Trainees collect images of Tartiflettes

From time to time, we look at our old articles and wonder if we should delete some of them. It’s not a matter of sparing disk space but more about reducing the noice they generate in the cyberspace. Even if those article are only small drops of water inside the ocean flowed by social networks and generative AIs, we want, as the hummingbird, to do our part.

This was the case of our tutorial on experimental archaeology¹ about witch we sincerely wondered who could need to setup an old Debian 1.3 nowadays… Until a trainee in archaeology of digital contacted us because, following the said tutorial, he encountered a Fatal Error when partitioning. After having searched and found solutions, we fix the tutorial a documented this adventure in a new article².

Without referencing our articles, journalist still contact us to get our lights on some everyday and dangerously common issues.

Delphine Bauer, for her study about the data collection operated by the Île de France region³ ask us the causes (collectionitis and zeal in surveillance societies), the risks (repurposing and leaks) and legal aspect (it’s not legal).

Fiona Bonassin, for her article in 20 minutes⁴ where she write about SLOPs (bad quality AI generated images) wondering why it works (they confirm believes), the risks (disinformation, radicalisation and fraud) and how to deal with this thread (to give trust only on relevant sources).

Since 2020, our list of those interventions is getting longer⁵ and we wondered if we should clean it a bit, keeping only the most interresting ones. Then we thought about the fakes expert interventions published on social networks (AI generated from real content). And we thought this list allows you to fact check those. If the content your are seeing, reading or hearing is not on our list, it means we are not aware of that content.

But those fakes are only make a tiny part of the noise generated in social networks and amplified by generative AI we spoke about in the beginning of this news. Authentic, interesting and substantial content have been nearly inaudible.

So before we leave and let your get back on your lives, we wanted to reveal you the mart-e website. This is a blog of a geek like we love them, sharing thoughts about the world, life and occasionally about tartiflette. The link we are sharing here⁶ is representative of the whole.

We thought that sharing that kind of discoveries from time to time will improve a little bit the signal/noise ratio. We don’t have the fame to resolve the problem but, as the hummingbird, we are doing our part. Feel free to share yours with us.