It isn’t indifference, it’s obliviousness. My mother keeps on listening to AI music, and I’ll be like “why are you listening to this slop” and she’ll then argue back that it isn’t AI, it’s actually really very good and I’m just jealous, as the synthetic voice continues to warble nonsenses like a fucking arcade machine full of snakes in the background.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
I’m curious as to how those numbers skew rural vs urban, as my experience in France couldn’t be further from fibre - have had a house there for decades, and we went straight from dialup to starlink, as there still isn’t even DSL available there. Fibre… don’t make me laugh.
It’s not like we’re super rural, either - small village, about 8km from two middling towns. The cell network isn’t much better - it’s 5g in the towns, and 2G or nothing as soon as you’re a few km out of them.
There is a fibre trunk running down the main road, 1.5km from the village, but when we enquired France telecom quoted about €250,000 to extend the fibre up to us. We passed.
Edit: same kinda deal with free.fr. If I check availability by address, it fails, as while the commune exists, the village does not, never mind the roads within it. If I enter the land line number, it says it is a mobile number and refuses to proceed.
So: your figures say 90%, but I suspect that’s a theoretical number rather than a real one.
Maybe it’s 90% of the 60% of addresses which got included in the statistics.
Edit edit: Ah hah, yes. I’ve looked at arcep’s methodology. That 90% is inventoried premises (homes & businesses) which:
- could be connected to FTTH, theoretically.
- exist in the arcep database
- are within several km of a live fibre
My home would be counted as “connected” by their methodology, even though there’s a quarter million euro bill to pay to make it so, and several km of fibre to run.
So - the stat is self-aggrandising bullshit, sorry.
Plus, the fiber trunk that runs near your house is not necessarily relevant. What matters are the _endpoints_ of that trunk line. They’re not just going to dig it up and splice your house into the middle of that fiber bundle. (This is a critical difference between fiber and water/sewer services!)
Instead there will need to be a central office (CO) in or near those towns that has a fiber trunk running to it. Then smaller fiber lines can be run from the CO outwards towards potential subscribers. The cheapest way to do this is with PON (passive optical networking) service, where a single fiber carries 10Gbps or 40Gbps service that can be split using prisms to service dozens of customers. XGSPON is 40Gbps, serves up to 128 customers, and has a maximum service distance of 16km. If you’re the first subscriber in that area, that €250k might be for opening up a whole new CO plus running a PON fiber bundle the whole 8km between it and your neighborhood.
Did you check on https://cartefibre.arcep.fr/? If your address is there, you will know the status of your address and notably the infrastructure operator, which has the obligation to cover your zone before 2030. If your address is not there (and the zone is empty, otherwise, this is up to your municipality to fix the missing address), it means there is no infrastructure operator yet. This is up to your local government to make a deal with an infrastructure operator to cover this zone.
As for the numbers, as it is open data, there are some sites like https://infofibre.fr/ where this is easier to see where we are. You can see that even rural regions have more than 90% of household coverage.
As for definitions, there are two cases for availability: immediate availability (infrastructure operator present up and you have at least one commercial operator after 3 months) or delayed availibility (the infrastructure operator has 6 months to make the address available after being asked by a commercial operator).
Just like every operator promises 95%+ national LTE/5G coverage (they have legal obligations in this regard), but somehow your particular village or town in the lower Alps or in Brittany has shitty data rates for some reason, despite the main street being coloured green on the official covergae map.
Some people in my family got a "zone blanche" subscription from SFR, i.e. LTE with a big antenna, possibly a higher Cat. than regular LTE, because they live too far from any DSL/fiber option.
We did actually try the LTE route years before starlink, but even on a honking great yagi the signal was unusable - the terrain is rolling forested hills and it apparently plays merry hell with diffraction and absorption of near-surface waves - at my place in Portugal we made an LTE relay up a hill work for us, as there the issue was just terrain blocking it directly, rather than it being heavily attenuated.
Anyway, I’ve looked at our address on the sites the OP provided - and it’s the first time our address has correctly existed as an individual property, rather than the whole village being marked as one - and it appears fibre became available about two months ago, which would make sense as I last checked the situation in December while there.
Anyway. I guess my point, that I utterly failed to make, is that there are many unserved places that don’t sit correctly in a database somewhere, or are just sparsely populated and inconvenient.
It is heavily dependent on the history of your area.
I am near Lyon (12km away), I had 20mb then 100Mb coaxial cable very early because the "département" built a public network and eventually leased it to private companies.
I finally switched to fiber 3 years ago when it became available in my street.
The cell network is fairly bad however (even with 2 cell towers less than 1km from my place).
>although if you use a busted microwave from the 80s it gives you good plausible deniability.
Not every radio runs off 2.4G, the frequency that microwaves would affect. Even for wifi there's 5ghz and 6ghz bands. For cellphones there are far more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
I’m 42 but British. I was a weird kid, but over in Blighty autism wasn’t something that was even considered back then - just “how much more do we need to cane him until he’s normal?!”.
It turns out, no amount. Now I’m just a weird adult with an ironclad distrust of all authority.
I was similar - primary school teacher wrote home to my parents asking their permission to slipper me (it was a no).
Diagnosed with adhd last year at 45, scored ridiculously high on self test aspie but no incentive to get an autism diagnosis atm (my wife is worried the far right will get in and they’ll go after the autistics).
Would have been nice to have had a diagnosis as a kid though - my life would have been quite different (maybe more hugs less drugs)
My parents weren’t consulted - public school allowed it up until 2001, I believe.
Anyway, I just got really good at masking, and learning to understand systems such that I might subvert them. Sociality and conformance just didn’t really matter to me, they didn’t have intrinsic value - so I learned to act the part, and figured out the least effort methods to hack people into approving of me, whereby I could gain personal agency. They trained a sociopath.
It’s gonna be interesting to see what the future will be like, when today’s kids who’ve actually had support and nurture rather than an endless cycle of punishment are really running the show - fewer crazy fucks like me out there ruining shit for the rest of humanity, that’s for sure.
I am a bit older and i grew up in New Jersey, and it wasn't much different. My teacher once told me she was going to cut my finger off because i always counted with them . Punk rock saved my life .
One of the many nice things about nature is that almost everything is interesting and unique in some particular way, be it longevity, size, or far more specific traits, across all species, all domains of natural science.
The PhD Movie introed with Richard Feinman's statement "I don't know anything, but I do know everything is interesting, if you go into it deeply enough."
Feinman was a curious character.
I suspect that with even a modest breadth of knowlegde a deep investigation of anything brings associations with existing knowledge (interest), unexpected connections and exceptions.
I built a terrible chicken coop. Truly awful, cobbled together out of whatever junk I could find in a hurry in the dark, as my wife had a pair of chickens foisted upon her on the way home that evening.
It was enclosed. The largest aperture was 20mm. Even enclosed on the floor.
Anyway. Anyone who keeps chickens already knows what I fucked up there.
2am. Almighty screaming from outdoors. A chicken has managed to squeeze its head through the grille, and into the mouth of a fox. Everything then rapidly devolved into a surprisingly large amount of blood, where I’ll just elide the details as they’re kinda grim.
Anyway, the bodies went in the pot the next day, and I now know why chicken wire is specifically called chicken wire.
Similar boat. Seen the same shenanigans being played with actors who really should know better - everything from military secrets to medical data, and absolutely YOLOing it with an audit mill. I have it on good authority that there are superuser credentials floating around for their production systems that they’ve lost track of.
And no, I won’t whistleblow either, as it would mostly be me that would face repercussions, and I am unafraid to say that I am a coward.
We choose the battles we fight, and I’d like to believe that ultimately, entropy will defeat them without me lifting a finger.
No NDA can prevent you from making protected communications about fraud, illegal activity, etc. If you have seen fraud that involves the military you can make an anonymous report to the DOD IG. If it involves medical data you can make an anonymous report to the HHS IG. Or, if you want to get rich off of it, there's another option. Happy to chat.
I think it’s partly that, but also that when you have something that is toxic, radioactive and on fire on your ship, you shove it overboard, and assess just how bad the damage was afterwards.
It’s a remarkable photo. You can see the aurora Australis at the top right of the image (it’s upside down, if there is such a thing - that’s the straits of Gibraltar at the lower left, and the Sahara above it - and the skein of atmosphere wrapping the entire planet. Those look like noctilucent clouds in the north, or possibly more aurora.
It really is gorgeous. You can see both auroral rings, then there's airglow, and city lights around Gibraltar and on the South American coast, and lightning flashes in the storm clouds over the tropics.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
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