Yeah, that kind of stuff. Any you’d recommend?

A bit dated but Cousteau’s documentaries, while it mentions environmental problems, do that from a discovery point of view.

0.7 on the Kardashev scale. En route to 1.0!

Here in France it is totally legal to produce your own electricity as you wish and consume it. You have regulations if you try to connect your installation to the grid but you can totally have different circuits.

Waste water is more problematic, with a strong push for new constructions to be connected to the waste management system when doable. Off the grid system here are allowed to but have to follow some regulations, basically to prevent flooding your neighbors with fecal matter when it rains.

I keep seeing these titles and it pisses me off.

Mass-tourism is a problem, but this is not what the Louvre strike (dare that word in the title, even if it pisses your owner) was about.

It was a regular strike over working conditions. Yes, mass tourism, but the Louvre has been the most visited museum in the world for a very long time with no problem. The problem is that 200 staff are currently missing and the rest is overworked, in the management’s indifference.

So let’s go with all the swear words: After a worker’s unions meeting about the degrading working conditions, a strike was decided to protest and gain a leverage in negotiation with management.

BLDC motors, also called brushless, is the silent geeky revolution that brought us lighter, cheaper and more efficient robotics. It also allowed to make battery-powered electric version of many gardening equipment. More precisely, it is the design of cheap lighter controllers that made all of this possible (a good controller will require a fast-ish microcontroller on board)

Kind of a niche subject but happy to see it here!

They enrich uranium up to 60%. It is very costly and there is no civilian need for that. No one believes it is a civilian program.

I am very critical of Israel on Gaza, but on the Iranian nuclear program, there has been decades of procrastination, ambivalence and, since the last Trump episode, downright idiocy, in the handling of the diplomatic discussion. I kinda believe it when they say we were at the point where strikes were the only option to avoid a nuclear Iran.

Then again, the world pretends that Israel has no nukes whereas it is an open secret. All the other nuclear nations, including Pakistan and India, consider that the only way to be safe in such a situation is the MAD doctrine. Yet we expect Iran to stop its nuclear program and pretend its main enemy has none. I am not sure how idiotic we thought they are but even to religious fanatics it was pretty obvious that the only way for them was to have their own secret program.

This is a complex clusterfuck where you can’t easily split the actors as good guys/bad guys. There are lots of rational decisions and lots of totally idiotic religion-fueled ethnic hatred.

Ban ads and close source.

If you ban smartphones, make sur to make it in a way that would not prevent us to reinvent them in the way they should have existed in the first place.

Yes, it changes the criterion from “uptime of a server” to “uptime of a service” and that’s why I mention that the fediverse and even the old discussions on slrpnk.net kept being accessible.

But if we went to let go of the old world, we can’t have the back thought of “you know, worst case I’ll host that on a google drive, I know that one will be up”. We need to get to this last mile.

Really this is just a general remark, not something specially related to slrpnk.net and you are doing an awesome job, that I am grateful I don’t have to do. Please don’t see it in any form as a criticism of this server!

I am just saying that we should not embrace downtimes as an unavoidable thing or a problem we need to live in order to have a sustainable world. Resilience is also an important aspect of solarpunk.

I love the lemonaut.

Also, there is an advice I love, that can be applied to any genre: Do not write with the genre X in mind. Write what you want, pour your love in it, and let others label it. Maybe ‘solarpunk’ will end up not existing and will instead be dwarfed by a similar but different style, tidal romance, alt-earth utopians, skyships lesbian pirate slashfiction, whatever. Do not try too hard to shoehorn the themes of sustainability, it can simply be a background for the things you love.

Gibson hated the term “cyberpunk”: he said he was just writing the science fiction that made sense to him.

If you are attracted to solarpunk, you have some thoughts and hope about the future but you are probably also into other things that you love. Make it about that.

First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins.

First, yes, <3 to all.

Then:

Meh, I consider that resilience is not opposed to sustainability.

We don’t have to prioritize it right now, and I will always be grateful of volunteers who do the best they can with what they have.

And to me the lesson was that several communities (french-speaking jlai.lu) still worked and I just used an alt there to continue the conversations I had, and that I could still access through them the past conversations in slrpnk.net. This is a testament to the resilience of the fediverse architecture.

I just disagree with the sentiment that we should somehow romanticize power outages. Some people need a reliable power sources to survive, and it is a totally preventable thing. We can route around them in a radically different way though.

But thinking “this could be down for a week with no warning” also implies that I need to keep a fallback mechanism if I am using it to organize any sort of event with people.

It is not only corporations. Single governmental voices are bad too, and many non-profits have their own political biases.

The difference with influencers and podcasters is that you have the choice between thousands of them. Radio would be like having the choice only between the top 5 of youtube, and you would have to tune in at a precise time to get it.

It is fun as a quirky hobby, but really, depending on it for information and entertainment was really bad. Radio and TV are what created mass culture, removed local dialects and accents.

It is a one-to-many channel where people in charge of the station have disproportionate power.

It is nice to have as a simple alternate way of communicating, but boy, how am I never giving up internet access to get back to those.

I wont buy electric until they are analog and disconnected from any sort of internet.

I have this one:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i_MiEV_-_Peugeot_iOn_-_Citroën_C-ZERO

As analog as you will get. Bought second hand for cheap. Only about 100 km range though so not for every use.

As someone who was extremely vocal of “the cloud” when it arrived and enthusiastic about AI (especially the non generative uses) I am sad and a bit angry that people only NOW realize that servers do not exist on an etheral plane but do have physical requirements.

The article is about lithium and copper. AI does not use lithium. It is a very small user of copper.

“Our ancestors were miners,” says Ramos. They were the ones who discovered the copper in the first place. The problem, she says, is the scale.

And I’ll add a complementary take: the problem is not the tech, it is the capitalist economy that decides to centralize megamining projects in the places where they are worst (read: cheapest) to implement due to poor environmental and social regulations. Most mineral resources are pretty well distributed in the world, we choose to mine them only in the poorest countries for a reason, which is unregulated trade.

The question is not “is the damage done worth the final benefit?” but rather “is the environmental and social damage worth a 20% decrease in consumer prices?”

Nowadays with JIT #1 and #2 are very close. There was less than a x2 performance gap when I compared a direct simple task in C and javascript.

About #3 no one does that.

#3 and #4 will be on the same scale, every token generated is roughly the same amount of CPU.

It surely sounds like it. Which is annoying if they are crying out wolf, because China can and probably will (or did) put backdoors in its equipment.

Batteries pack with radio is weird. But really I don’t understand why we don’t have technical details.

Yes, well, from what sources do you gather that?

(I hate it when a technical take makes me side with authoritarian propaganda, but well…)

There is zero technical information in that article, yet plenty of people jumping to politically-loaded conclusions. Reminds me of the time when there was a (totally legitimate imho) scare about Huawei backdoors but zero technical details about what was actually found.

So from what I understand, some inverters “phone home”. A despicable habit of too many hardware in the industry, but the phrasing suggests without even confirming that it may be more nefarious than “mere” telemetry that plagues any connected device out there.

“Rogue device” suggests that it is additional hardware. They imply that the add connectivity channels that were not present in the device. Are we talking offline devices that were stealthily loaded with a 5G simcard or a Lora device waiting for a bricking code? It is implied but not stated, which makes me extremely suspicious.

If Chinese authorities can remotely brick solar inverters, it is a matter of national security to disclose the models and the modus operandi asap. It is irresponsible to not help us mitigate the potential of attack. Also, if there are “rogue devices” designed to sabotage your grid, that’s international sabotage, that’s state terrorism. It is important to state it if it is the case, instead of implying it.

“This is a serious issue that the industry needs to address, and it’s even more reason for Congress to maintain tax credits that are onshoring the production of inverters and the entire solar supply chain in the United States."

I suspect that this is the core reason actually. Don’t get me wrong, manufacturing crucial equipment locally is definitely a good idea, but I suspect strongly that these accusation are just a way of dodging the embrassement that Chinese companies’ market share is annoyingly high in a market that westerners were too slow to recognize as critical.