Remote

Benjamin Geer

@benjamingeer@piaille.fr

mastodon 4.7.2

Software developer and ex-academic (sociology, conceptual history, Arabic culture, etc.), sometimes publishes classical sheet music, lives in Paris.

Développeur de logiciels et ancien universitaire (sociologie, histoire conceptuelle, culture arabe, etc.), publie parfois des partitions de musique classique, vit à Paris.

en/fr/ar/de/it

1378 Followers

1898 Following

50 Posts

Joined September 29, 2024

Blog:

https://benjamingeer.name/en/

ORCID:

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2449-8558

Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

The Moroccan geographer Mohamed Berriane just told me an amazing story: About ten years ago, in Corsica, he talked to some Corsicans who had been hiking in the mountains in Morocco. On a high mountain slope, they encountered some bad weather and got lost. So they did what Corsicans do in that situation: they sang a specific song, which is known in Corsica as a call for help. And right away, some local Amazighs heard them and came to help them, because the Amazighs have the same song, which they use in the same way. Mohamed thought this was fascinating and should be studied, but hasn't found anyone who's interested. @lameensouag.bsky.social

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io When I started learning Arabic, I had a beginners’ dictionary that translated “I hope” as inshallah, and now that I speak it fluently, I still fully support that translation. There are other ways to express hope in Arabic, but that’s by far the most common one.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange This really matches my experience interviewing for jobs lately: the coding tests are often very artificial problems that you’ll never encounter in real work situations and that you could answer quickly, under the intense pressure of an interview, only if you had seen that exact problem before or something very similar and learned the solution by heart. The interviewers always say, ‘We just want to see how you think’, but in practice they’re testing how much you’ve memorised.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Candidature rejetée, après deux entretiens, parce que l'entreprise «s'oriente vers une adoption forte de l'IA dans ses pratiques de développement, une direction qui ne semble pas alignée avec vos attentes à ce stade». Est-ce qu'il y a encore des éditeurs de logiciels en France qui sont prêts à embaucher un développeur qui préfère écrire lui-même son code ? #GetFediHired #Rust #Scala #Python #PostgreSQL

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@b0rk@social.jvns.ca @wingo@mastodon.social Unfortunately "ours" and "theirs" aren't very helpful when both of the branches are mine :)

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

I know this is totally banal, but I got a little solar panel, I’m charging my phone with it, and it makes me happy ☀️😊 #solar

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 4w ago

Replying to

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @vnikolov@ieji.de @rk@mastodon.well.com @ed1conf@bsd.network @mike805@noc.social @thalia@discuss.systems Exactly! The Apple II was simple enough that even as a kid, I could understand a great deal of it. It didn’t feel overwhelming. Even extending it at the OS level wasn’t that hard. Now my 15-year-old kid is going to start learning Python at school, and OK, in many ways Python is much better than Basic, but even Python isn’t simple any more. I feel like there ought to be a way for kids to still have that experience of understanding a computer at different levels, without the overwhelming feeling that there are lots of huge areas of total mystery.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 4w ago

Replying to

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @vnikolov@ieji.de @rk@mastodon.well.com @ed1conf@bsd.network @mike805@noc.social @thalia@discuss.systems When I was 15 I spent a summer vacation writing a 6502 assembly language program on a pad of yellow legal paper, then hand-assembling it to machine code and typing it into an Apple II. Those were the days 😄

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Brie@mastodon.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io There are many possible nuances. 😃 It can also be a polite way of giving a noncommittal response to an invitation.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3w ago

Book Review: Nationalism as a Way of Life by @sinimalesevic@mastodon.online https://thesiseleven.com/2026/09/11/book-review-nationalism-as-a-way-of-life/

thesiseleven.com

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 4w ago

Replying to

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @vnikolov@ieji.de @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @rk@mastodon.well.com @ed1conf@bsd.network @mike805@noc.social @thalia@discuss.systems That reminds me of this: https://piaille.fr/@benjamingeer/114670017926698162

Benjamin Geer : « @elly@front-end.social @Gouximan@sciences.re @shi… » - Piaille

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@NicolasRinaudo@functional.cafe Je pourrais donner une réponse vague comme « Je l'utiliserai dans les cas où ce sera pertinent de l'utiliser » mais je pense que ça n'aurait pas suffi pour cette boîte, ils doivent être dans la situation décrite ici : https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

ludic.mataroa.blog

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making — Ludicity

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@munificent@mastodon.social This is what happens when you have dynamic typing.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

‘Someone sent me a link to this paper “Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination” Gao et. al. are trying to get LLM’s to demonstrate high order skills in historical reasoning, using a new benchmark ProHist-Bench. They determine, that no, they can’t. LLM’s still hallucinate, and more importantly, they answer questions wrong. My problem is not that they get questions wrong, but that the people doing this don’t seem to know what doing history is.’ https://froginawell.net/frog/2026/05/want-to-ai-proof-your-degree-study-history/ @histodons@fedigroups.social

froginawell.net

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net https://degooglisons-internet.org/ https://cryptpad.fr https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://tuta.com

Dégooglisons Internet - Accueil

degooglisons-internet.org

Dégooglisons Internet - Accueil

Les géants du web centralisent nos vies numériques en échange de leurs services Les communautés du logiciel libre offrent des services alternatifs éthiques Le réseau Framasoft souhaite le démontreren les hébergeant

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@_elena@mastodon.social Coraggio! I'm sure you'll find a solution. I've heard, from MeshCore people who know much more about this than I do, that this is a common experience in cities. I have a little node with a crappy antenna, and I found that when I pinged the nearest repeater, it only worked near the street and at a certain height. So I bought a repeater with a better antenna, and installed it there. Now my messages are received. My beginner's impression is that height and the antenna are the two main factors. @tommi@pan.rent

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@triploidtree@mastodon.ie I haven't tried this but it might be worth looking into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israelensis

en.wikipedia.org

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

My installer for programs that I always forget how to install is now called forgothow https://codeberg.org/benjamingeer/forgothow #Linux #macOS #Fennel #Lua

forgothow

An installer for things I forgot how to install.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

‘The question, “everyone has lost their job and only 10 trillionaires own everything. Now what?”, has no cultural answer yet.’ AI Job Grief: The Unnamed Psychological Crisis Hitting Tech Workers https://jackmaguire.org/blog/ai-job-grief/

jackmaguire.org

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

RE: @ndaktuell@troet.cafe

A study commissioned by the EU Commission argues for wealth taxes in Europe. The article notes that although Germany’s wealth tax was abolished in 1997, it still has an exit tax, which requires wealthy individuals to pay a third of their assets in tax if they move abroad.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe I can't reach my roof either, and I ended up getting a repeater and putting it on a relatively high fence, which works OK (especially at night). I'm planning to put the repeater's antenna on a tall pole to see if that helps. @_elena@mastodon.social

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe You should ask @_elena@mastodon.social, she had the same problem and I think she solved it with a better antenna https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116936793218884046

Quoting

Elena Rossini 🌈

@_elena@mastodon.social

📻 Adventures in #MeshCore communications - part 6 📡 My teacher @stereo@freiburg.social recommended I get more powerful antennas - price: 9 Euros for 2. They are slightly longer than my hand… and miraculously I went from receiving signals in Lombardy (my region) to reaching repeaters as far away as Sardinia and Rome!!! How? It feels like magic 🤯

Open quoted post

mastodon.social

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@juliette@mastodon.green @Pepijn@mastodon.online You can try, but kids often have their own ideas. 🙂 My mother was a musician and read books a lot, I grew up doing those things. I also grew up interested in computers, which my mother didn’t know anything about. I’ve tried to get my kids interested in all those things, with only partial success. One of my kids is very musical, the other much less so. Both read a lot, and both think computers are very boring except for playing video games. The one who’s not so into music is very into drawing and painting, which I know very little about. That’s all fine with me. 😊

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@dougmerritt @thalia @j2kun @munificent @regehr I’ve been waiting for an excuse to use a PEG parser for something 😄

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

Replying to on mastodon.social

@_elena@mastodon.social https://www.schneier.com/ @evacide@hachyderm.io @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange @dymaxion@infosec.exchange @noybeu@mastodon.social @andrewnez@mastodon.social @echo_pbreyer@digitalcourage.social

Schneier on Security

Schneier on Security

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

RE: @leibnizopenscience@mastodon.social

If you wanted to start a movement for university autonomy, you could do worse than to read my paper about how such a movement was built in Egypt, where universities have very little institutional autonomy: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.4780

mastodon.social

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

Die Erzählung handelt von einem älteren Ehepaar, das sich über Autofahrer und Verkehr beschwert, und erst am Ende wird einem klar, dass sie selbst in einem Auto sitzen und genau das tun, worüber sie sich beschwert haben. @SheDrivesMobility 2/2

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@preservaAV@mastodon.social I don't think there's any correct format, it just has to be a username that isn't already taken on that server.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jromanowska@fosstodon.org @michcampbell@fediscience.org I've been enjoying using this little command-line tool called csvlens for browsing CSV files: https://github.com/YS-L/csvlens

GitHub - YS-L/csvlens: Command line csv viewer

Command line csv viewer. Contribute to YS-L/csvlens development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@j2kun @dougmerritt Robert Nystrom wrote, “Parsing doesn’t matter.” https://craftinginterpreters.com/compiling-expressions.html#design-note And personally I think the back end is more interesting and more fun!

craftinginterpreters.com

Compiling Expressions · Crafting Interpreters

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@kdriscoll@aoir.social For me it’s as if this was filmed on another planet. I guess this is an American thing? I’ve never seen a drip coffee maker in Europe.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

“Broken Arabic” between mockery and commercialization

“Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) is widely spoken in the oil rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, KSA, and Oman. It emerged as a contact language between Arabic-speaking Gulf nationals and the large numbers of migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia, who came to the GCC speaking a plethora of languages unrelated to Arabic.”

https://languageonthemove.com/broken-arabic-between-mockery-and-commercialization/

languageonthemove.com

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

@cahollenbeck@mastodon.scot Retirement

Celeste (@cahollenbeck@mastodon.scot) - mastodon.scot

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Ambraven@social.mochi.academy With more than one optional parameter, I think it would be clearer like this. (I think it's best not to use unwrap() except in tests.) But it might be better to try to redesign things so you don't need the options.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Ambraven@social.mochi.academy It just occurred to me that it might be possible to write a macro to generate the match statement with all the permutations for any number of parameters... but I'm not going to write it tonight. 😆

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Ambraven@social.mochi.academy The problem is that if the Option is empty, you're making a new instance of A. If you take a reference to that, the A still has to stay in scope (i.e. not be dropped) while you're using the reference. You could do something like this: fn use_f(f: &A) { println!("{f:?}"); } fn toto(foo: Option<&A>) { if let Some(f) = foo { use_f(f); } else { let f = A::new(); use_f(&f); } }

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@linguacelta@toot.wales Was it this? https://www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-neuroscience/the-brain-in-theory-an-excerpt/

‘The Brain, In Theory,’ an excerpt

The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

‘The Brain, In Theory,’ an excerpt

In his new book, Brette pushes back against theories that describe the brain as a “biological computer.” In this excerpt from Chapter 4, he challenges equating brain evolution with programming…

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kirk@social.coop @SocialCoop@social.coop Sounds great! Do you need software developers? I’d love to be part of such an enterprise.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kirk@social.coop Sounds terrific, good luck and keep us posted!

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@lkanies @andrewnez Just taking a quick look: .deb and .rpm packages can contain shell scripts that are run on installation/removal, and even the Nix language is apparently Turing complete

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@gimulnautti@mastodon.green It does! @cassana@the-crossroads-inn.com have you heard of anything like this?

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@kdriscoll@aoir.social I thought an americano was espresso diluted with hot water https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caff%C3%A8_americano

en.wiktionary.org

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jromanowska@fosstodon.org @michcampbell@fediscience.org That one looks good too! There's also xan, which is good for filtering and more complex stuff: https://github.com/medialab/xan

GitHub - medialab/xan: The CSV magician

The CSV magician. Contribute to medialab/xan development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@pintoch@mamot.fr Would you agree that the governance problem is partly problem of scarce expertise? It sounds like, to maintain Neovim queries for the Rust parser, you have to know a lot about Neovim’s implementation, about tree-sitter, and about Rust, and not many people have all that knowledge, so there aren’t enough people to maintain the code, and therefore also not enough people to participate in governance. Would it be possible for the interfaces between tools, queries, and parsers to be defined so that, say, one set of Neovim queries would work with any parser? Then you wouldn’t need a maintainer who knows both Neovim and Rust. @pmmeurcatpics@ieji.de @Zimm_i48@fediscience.org

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@carlosefr@mastodon.social That game had an irresistible mystique for me in the 80s, but it was also very frustrating!

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@andrewnez @lkanies OK, but I suppose it’s easier to do that in a package manager that just installs libraries (for one programming language) than in one that can install anything (like dpkg or Homebrew).

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@andrewnez @lkanies I would be interested to know what sorts of things the install scripts in .deb packages do. I wonder if there might be good reasons why the designers of dpkg chose to allow those scripts to exist. I’m just guessing, but perhaps if dpkg didn’t allow them, it would have to know too many details about the OS and about the packages themselves.

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@lkanies @andrewnez Are there any purely declarative, non-Turing-complete package managers?

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Benjamin Geer @benjamingeer@piaille.fr

· 5mo ago

Patrice Lumumba, Louis Armstrong, et la CIA, par Pascal Bouaziz (Les blogs du Diplo, 27 avril 2026) https://blog.mondediplo.net/patrice-lumumba-louis-armstrong-et-la-cia

blog.mondediplo.net

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