I’m not really sure that’s true. Labour has also downgraded its climate ambitions and ruled lots of necessary change out in favour of promising technosolutions. That means when change is needed the expectations have not been managed and we risk a megabacklash. The victory is dramatic and large but mainly due to FPTP. The victory is very shallow beneath the surface with lots of marginal seats and in lots of them Tory+Reform share is bigger than the labour share.

We can absolutely enjoy this moment but the big fight for climate I think has only just begun in the UK.

Just to be clear I wasn’t being feacious genuinely curious as to the specifics as I’m not as familiar with haulage.

I suspect there is an argument that we’ve made cargo transport too cheap and its skewed the economics of local vs outsourced production.

My preference would be pantograph systems on the motorways and main routes which we could roll out quite quickly and remove the majority of emissions coupled with a systemic look at our material needs and production capacities locally with a view to lowering volumes

The Silvertown tunnel (and lower thames crossing) in London would be a good example where we are rebuilding our infrastructure along the lines of sustained and increased haulage along certain routes at great public expense so I guess this could be considered an indirect subsidy.

What subsidies do they get?

I acknowledged this in my last paragraph. We should care about value though and we need to fight for that value to be something positive and meaningful (human and non-human health and wellbeing is a good start imo) not just shareholders.

Ultimately, there is a lot flawed in carbon accounting systems but we do need measures that allow us to assess if individuals, organisations and nations are doing enough and importantly articulate what pathways to zero emissions look like and that does mean trying to work out which processes are producing something we want with low or no emissions or not.

Sorry for delay I wanted to take the time to respond to you properly because I’ve probably thought similar to you at some point in my life and I want to explain how understanding what is happening has shifted that.

Yes, you are right the analogy isn’t perfect. Loss is part of change and change is a permenant. You are right that species and human history and culture has gone through both action and inaction from humans. My comment was about my own realisation that I (and probably wider society) was guilty of placing reverance and value too much on the human artifacts and not on the incredible natural history (the web of life that we all rely on) that we are losing. I looked at my feelings of potential loss about Van Gogh and questioned why I didn’t feel that way about our natural history and living beings we are losing daily and could stop destroying if we wanted to. So, you are right that losing the links to our human past would be tragic and we should try and preserve it* but the same is as true if not more true of our natural history. We are not separate from the climate and ecological systems we’ve evolved and developed in and whilst we could survive without links to our human history being disconnected from our natural heritage causes a number or mental and physical harms (the science is only just really beginning to understand these connections) and ultimately we rely on (e.g. food and clean air).

What I would say is that I think what you articulate is climate denial here. I realise, unfortunately, its an emotive term and I mean this in the way denial is talked about with respect to grief (which is what climate change is about to be honest coping with loss). You say that things always come and go and will regardless of our level of action. Whilst that is a truism it misses an important understanding of what’s happening. We are not just losing a few species or ecosystems here we are actually drastically changing the ratio of the rate of which things come and go. I.e. we are massively upping the rate at which things go whilst also limiting the rate at which they can come. Even this is an understatement unfortunately because what we are actually doing is pulling so hard on so many strands of the web of the life (Earth’s natural living systems) that the web itself is at risk of coming apart. Earth’s living system as a whole is as far as we know intrinsically unique to the whole universe and if we don’t manage to stem this collapse all those intrinsically unique human artifacts will likely be lost or in the worst case there won’t be much life to reflect on it. Its worth once again reiterating that the risk they took to the rocks was mindblowingly low espcially relative to other risks.

On their strategy I agree this is where there is room to start having a discussion about Just Stop Oils actions but we can’t do that I don’t think unless we start with the acknowledgement that their assessment of the stakes is valid and correct and that if effective their action (and tbh action that took real non trivial risk with Stonehenge) would be overwhelming worth it.

For what its worth I do think their theory of change is flawed and their self-care of their activists is lacking but if their aim is solely to keep climate change on the agenda with more people pushing for change they are succeeding (people hate them whilst they think about climate change and spend time on the internet and in person discussing climate change and what should and shouldn’t be done). The flaw I think is that they believe in an idealised vision of democracy where change happens when enough ordinary people want it whereas the reality is that public pressure is only one component of change espciaily when an issue is as complex and “spinnable” as climate change.

This is already too long so I won’t go into it but I also don’t think this issue boils down to a game of political chicken with governments. One of the challenges is the climate change is so sprawling and complex it brings up challenges to across lots if different scales and disciplines. The solutions are fundamental to our human story not just small technocrat shifts. There is no area of human activity that isn’t upturned by climate change and that ibudes archeology and anthropology.

Finally, if you are interested in learning about where I and others are coming from and the scale of our problems and challenges I recommend the following books:

• The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. This covers human history and we have created meaning and how it links with the environment and interconnects with the current issues we face
• Inflamed: deep medicine and he anatomy of injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Whilst not directly about climate change it does talk about how interconnected our health is with natural systems and how failure of connection to them leads to amoung other thing inflammation and disease.
• The climate book by Greta Thunberg. I haven’t actually read this but I know a number of the experts involved in areas that overlap with mine and I trust them. It might be guilty of focussing on the technical aspects of the issues rather than the human stories I think are more important which is why place it lower.

• There’s a lot of discussion to be had about Stonehenge particularly and how its been prioritised to be “preserved” at the cost and neglect of the surrounding archaeology. It also sad that none of the discussion and worry about potential risk to it covered the fact that the government is pushing ahead with sacrificing the wider site to car culture ( big underground new road, believing in the myth that more lanes stop traffic rather than the opposite). If we truly cared about that era of British and global history we would doing a lot more than “preserving” a few rocks which the Victorian moved about and romanticised anyway.

The idea is GDP is a measure of activity. So using per GDP allows you to see the efficiency which you are producing “value”. That’s not a terrible idea in general but it accepts a very narrow definition of value.

GDP is a really flawed measure of how well a society is performing. I wonder what it would look like if we used Gross National Happiness or Total Quality Life Years. Could also think about ecosystem health or biodiversity as a valuable output of a country but that’s highly linked to CO2 emissions so wouldnt be meaningful.

Also worth saying whilst per capita is absolutely important as a measure for us to understand the performance of human economic systems the earth systems only respond to gross total emissions.

Lots of people seem to hate this and I do on some level get it. I’d be happy to talk about whether its a winning strategy or what alternatives there are (I’m not sure personally its the optimum form of activism)

What I would say is the evidence suggests:

• General public do seem to hate this stuff.
• There is a relatively little spill over from the organisation to the wider issue (as in people think these guys are idiots but don’t link to climate change or environmentalism more generally).
• It is evidenced to increase the saliance and perceived importance of climate change I.e. people hate them but spend more time thinking climate change is serious than before.

Lastly, what I would say is from my own visceral reaction to the Van Gogh painting: I felt a huge and sudden feeling of cultural loss. That something of our heritage was at risk and we may lose it and initially I was angry and sad but I realised that we are routinely doing this everyday with lost species. Heritage we haven’t even been able to document yet. All that is to say it maybe we have a discussion about what the best activism is and who we need to influence and how (I think we need to do better than just think we need everyone on side) but what we shouldn’t do is entertain for a moment that the scale of this action isn’t proportional and valid to what we face. We are hurtling towards a cliff edge and some people still have their foot on the accelerator. This is the equivalent of worrying about a vase in the boot. I want to save it too but at the moment we are endangering it more through business as usual than through some cornflour.

I won’t rehash the arguments around “AI” that others are best placed to make.

My main issue is AI as a term is basically a marketing one to convince people that these tools do something they don’t and its causing real harm. Its redirecting resources and attention onto a very narrow subset of tools replacing other less intensive tools. There are significant impacts to these tools (during an existential crisis around our use and consumption of energy). There are some really good targeted uses of machine learning techniques but they are being drowned out by a hype train that is determined to make the general public think that we have or are near Data from Star Trek.

Addtionally, as others have said the current state of “AI” has a very anti FOSS ethos. With big firms using and misusing their monopolies to steal, borrow and coopt data that isn’t theirs to build something that contains that’s data but is their copyright. Some of this data is intensely personal and sensitive and the original intent behind the sharing is not for training a model which may in certain circumstances spit out that data verbatim.

Lastly, since you use the term Luddite. Its worth actually engaging with what that movement was about. Whilst its pitched now as generic anti-technology backlash in fact it was a movement of people who saw what the priorities and choices in the new technology meant for them: the people that didn’t own the technology and would get worse living and work conditions as a result. As it turned out they were almost exactly correct in thier predictions. They are indeed worth thinking about as allegory for the moment we find ourselves in. How do ordinary people want this technology to change our lives? Who do we want to control it? Given its implications for our climate needs can we afford to use it now, if so for what purposes?

Personally, I can’t wait for the hype train to pop (or maybe depart?) so we can get back to rational discussions about the best uses of machine learning (and computing in general) for the betterment of all rather than the enrichment of a few.

Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft’s climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).

Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn’t. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there’s also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.

Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can’t do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it’s accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn’t actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.

I was experiencing with both X11 and Wayland. I’ll give 555 a test. Thanks!

Were you having any kernel panics before this beta?

I was having this issue https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/series-550-freezes-laptop/284772/163 I disabled the GPU for the time being and was hoping the new driver would fix.

Me too. Noticeable Delay around 6s.

I’d be keen to know your (or others) experience of biking and driving in those conditions because in my experience cars aren’t well suited to those temperatures either. I don’t have direct experience of biking in that low but I know people who do and they swear by it.

Of course you could throw fuel at it and keep your car running all the time to stop it from freezing. 😷

https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/329955-russia-cars-extreme-frosts

Anyway as others have said no one is actually saying cycling is the solution for all extreme use cases that’s a strawman.

Very cool!

I would add just a few points I think are relevant for the discussion. I think some buildings and areas might need to be actively targets for removal on the basis on a spatial plan that builds in “space for nature” by which I mean letting the land return as much as possible to some form of wilderness. We are sadly quite far down the process of completely shaping the land and its not clear that we will be able to get back but I suspect a serious and sustained attempt will be needed.

On the transport of the materials: nothing wrong with your choice of road vehicles salvaged and converted to a different fuel source but it’s also worth considering another solarpunk option. Building before the availability of combustion engines often used temporary, lightweight narrow gauge railways were laid for the duration of construction. This was also used during WW1 for logistics. Once finished the track can be moved onto the next area. I suspect the narrow gauge would limit the speed and weight of any uses but for this purpose I suspect that doesn’t strongly matter. I can’t find a good source on the internet about this that’s but I vagually recall a Tom Scott video which mentioned off hand that a monorail which is now a tourist attraction actually began life as a temporary railway for construction freight. Rail also could be used in conjunction with human power (a hand car) for workers to commute.

Keep up the good work!

It also, I think, centres the ability of drivers to act independently of the visual design of the infrastructure and whilst, that is possible of course, research suggests driving behaviour is more strongly determined by design than conscious choice.

Not to be too negative but begging for drivers to consider us human is so tiresome.

We already know how to nearly eliminate road death. Unbundling the modes (segregation) and treating cars as guests where that’s not possible. After that treat infractions by drivers seriously. If you can’t drive safely your license should be removed. No more arguing in court that you need to drive to get to work.

I hope Nix sort it out too because technically I think its one of the better options for packaging.

It’s not about “satisfying the minorities”. It’s about ensuring a basic base level of respect and behaviour for people from all backgrounds. The roles you are talking about were specifically to deal with the fact there was an active problem around that minority in that community that needed dealing with. So bringing in that lived experience is absolutely important. Someone can be adequate, sane, have “proper” mindset and judgement and be from a minority that is currently being targeted with lived experience of the problem. Dealing with issues around diversity and inclusion make life easier and better for everyone: it’s well evidenced. I benefit daily from work that’s been done to make my area easier for people with disabilities despite not having one. Those only came about by people with disabilities challenging and getting in the room where decisions are made.

It’s really not that hard! If you don’t feel minoritised in your daily life and therefore don’t see the importance, fine, but all of us are only one incident or cultural shift to end up being the target so if you aren’t motivated by the plight of people you are happy to “other” than do so because one day you might be the other.

You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman. No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status. They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community. You can’t get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it. Your enforced anonymity doesn’t work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk). Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don’t get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination. They are called communities because that’s what’s they are: people want to be part of something and that involves sharing a part of themselves too. Open source projects live or die on their communities because they mostly don’t have the finances to just pay people to do the work. You need people to beleive in the project and not burn out etc.

You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it. If you aren’t in a minority and don’t care about those that are then just say so!

Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance (‘merit’) is complex interaction between an individual’s skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on “merit” you are just further entrenching that discrimination.

This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn’t survive.

I’m glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.