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• Post #4429259

  good vibes 😊 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G383538qzQ

• Post #4388342

  Between a Rockford File and a hard Place #TVShowProverbs

• Post #4378119

  There are blokes my kind of age and blokes younger than me salivating at looking more powerful as prompt engineers (alchemists). Seems to me they are overwhelmingly blokes. (The key is the ‘powerful’ bit.) I see the LLM game. And I want no part of it. I will inevitably touch its greasy surfaces and co-opt some of its utility. But I am consciously curating my mitigation of that: asymptotically aspiring to #zuzai

• Post #4373135

  Programming is the modelling of entire landscapes in one’s head: - terrain right in front of you and under foot - and terrain obscured by buildings and trees (mostly buildings these days) - and terrain visible but across a river - and terrain over the horizon. A good sense of direction and gradient needed. LLMs have no sense of direction, though their vendors do, and I don’t want to traverse the denuded landscapes they’re selling https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116623150311153409

• Post #4354580

  #climateDiary The diagram below attempts to visualise what I see as a core misunderstanding of our power generation pathways. Our cultural expectations of the power available to us are set by the fossil fuels we have become accustomed to using. We do understand that the fuel source does not fit the safe operating space, but we have not adjusted our expectations, and those don’t fit either. (It’s not a remotely statistically sound Venn, so don’t get hung upon the radii or extents of overlap)

• Post #4325494

  .@RichardJMurphy is straying closer to being blocked. Going to the trouble of adding an image description that explains the *mode* of production – “AI-assisted” – but absolutely *none* of the detail of his infographic on Marx writing about the *means* of production is just insulting

• Post #4279747

  #carbonBombing 1/n Yesterday, I saw the phrase “carbon bomb” from Ketan Joshi, used with respect to data centres. It got me thinking about bombs. When I was a kid growing up in the 70s I was in thrall to the heroics of Bomber Command, especially the Avro Lancasters that flew out of places like RAF Scampton in the north of my then home county of Lincolnshire. It was of course a heavily romanticised childhood fascination, devoid of any sense of what happened beneath the bombs they dropped…

• Post #4174419

  “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is an oft-posed question, but today, courtesy of @martinvermeer@fediscience.org, I learn the more foundational question… “Which came first, the anus or the mouth?” We are arsehole-first creatures https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/biology/difference-between-protostomes-and-deuterostomes/

• Post #4160335

  Given all the shit going on… I did appreciate learning from Chris Packham last night just how paradigm-shifting the evolution of the bumhole was. As Chris puts it: “I absolutely love the fact that for life to evolve a head, it had to evolve an arse first.” And my internal feeling while watching Episode #3 of Evolution was not unlike the countenance of the early fish, Metaspriggina of the Cambrian period https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002yyzn

• Post #4135719

  I have long been nuts about nuts. Which makes me well-suited to being vegan. Some people think that being vegan is nuts. But those people are wrong

• Post #4135634

  “Plastic pellets spilled into River Tyne after two ships colliding caused up to 25 tonnes of nurdles – about a billion in total – to enter the water,” More plastic destined to enter our brains and gonads as micro plastics sooner than later. So more strokes and dementia, and fewer babies in our future. On the upside, they make inordinate amounts of money for pricks line Jim Ratcliffe to fund sports teams that plug fossil fuels. So what’s not to like? /s https://northeastbylines.co.uk/news/e...

• Post #4082831

  31 years ago, around this time of year, we took a train to Bordeaux from Fontenay-le-Comte, where we had been staying the previous week. In the intervening years, we (le grand « nous », not just me and my wife) have pissed close to a trillion tonnes of climate heating CO2 into the air. Or, roughly 1500x the weight of all the people alive today. Today, Bordeaux is imperilled by fire https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jul/25/france-spain-wildfires-latest-news-updates-madrid-cap-ferr...

• Post #4034176

  I note that the BBC is now adopting America’s idiotic convention on placing punctuation for the outer clause of sentences inside inner quotations. Exhibit A: > "Our works show that prolonged day-and-night heat above 41 to 45C directly attack their cells," he told the BBC. This makes no sense. The comma belongs to the sentence not the quote. I guess the BBC is now ABC :/ - - - Update: I’m wrong on this 😆 See Sara’s reply #AmericanHegemoany

• Post #3981545

  From page 14 of the PDF available from the URL shared by Gerry: 1/n “While much discourse centers on the need to massively increase mineral extraction to tackle the climate crisis, how they are currently used remains a footnote in the mainstream discourse.” https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/116956751767696401

• Post #3955900

  As Valencia prepares itself for more rain https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113417885855937114 the rest of us would do well to understand that we are *daily* pushing ourselves outside what Johan Rockström calls “the corridor of life”, especially the geological ribbon of the Holocene in which human civilisation has been possible. The graphic shows the 14°C average that climate scientists use as the ‘zero’ baseline of the last 3 million years. The Holocene has been within +/- 0.5°C of tha...

• Post #3955898

  #climateCrisis There’s an envelope of temperatures in which food grows. It will vary due to many factors such as soil health and levels of rainfall, but all other things being equal, the productivity in a given region is a function of the average temperature in that region. The graph here is a representation of crop yields in Pakistan over time. Although productivity has increased, the parts of the country where the average temperature is about 14°C are consistently the most productive, and…

• Post #3953055

  “Immediately after ChatGPT was released, people around the web began using ‘low-background steel’ as a metaphor to describe the practice of archiving web content that existed before 2022 in an effort to preserve information that was produced by humans without ‘contamination’ from large language models” https://aus.social/@backupbear/116936877137999956

• Post #3929173

  “Canada is warming much faster than the global average. The country is warming at twice the global rate, while the Canadian Arctic is warming at nearly four times the global rate, raising concerns around thawing permafrost in northern regions.” Which is what happens when you hitch a national economy to a driver of global heating https://ottawa.place/@AudhdDespiteNoisyAbleism/116941456734607219

• Post #3891305

  1/2 Hey fedi, I would like someone to patiently explain to me, with practical examples that are not founded in hype or bullshit… when using a blockchain is better than a regular database (distributed or otherwise). Bearing in mind a couple of points: 1. *humans* build webs of trust, not machines. Machines do not know how or when to trust because they cannot relate to each other emotionally. So I do not see how blockchain can resolve a trust deficit…

• Post #3880080

  Probs more than anything else, I use Mastodon to think out loud in public. But there are *loads* of different modes with which to use it, with which to *be* in it. And that’s very cool. Thanks for being here. And thanks to @Gargron@mastodon.social for getting the whole thing going 😊

• Post #3858904

  Here’s a snapshot of shipping in the Gulfs of Persia and Oman from 14 years ago, since when – prior to 28 Feb this year – the weight of moving cargo will have increased by about 70%. Every dot is a ship of type container, dry bulk, tanker, gas bulk or vehicle carrier. Source: https://www.shipmap.org The great irony is that Trump, the Fool’s Gold idiot and climate denier in chief, has probably done more these past 19 weeks to suppress emissions than any other individual

• Post #3805482

  Because I keep seeing an ad for Polar Breeze, and Google ads are overwhelmingly grifts of some sort, I did a search for “polar breeze scam” and found https://malwaretips.com/blogs/polar-breeze-portable-ac-exposed-scam-or-legit-investigation/

• Post #3783233

  Weather is not climate but weather forecasts have become a window into a future we don’t want but mostly can’t be bothered to mitigate

• Post #3735784

  We’ve made things so hot that we have to douse trees. I’m sure that another 135,000 flights today and tomorrow and the day after will help https://youtu.be/MxHG9sWZPvs?si=NVQhyYHZ40k4fEqA

• Post #3713000

  Zuckerberg’s track record: Turned a perving on women app into a network phenomenon with the help of a guy who stole everyone’s music. Bought other people’s work to use his network phenomenon dollars to pump their network effects into his maw. Turned his OG network phenomenon into an electoral fraud engine. Poured money into a virtual environment with no legs. Poured more money into bullshit engines to reduce the number of employed legs and got bullshit results https://eshumarneedi.com/2...

• Post #3687002

  Our dilemma is that we live in an economic system structurally incapable of paying attention to the multiple paths of its own collapse https://fediscience.org/@rahmstorf/116878340334059809

• Post #3670903

  “The rise in observed temperatures in France has outpaced projections made by climate models, with June maximum temperatures more in line with what was expected for the 2070s. This is illustrated in the figure below, which shows how France’s average maximum daily high temperature for June recorded in 2026 (black line) compares to climate model projections (blue and orange lines).” https://climatejustice.social/@RichardAshwell/116883592415459378

• Post #3659662

  A search on here suggests that tennis is very much not Mastodon’s sport. At least not relative to loads of results from bridged Bsky posts. So what sport is Mastodon?

• Post #3598341

  ⚽ Imagine a world where a World Cup of overpaid football athletes, 🎾 or a Grand Slam of overpaid tennis athletes in a leafy suburb of London, 🚴‍♂️ or overpaid cycling athletes Tour-ing round France in a mostly predictable heatwave couldn’t take place because we understood that the price of those events is existentially unaffordable. But we don’t understand that, so we’re choosing devastating precarity and unaffordability in years to come. PS: I love watching sport #climateDiary

• Post #3575528

  There seem to be 3 main lenses to the “we can do this” discourse on decarbonisation: 1. We need governments and transnational businesses and institutions to act. (In ways they are structurally incapable of and extreeeeeemely resistant to.) 2. We *are* doing this. Just look at the rollout of solar and wind. (But don’t look at the massive mismatch with scale and time or at any of the supply chain dilemmas.) 3. We are most definitely not doing this. But we can and must radically address demand.