The deers of Nara show that giving them food and protecting them is an easy way to achieve that.

I had never seen deers as aggressive as monkeys towards humans!

Let me guess: open source?

That’s according to a peer-reviewed study funded by the Ford Motor Company, a company that makes most of its profits from gas-powered vehicles.

If you want to see if a tech is part of a renewable future, it is direct emissions that should be counted. EVs are at zero. They don’t emit CO2 when running, when being produced or when being disposed of. They use electricity and transport, two things that we can provide without emitting CO2. They are a piece of the puzzle of a sustainable society, something thermal cars will never be, and something these graphs hide.

Of course we will be better off without cars and trucks, but the road towards them being totally gone is long, and it is time we don’t have.

Been there, done that :-)

30 minutes of video is a lot of time to go a bit deeper, especially if you assume the audience knows half of the movies mentioned.

For me it stopped when it started getting interesting.

And “ghosts” are such a cop out to not talk about the hard questions.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love GitS which is a stunning piece of art, but it barely scratched the surface.

The subject deserves a better treatment than this relatively shallow pop-scifi video. This has been a question in science-fiction for more than a century. No, it did not start with Star Trek, Asimov dates it as far back as 1818 Frankenstein. If you are bold you can see this theme in the 2000 years old story of Talos, the bronze colossus that wanted immortality (ancient Greece was surprisingly full of automatons, Rhodes was known for them).

The question is what does imbue humans with what makes us see them as humans? Please don’t use the word “soul”. It is meaningless and religious, does not refer to any observable thing.

And don’t use “intelligence” as an interchangeable word with that undefined property, that most sci-fi authors have took to call “sentience”. That word is not human-centric and they typically apply sentience or the question of sentience to aliens or machines.

We have a hard time seeing as sentient something that has zero sense of ego. You can make an extremely intelligent machine with no ego, no sense of self. This is what you have in LLMs.

Giving them a sense of self and ego is probably feasible, but it is both useless and a huge responsibility. Maybe will happen first as an art project, but then you have to question the morality of creating something that does not want to die (or at least expresses it) but is not recognized as a person.

It also interrogates our notion of the linearity of the self. If such a sentient being can be forked, suspended, copied, have memories wiped out, fake memories implanted, personality changed, willingly or unwillingly, that opens a lot of philosophical questions.

I wish the community would embrace them, but so far all we have had are extremely superficial debates over “true” intelligence, usually defined as the difference between what humans can do and machines can do, an ever-shrinking territory.

I’d have a slightly different take: managing things in-house is going to be cheaper if you have a competent team to do it. The existence of the cloud as a crucial infrastructure is because it is hard to come up with competent IT and sysadmin people. The market is offer-driven now. IT staff could help the company save money on AWS hosting but it could also be used in more crucial and profitable endeavour and this is what is happening.

I see it at the 2 organization I am working at: one is a startup which does have a single, overworked “hardware guy” who sets up the critical infra of the company. His highest priority is to maintain the machine with private information that we want to host internally for strategic reasons. We calculated that having him install a few machines for hosting our dev team data was the cheapest but after 3 months of wait, we opted out for a more expensive, but immediately available, cloud option. We could have hired a second one but our HR department is already having a hard time finding candidates for out crucial missions.

On the non-profits I am working on, there is a strong openness/open-hardware spirit. Yet I am basically the only IT guy there. I often joke they should ditch their Microsoft, Office and Google based tools, and I could help them do it, but I prefer to work on the actual open hardware research projects they are funding. And I think I am right in my priorities.

So yes, the Cloud is overpriced, but it is a convenience. Know what you pay for, know you could save money there and it may at some point be reasonable to do so. In the end that’s a resource allocation problem: human time vs money.

Yes but at one point when people have to choose between their device catching fire and 15% more range, a lot of reasonable people realize what is the most important.

It is a bit dangerous with lithium batteries but the industry is switching quickly to a safer tech that will make these DIYers a viable and safe option

I was also pleasantly surprised that the /r/solarpunk subreddit promotes slrpnk.net. I asked about it and I loved their answer:

Yes, we’re very keen to promote other communities. Reddit will collapse sooner or later, but this community is also a very large gateway, and so quite vague/broadbrush. The most interesting and innovative work tends to happen in smaller places.

Then making it light makes sense because some of these visitors will have slow computers and expensive bandwidth. (And probably a much bigger co2 impact per site visited but I have the weakness to think that knowledge is worth it)

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good reasons to do lighter websites. Environmental impact is not one of them. Either your electricity usage emits CO2, in which case you have more urgent things to do, or your electricity does not, and you don’t care about the additional microwatthour loading a js library took.

At one point then the goal is not to lower your impact, it is to make it positive: don’t lower your energy use anymore, become a net producer. We just moved in a house so the insulation and switch to heat pump is our priority but at one point I want solar panels. I want guilt-free air conditioning in summer

Individuals can make a ton of choices and impact! But don’t make them believe that some things are impactful when they are not. Changing the way you move around, insulating your home, changing your diet, improving your recycling, all these have an impact. Making your webpage 50K lighter? That’s good design sure, but not an environmental action.

Insulate your water heater before worrying about the few mW a website could save!

The machine it is hosted on can have more than a 10x impact on its electricity use.

Inconvenient truth: the location of your website matters more than its content in terms of footprint. Hosting in on a VPS at Amazon probably has a lower footprint than a raspberry pi in your garage. And overall, it is really, really small.

AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions

Crypto yes, AI does not come even close to 1% of that.

Someone asked something similar in reddit a few days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1amqzc4/foss_for_selforganizing_groups/

We were not doing it the wrong way, but we were having a different financial calculus: the goal used to be to maximize the revenue per m² of solar panels, but they have become so cheap that now we try to optimize the revenue per m² of land.

It used to be profitable to motorize panels to follow the sun. Now it is more profitable to have two panels suboptimnally placed but maximizing output per m² of land.

Probably old equipment with default admin passwords. You would not believe the amount of things you can “hack” with admin/admin