Bert Hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦

@berthubert.bsky.social

2720 Followers 309 Following

Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist, publicist. https://berthub.eu/ More active on Mastodon -> @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social -> Nederlandse BlueSky @berthub.eu

table showing GLONASS status. Lots of red indicating things that are not good
"The Future is Europe" artwork
Alt text "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely" — Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy Or, being good at your actual job hurts your career!
a somewhat crinkled flag against a blue sky
"We treat clouds like government regulated utilities and they are nothing like that" - with a picture of a cloud and some water spigots
graph showing the increase of CO2 PPM from year to year. The rate of increase is increasing, but appears to have a 17 year swing to it.
The Future Is Europe
Bert holding a QR-code pointing at https://berthub.eu/rtg and there is a sign that says Hubert, personal title, berthub.eu
timeseries of per GPS satellite declared accuracy, mostly 2/3 meters at the start, then steadily rises to 4/5 meters, and then goes down again go 2 meters.
Here goes: The climate is already seriously out of whack. Even if we’d stop polluting now, we’d still be suffering the consequences for a century, or perhaps forever. Instead, we are steadily making things worse. We technically know how to stop emitting CO2, but we’re not doing it, since it is expensive and a hassle and people don’t want to believe it is necessary. Stopping harmful emissions & dealing with the climate consequences requires humanity to work together and do all kinds of smart and difficult things. Meanwhile, our governments have lost a lot of skills and are no longer able to do anything like that. And most of them also don’t want to, because.. .. voters have decided they Want Something Else and have mostly rejected ’normal political parties’ (and not without reason) Yet, the few things we ARE doing are undermining countries like Russia, who are not taking this sitting down, and are willing to wage war to stay relevant. In 2025, the US elected a president who promises a dictatorship. Many other countries are poised to vote fundamentally anti-democratic parties to power (the Netherlands, Germany, France), or have already done so. Meanwhile, climate change is even more real and devastating than often described, and it needs worldwide coordinated effort to address. Many autocratic political parties however promise us that climate change is all a hoax. Even the more democratic governments have been infantilised or weakened and are no longer able to provide technical leadership. Yet “climate control” will require just that.
There are various ways of looking at this graph. We can lament that the 2023 pledge (in red) is not ambitious enough, or we could express justified doubt that we’ll even deliver on that. But there is a wholly different way of looking at it. To the government of an oil-state, this graph looks like an outright declaration of war. This graph represents national bankruptcy if not extinction for specific oil producing countries like Russia and Venezuela. So what would actually happen? If the oil cartels coordinate, they can slowly shutter their production in unity, and they’d all suffer equally and fossil prices would remain more or less as normal, except they’d sell less. We may already be seeing signs of such voluntary shuttering. But it won’t last. Saudi Arabia can produce oil for a few dollars per barrel. But Russia needs six times more money (~$30) before they make any profits. Both countries need seriously high oil prices to stay alive (>$80, $100 perhaps for Russia). Meanwhile, the world is electrifying loads of things, and if you manage to heat your house with solar or wind, you’d pay only $15-$30 to get the heat output of one barrel of oil. If you were driving a car and you manage to charge it from solar/wind, you are looking at costs oil would only reach at $7/barrel (this all pre-tax). You don’t have to be a green dreamer to see that any country that needs $80/oil to survive is looking at an imminent world of pain. Someone else (renewable energy) is competing at prices that are whole factors lower. And getting even lower.
a smiling bert proudly wearing his bEUret!
Convex hulls around all 3 digit postcode prefixes, which often overlap, but form a pretty map of The Netherlands.
And all atomic bombs in the US are now manufactured/maintained in the Pantex plant. And this is a distressingly normal organization. They have Christmas parties and they have a very active Instagram page. If you go work there, you can get this photo taken with an atomic bomb. I don’t think it’s a real one, but it looks like one. It’s on Instagram and they have a super, super nice environmental policy. I mean, we’re building hydrogen bombs. But look at our windmills! But there is a lesson in here. You can see here, and we’ll see that repeat in the course of the presentation. Where did the atomic bomb come from? Of course, they used all these great scientists from the great universities.
Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. The logo consists of the letters W A, within an oval that also says "Wassenaar Arrangement". It all looks decidedly 1970s.
“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” ― Christopher Hitchens
Street sign saying "Laan van Reagan en Gorbatsjov", with a subtitle explaining this is named after the 1986 meeting that ended the cold war.
An IBM XT computer, with some WordPerfect floppies. Text 'Air-gapped sovereign computing solution'.
https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2025
spice girls holding signs that say if you / wanna steal / my data / you gotta / be a U.S. based corporation
CITRIX <tm>
a slanted table showing Word, Excel and Powerpoint icons sliding towards the Microsoft OneDrive and thence to the NSA
histogram showing a peak around 0 gene strand bias for archaea, and two peaks for eubacteria around 0.1 and 0.45.
In short, led by Denmark, many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp/Signal/etc to inspect all our photos and links, using AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if this might be child pornography, your photo, location, phone number & other details get reported to Europol and a local police force. What happens next is not specified, but your holiday in Cyprus might end up with you having to explain your photos over at the local police station. In Greek. Und hier auf Deutsch 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇧🇪. Et ici en français 🇫🇷 🇧🇪🇱🇺. Y aquí en castellano 🇪🇸, i en català, og her på dansk 🇩🇰, E qui in italiano 🇮🇹. Și aici în română 🇷🇴. In het Nederlands🇧🇪🇳🇱, v češtině 🇨🇿 , и на български 🇧🇬, kaj en Esperanto. If you translate this page to further languages (which would be very useful), please do let me know (bert@hubertnet.nl) so I can link to your work, or host it on my site. Here is the original Markdown. Thanks!
Codons sun ("codesonne" in german); shows which base sequence encodes which amino acid; vectorized from png file
https://program.why2025.org/why2025/speaker/QXNVPE/
Reverse engineering life: what we can learn from the DNA
Text from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON showing a table with a big 1 and a 2 and a 3, in different colors.
Scatterplot showing for nearly 50000 bacterial chromosomes the fraction of C versus the fraction of G: nearly a straight line.
Warning Notice! You are accessing a U.S. Government information system which includes this computer, network, and all attached devices. This system is for Government-authorized use only. Unauthorized use of this system may result in disciplinary action and civil and criminal penalties. System users have no expectation of privacy regarding any communications or data processed by this system. At any time, the government may monitor, record, or seize any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to the NCBI rsync server.
DATE GENERATED (UTC): 2025-07-09 16:45 NAGU TYPE: EXTNS NAGU NUMBER: 2025025 NAGU SUBJECT: EXTENSION NAGU 2025024 UNTIL 2025-07-15 NAGU REFERENCED TO: 2025024 START DATE EVENT (UTC): 2025-07-04 22:50 END DATE EVENT (UTC): 2025-07-15 11:20 SATELLITE AFFECTED: GSAT0102 SPACE VEHICLE ID: 12 SIGNAL(S) AFFECTED: ALL EVENT DESCRIPTION: GALILEO SATELLITE GSAT0102 (ALL SIGNALS) IS UNAVAILABLE SINCE 2025-07-04 BEGINNING 22:50 UTC. OUTAGE RECOVERY ESTIMATED ON 2025-07-15 11:20 UTC. THIS CANCELS NAGU REFERENCE 2025024.
a slanted table represents MIcrosoft 365 and Windows 11. Icons for Word, Excel and Powerpoint are shown sliding off the table to a OneDrive logo, under which there is an NSA logo. At the upper right there is a European flag
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely" Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy We used to think we could get generalists to make good decisions about complicated things if we explained these well enough Forget about it Ridiculous concept! If you are in charge of XYZ you should know all about XYZ! We've accepted that WHOLE BOARDS are non-experts
Save the world, write more efficient code!
Your proposals Title State DNA & Molecular Biology: A 2025 digital view confirmed Reverse Engineering Life: A teardown of the DNA source code of a whole bacterium confirmed
0 The state of the art FROM WHENCE WE CAME: EARLY COMPUTING The dizzying pace of technological change is so ingrained into our consciousness, it is impossible to remember what was considered ``the state of the art'' as recently as a few decades ago. Consider the first practical computer ± the room sized, vacuum tube ENIAC. In the years since its creation in 1946, the power of perhaps a million ENIACs has shrunk to an attractive package that comfortably fits in a briefcase. In such a 21st century laptop, with its multiple processors and gigabytes of memory, there is rarely any thought given to its internal complexity. It is by most definitions, an appliance ± a black box, and few need to know or care about the principles that make its magic happen. Creating such a sophisticated device demands a standing army of thousands of engineers and technicians, each using sophisticated tools to design the chips, disks and displays. Manufacturing these components demands such cleanliness and precision that humans cannot touch the parts until their fabrication is complete. Software developers, using formalized methods, automated tools and debuggers also create products with formidable complexity. Software reliability is an important goal of course, but so is the need for standardized interfaces, security, lush graphical
Graph showing how quickly the CO2 concentration has been rising. In the 1980s this was 1.5ppm/year, and now it is headed for 3.5 ppm/year. The graph shows this rate of increase.. is increasing still.