I guess Metropolis solar?

I like tech and I want sustainability. We “just” need to get rid of capitalism and finish the transition out of fossil fuels but all the tools are there.

Quite frankly I assumed it from the title. Storing data on mushrooms would be something new and it would start at a few KB. Jumping directly to 8GB would require several miniaturization iterations

We have anticipated China’s coal plateau several times already. I agree it will come at one point, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Contrary to Trump’s administration, the Chinese one is promoting a green transition and tends to be overly optimistic.

‘Free’ as in ‘paid collectively by taxes’ works for me.

Robots. This is a serious answer.

(Mainland France) When I was a kid, my parents decide to move to a big ancient house with thick stone walls with a lot of repairs, we talked a lot about these things. back then, in the 90s, stone walls were considered superior than average insulation, as it was mostly inexistant at the time.

Nowadays, it is much inferior and you really need to add insulation to be a bit efficient.

If you have more thermal mass, for example in caves or underground structures, you can have the mean temperature of an entire year.

Yep, here 13-14°C is the temperature of all the caves (that are not high in the mountains, altitude is a factor) and incidentally the temperature considered ideal to keep red wine.

This can be used with heat wells: have a way to exchange deep heat, with circulating water for instance, and in winter you can pre-heat your home at 14°C before adding energy. It is heavy work though to bury these pipes, and the efficiency of heat pumps nowadays makes this a bit irrelevant, but it is a nice low-tech possibility.

Ads make the web human-hostile and such disgraceful behaviors by scrapping bots force to make it bot-hostile too.

I am sad and depressed. I went into AI to solve the problems of the world and I still think that the progresses made in machine learning are a huge step to to improve the world, but seeing what capitalism turned these tools into… sigh.

I don’t even have the strength anymore to explain that “AI companies” and "AI"are not the same thing…

There should be ways to behave correctly. Robot.txt should be legally enforced, rate limitation should be respected and prosecuted. Sites with information they are willing to share with models should just provide a datadump and individual requests should be reserved for human usage.

But an internet where everyone is understanding of each other and business actors do not act like psychopaths does not exist.

It sounds like a technical problem but it is a political one. You need an entity that is independent from the malicious actors wanting to use surveillance for control. Once you have that, giving that entity able to manage all aspects without bleeding private information is a technical problem, but if you don’t have one to begin with, it is without hope.

If some people have the right to enter any building and any computer to sniff data without restriction, you can’t have privacy. It is a political problem.

People do care. But there are a lot of people. Not everyone does.

When one does things, you end up with other people who do things. Won’t be your neighbor, won’t be your colleagues (unless you do the Good Thing™ professionally) so do not waste time trying to convince them.

Do your own thing. Life is short and there are billions of people out there. Spend it on the millions that want change, that’s a big enough crowd.

Since I discovered that Freebox (the set-top box of a common ISP in France, without about 8 million installed) are welcoming to users running their own docker images, I wonder if I should not write a specific guide about how to install an alternative to Google services on these, and have a huge local impact…

What’s up?

Apparently not my nginx >_<

Small trick that took me far too much time to realize and that may interest other French out there: if you own a relatively recent freebox (The box given by Free Telecom, one of our main ISPs) you can run docker images on it! That’s a way to set up a server really easily and painlessly.

At one point we had a long back and forth with my cousin, a post-apo fan, about the credibility of various scenarios, various shortage, various technological regressions. My conclusion: if humanity loses the ability and the knowledge to make CPUs, then CPUs are not the first thing you will miss.

It would have meant that a generation-long obscurantist crusade would have purposefully destroyed that knowledge.

I don’t see anything natural nor a human-made disaster that could durably erase all knowledge and industries on a global scale. You would need an intelligence geared at destroying knowledge specifically.

Uh…

These obvious things are why solar power CO2/kWh estimates are not zero. And I personally think that counting these indirect costs should not be automatic and is even fraudulent in some cases. For instance, in the picture that this guy denounces talks about what pieces of tech are part of the jigsaw of a sustainable future. For these, indirect costs do not matter. For all intent and purpose, electric cars and photovoltaics have 0 g CO2/kWh of direct emission.

Mining needs to become renewable, transport needs to be renewables, and electric vehicles are a part of that.

Actually, when you want really heavy mining machines, thermal engines do not cut it anymore, you need to go electric.

It is actually a good trick to assume that when a renewable “innovation” happens in the US, it has already been deployed somewhere else already. I love this 2012 picture of the Indian project:

Really weird title. TL;dr: ESG-conscious banks fail to account for the impact of mining in their accounting.

I see this kind of articles as a good thing: mining is a polluting process that can be much cleaner but lacks incentives to do it. The only incentive right now is to be the cheapest. If some actors start accepting to pay an extra for ethically and environmentally friendly mining, the industry can change.

Haha I should have guessed! Thanks for the info

That would be really great! Codeberg.org has been a bit involved in the fediverse, they may be open to the idea too.

That lazy line again:

During the heatwave between 28 June and 2 July, 17 out of France’s 18 nuclear power plants in the country faced capacity reductions, with some shut down completely.

Nuclear power plants n France have scheduled maintenance in summer (because despite what the article suggests, this is a low in power consumption)

Capacity reduction happen in that context, with extremely stringent regulations in some rivers that prevent any sort of warming of the water above some temperatures.

It does not impact the power plants that rely on water evaporation which, let’s remind it, release colder water than they take in (but in a lower volume)

TIL, I thought it was more

All the neighbors of France rely on its nuclear capabilities to keep the light on when wind/sun is low. Renewables are finally at a point where they are competitive but we really need some intermittence absorbing capabilities. Batteries or dams.