre los Centros sociales autogestionados okupados como infraestructuras sociales, término acuñado por Eric Klinenberg.

En los últimos 25 años han sido fábricas de innovación y un lugar fundamental de encuentro para mucha gente anónima.

Laboratories of the unexpected: can we make more creative, resilient and inclusive cities “just” by planning and designing less?

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To facilitate a “Laboratory for the unexpected” approach, here are 2 tips:

Run a community event first
Whether you are a public or private organization, when planning to create a space dedicated to creative cultures in your city, there are huge benefits in running an event to gather the community you want to engage with, before the actual opening of your space. This would allow your project to perform an agile reality check (”is the vision of the project in line with local expectations?”) and to inform early stage decisions to be more efficient (”does my space need to be 500 or 1000 sqm?”).
Adopt an incremental approach: the 80/20 principle for space design When it comes to spatial design, you can temporary leave 20% of your square meters undesigned, only with basic furniture and without a pre-defined specific destination. This will allow the community to come up with real needs for it (a laboratory for professional photography, a special meeting room, a café, etc…). This will avoid overdesign and overbudgeting of your operation, while strengthening the bonds between your physical space and the community.

Object-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster

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The ultimate goal of every software developer should be to write reliable code. Nothing else matters if the code is buggy and unreliable. And what is the best way to write code that is reliable? Simplicity. Simplicity is the opposite of complexity. Therefore our first and foremost responsibility as software developers should be to reduce code complexity.

I’m not criticizing Alan Kay’s OOP — he is a genius. I wish OOP was implemented the way he designed it. I’m criticizing the modern Java/C# approach to OOP.

Many dislike speed limits on the roads, but they’re essential to help prevent people from crashing to death. Similarly, a good programming framework should provide mechanisms that prevent us from doing stupid things.

Yes, Functional Programming has a strong mathematical foundation and takes its roots in lambda calculus. However, most of its ideas emerged as a response to the weaknesses in the more mainstream programming languages. Functions are the core abstraction of Functional Programming. When used properly, functions provide a level of code modularity and reusability never seen in OOP. It even features design patterns that address the issues of nullability and provides a superior way of error handling.

I think that it is not right that OOP is considered the de-facto standard for code organization by many people, including those in very senior technical positions. It is also unacceptable that many mainstream languages don’t offer any other alternatives to code organization other than OOP.

Scribe – CEMEA. Un transcripteur Audio/Vidéo en Texte

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Captura de pantall de scribe.cemea.org

Les envois de vidéos sont supportés, mais il est plutôt conseillé d’envoyer un fichier audio (wav, mp3, m4a, ogg…) pour limiter les délais.

Un outil comme celui-ci est utile pour fournir une version texte d’un fichier média (audio ou vidéo). L’objectif de ce programme est de fournir un outil simple et rapide pour permettre de récupérer un texte et l’utiliser comme version numérique. Ceci peut être pratique pour retransmettre rapidement des notes audio par écrit, par exemple. Il vous suffit de vous enregistrer en train de les lire à haute voix, puis d’envoyer votre fichier audio pour qu’il soit transcrit au format texte.

Conduit. Your how chat server

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Conduit is a simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix.

Conduit is a lightweight open-source server implementation of the Matrix Specification with a focus on easy setup and low system requirements. That means you can make your own Conduit setup in just a few minutes.

Other server implementations try to be extremely scalable, which makes sense if the goal is to support millions of users on a single instance, but makes smaller deployments inefficient. Conduit tries to keep it simple. The future for Conduit in peer-to-peer Matrix (every client contains a server) is also bright.

Conduit tries to be reliable by using the Rust programming language and paying close attention to error handling to make sure that evil clients, misbehaving servers or even a partially broken database will not cause the whole server to stop working.

BULLSHIT JOBS – David Graeber

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHx5rePmz2Y

There’s all these industries that are, basically, if they disappear it wouldn’t make any difference. Telemarketing! You know, the whole telemarketers vanished: most people would not complain. They’d be pretty happy actually. Corporate lawyers. I mean, there’s one or two big shots who think waht they do is important, but the vast majority say « Well, yes, I mean, it’s completely unnecessary. If I didn’t have this job the world would not change in any way »

random.org: True random number service

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Perhaps you have wondered how predictable machines like computers can generate randomness. In reality, most random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, which means they are generated in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. This is fine for many purposes, but it may not be random in the way you expect if you’re used to dice rolls and lottery drawings.

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive online games, for scientific applications and for art and music.

Lo que hacen los pobres con nuestras estadísticas

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Ser pobre, de nuevo, es una percepción por comparativa. Y esto tiene una trascendencia crucial a la hora de entender el actual panorama de polarización en el que vivimos: mientras que los de arriba intentan convencer al mundo de una visión cartesiana y cientificista de la realidad (que curiosamente coincide a pies juntillas con su experiencia vital), los de abajo se la explican a través de sus percepciones y experiencias del día a día. Y la pobreza, amigos, se adhiere a la piel hasta fundirse con ella. Y la percepción de injusticia aumenta con cada gesto, con cada pequeña discriminación sentida, hasta degenerar en rabia. Entender esta dicotomía de la percepción de la realidad es clave si queremos entender por qué los de abajo apoyan a las lepen, los bolsonaro, los castillo o a los abascales de turno. Reacciones contra un establishment que sigue hablando para sí mismo, mientras el resto del mundo se muere, casi literalmente, de hambre.

Lutris. Open Gaming Platform

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Play all your games on Linux

Lutris is a video game preservation platform aiming to keep your video game collection up and running for the years to come.

Over the years, video games have gone through many different hardware and software platforms. By offering the best software available to run your games, Lutris makes it easy to run all your games, old and new.

Las primeras aplicaciones civiles de la fotografía aérea en España: el Catastro y las Confederaciones Hidrográficas

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Desde la década de los años veinte empieza a plantearse en España la posibilidad de incorporar la fotografía aérea a los trabajos catastrales, realizándose los primeros experimentos al respecto en los años treinta. Entre tanto, fue la iniciativa privada, representada por la Compañía Española de Trabajos Fotogramétricos Aéreos (CETFA), la que asumió el grueso de las labores fotogramétricas, trabajando de manera sucesiva para las Confederaciones Hidrográficas, la Diputación de Navarra, los Ayuntamientos, o incluso los propios servicios del Estado, el Instituto Geográfico Nacional y el Ministerio de Hacienda

¡Hay luz en las alturas!

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A este fenómeno lo bautizaron los habitantes de los Alpes que contemplaban el brillo de las altas cumbres después de que el sol se hubiera escondido tras el horizonte. Por eso se conoce como ‘resplandor alpino’ o Alpenglow, que viene de la palabra alemana Alpenglühen.

Hoy en día el término Alpenglow no se utiliza solo para describir la última luz en la cima de las montañas: también vale para describir la luz que ilumina la parte más alta de un rascacielos, como en este atardecer en Nueva York.

Si seguimos hacia arriba y tomamos la definición de Alpenglow en este sentido tan amplio, cada vez que vemos pasar la Estación Espacial Internacional (ISS) sobre nuestras cabezas cruzando el cielo nocturno (hay aplicaciones que te dicen en qué días y horas se ve mejor), estamos viendo un objeto iluminado por el sol en las alturas que brilla en medio de la noche.