sujato

Folks think the growth of China’s renewables is somehow *good for the plant*. Sure, renewables do *less harm* than FF, but every EV, solar cell, battery, harms the earth. It’s integral to the world’s most massive industrial machine, profiting from the burned and desecrated corpse of mother nature.

Deflating “Hype” Won’t Save Us The problem with AI isn’t hype. The problem is who and what it’s useful for.

«is it rather the case that the [AI/LLMs] models’ inability to distinguish words from the world is precisely what makes them so useful to fascist aims?»

www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...

incredible. I had no idea the change was that vast in just ten years.

Remember all the agonizing like, "is it *really* a Nazi salute???" Musk has been "our guy" his entire life, his father before him, his grandfather before him.

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

Well, I'd rather see AI *go away* but yeah, good idea.

I really feel like governments have been largely made up of old guys who get their emails printed out. They're starry-eyed at the "smart" geeks and just relinquished any sense of purpose when it comes to the digital sphere.

We don’t even have anything like a public service sphere in the digital space.

It’s not even just one thing, it’s promoting a healthy digital ecosphere.

Eg. govts could run their own social media, spin up an instance of Mastadon or Bluesky and make it the official medium of record. It’s not competing w/ FB, it’s providing an accountable service.

Yeah, government is not the whole answer, but I think having both government and corporate is better than either alone.

I’m thinking of TV and radio in Australia, where you have commercial channels, govt channels which are quasi-independent, but also local community radio, universities, etc.

Good to see these serious issues being raised. I don’t think there’s a simple answer, but whatever it is it has to involve plurality. Break up the corporate monopolies and enable multiple options via govts, communities, regions, etc. Maybe a hard limit on the size of social media networks.

I remember being at group discussion, one young guy was manspreading heavily. One woman asked him to cut it, but another woman said it’s better to just be patient. They ended up arguing while he kept on spreading.

Simpler times.

Not sure that “we’ll just keep our trillions cos the real problem is the ones who want to drive their car or fertilize their field” is a winning message but ok.

Screenshot of Merrian-Webster website showing fascism defeating Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

Noooooooo!

Just saying, there's two sides.

Graph from norskpetroleum showing Norway's oil and gas exports from 1970. They have remained roughly steady since the mind 90s, in fact growing slowly since 2020, the same period that saw a massive increase in renewables globally.

And yet …

It’s only just become respectable to explain how bad MAGA is by comparing them to Nazis. Time flies. Soon we’ll be telling kids, “That Hitler was so terrible, he was as bad as Trump”. And they’ll scoff and say that’s so extra, be serious.

yeah, you're probably right.

Good guess, let's see. Maybe VR/AR in-between, but that seems have fizzled before the sizzle.

Graph of global renewable electricity from Our World in Data, showing massive growth from 1965 to the present, with a steady growth over that period of hydro, and since 2010 a rapid growth of solar and wind as well.

while renewables also grow.

Humanity will simply consume all the energy it gets its hands on. More is not the answer.

Graph of global coal production from 1900 to 2024, showing an increase that acceerated after 2000, slowed during the COVID years, but has since rebounded.

Coal production continues to grow past its current vastly-excessive state …

That’s an impressively precise comparison.

Releases · rosettatype/yrsa-rasa Yrsa & Rasa: fonts for Latin and Gujarati. Contribute to rosettatype/yrsa-rasa development by creating an account on GitHub.

Yrsa, and it’s Gujarati companion Rasa, are freely available, grab them from Github.

Fun font fact: if you’ve noticed the nice serif font on Github recently, that’s Yrsa, which was designed by David Brezina’s Rosetta foundry, as was SuttaCentral’s Skolar.

A nemesis arose from the deep past, following me to a new platform. Before blocking, I quickly checked his feed. It’s choked with AI slop. Seems like I was right about the guy.

Absolutely not. Crazy engineering will not solve anything, but it will give the climate criminals yet another excuse to keep emitting under the promise of some magic fix in the future.

There’s still hope. Right now, “fascism” is losing. It’s no longer the top lookup on Merrian-Webster.

Let this day be remembered as the day fascism was defeated by Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

Other billionaires must cringe. He's ruining it for them all. Just keep quiet, nurture mystique, let them think that money = genius. Like the Wallenbergs. No-one knows who they are, but they own like half of Sweden.

Iran must move its capital from Tehran, says president as water crisis worsens Masoud Pezeshkian says subsidence is also ‘a disaster’ in city of 10 million, which consumes quarter of Iran’s water

We can’t separate climate chaos from immigration. The movement of people is the tip of the spear. It’s driving authoritarianism, and how we handle it will determine the future of humanity.

Does anyone else find it weird/disturbing how many US folks use the word “American” to mean “person deserving of rights”?

Puggala: a composite individual Buddhism has always had a certain anxiety over the concept of the “person”. Small wonder, since the Buddha’s cardinal doctrine was that there is no self. That didn’t stop early Buddhists from writing ...

Ok, done, here you go: