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Cake day: April 21st, 2025

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  • It’s not the BBC’s job to be an authority. Their job is to report what the (relevant) authorities are saying:

    DeepSeek challenged certain key assumptions about AI that had been championed by American executives like Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

    “We were on a path where bigger was considered better,” according to Sid Sheth, CEO of AI chip startup d-Matrix.

    Perhaps maxing out on data centres, servers, chips, and the electricity to run it all wasn’t the way forward after all.

    Despite DeepSeek ostensibly not having access to the most powerful tech available at the time, Sheth told the BBC that it showed that “with smarter engineering, you actually can build a capable model”.

    That said, seems suspect that an AI startup CEO is getting this much airtime. I would have preferred an industry analyst or an AI researcher.













  • Non-paywall: archive.ph

    An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.

    For canny operators, such a public affords new opportunities for corruption. Oligarchs attempting to shape policy to their advantage will benefit from the fact that few will have the attention span to track or challenge policies in dull, technical fields; what a majority now wants is not forensic investigation but a new video short “owning” the other tribe. We can expect the governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry. I do not celebrate this, but our net-native youth seem unfazed: International polls show waning support for democracy among Gen Z.

    Lest you mistake me, there is no reason the opportunity to sideline the electorate or to arbitrage the gap between vibes and policy should especially favor either the red team or the blue team. This post-literate world favors demagogues skilled at code-switching between the elite language of policy and the populist one of meme-slop. It favors oligarchs with good social media game and those with more self-assurance than integrity. It does not favor those with little money, little political power and no one to speak up for them.



  • From the post, for those who don’t want to go off-site:

    YouTube Channels:

    Andrewism

    The Solarpunk Scene

    Solar punk Life

    Solarpunk Station

    Our Changing Climate

    Podcasts:

    The Joy Report

    How To Save A Planet

    Demand Utopia

    Solarpunk Presents

    Outrage and Optimisim

    From What If To What Next

    Solarpunk Now

    Idealistically

    The Extinction Rebellion Podcast

    The Landworkers’ Radio

    Wilder

    What Could Possibly Go Right?

    Frontiers of Commoning

    The War on Cars

    The Rewild Podcast

    Solacene

    Imagining Tomorrow

    Live Like The World Is Dying

    Books (Fiction):

    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness The Dispossessed The Word for World is Forest

    Becky Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

    Phoebe Wagner: When We Hold Each Other Up

    Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

    Brenda J. Pierson, Claudie Arsenault: Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

    Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

    Justine Norton-Kertson: Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology

    Sim Kern: The Free People’s Village

    Ruthanna Emrys: A Half-Built Garden

    Sarina Ulibarri: Glass & Gardens

    Books (Non-fiction):

    Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom

    George Monbiot: Feral

    Miles Olson: Unlearn, Rewild

    Mark Shepard: Restoration Agriculture

    Kristin Ohlson: The Soil Will Save Us

    Rowan Hooper: How To Spend A Trillion Dollars

    Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom At The End of The World

    Kimberly Nicholas: Under The Sky We Make

    Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass

    David Miller: Solved

    Ayana Johnson, Katharine Wilkinson: All We Can Save

    Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are The Weather

    Colin Tudge: Six Steps Back To The Land

    Edward Wilson: Half-Earth

    Natalie Fee: How To Save The World For Free

    Kaden Hogan: Humans of Climate Change

    Rebecca Huntley: How To Talk About Climate Change In A Way That Makes A Difference

    Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose

    Jonathon Porritt: Hope In Hell

    Paul Hawken: Regeneration

    Mark Maslin: How To Save Our Planet

    Katherine Hayhoe: Saving Us

    Jimmy Dunson: Building Power While The Lights Are Out

    Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin: Prefigurative Politics

    Andreas Malm: How To Blow Up A Pipeline

    Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Almanac For The Anthropocene

    Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

    William MacAskill: What We Owe To The Future

    Mikaela Loach: It’s Not That Radical

    Miles Richardson: Reconnection

    David Harvey: Spaces of Hope Rebel Cities

    Eric Holthaus: The Future Earth

    Zahra Biabani: Climate Optimism

    David Ehrenfeld: Becoming Good Ancestors

    Stephen Gliessman: Agroecology

    Chris Carlsson: Nowtopia

    Jon Alexander: Citizens

    Leah Thomas: The Intersectional Environmentalist

    Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book

    Jen Bendell, Rupert Read: Deep Adaptation

    Seth Godin: The Carbon Almanac

    Jane Goodall: The Book of Hope

    Vandana Shiva: Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture

    Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement

    Minouche Shafik: What We Owe To Each Other

    Dieter Helm: Net Zero

    Chris Goodall: What We Need To Do Now

    Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac

    Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stephanie Foote: The Cambridge Companion To The Environmental Humanities

    Bella Lack: The Children of The Anthropocene

    Hannah Ritchie: Not The End of The World

    Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

    Kim Stanley Robinson: Ministry For The Future

    Fiona Mathews, Tim Kendall: Black Ops & Beaver Bombing

    Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

    Lynne Jones: Sorry For The Inconvenience But This Is An Emergency

    Helen Crist: Abundant Earth

    Sam Bentley: Good News, Planet Earth!

    Timothy Beal: When Time Is Short

    Andrew Boyd: I Want A Better Catastrophe

    Kristen R. Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia

    Elizabeth Cripps: What Climate Justice Means & Why We Should Care

    Kylie Flanagan: Climate Resilience

    Chris Johnstone, Joanna Macy: Active Hope

    Mark Engler: This is an Uprising

    Anne Therese Gennari: The Climate Optimist Handbook

    Magazines:

    Solarpunk Magazine

    Positive News

    Resurgence & Ecologist

    Ethical Consumer

    Films (Fiction):

    How To Blow Up A Pipeline

    The End We Start From

    Woman At War

    Black Panther

    Star Trek

    Tomorrowland

    Films (Documentary):

    2040: How We Can Save The Planet

    The People vs Big Oil

    Wild Isles

    The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

    Generation Green New Deal

    Planet Earth III

    Video Games:

    Terra Nil

    Animal Crossing

    Gilded Shadows

    Anno 2070

    Stardew Valley

    RPGs:

    Solarpunk Futures

    Perfect Storm

    Fully Automated

    Advocacy Groups:

    A22 Network

    Extinction Rebellion

    Greenpeace

    Friends of The Earth

    Green New Deal Rising

    Apps:

    Ethy

    Sojo

    BackMarket

    Depop

    Vinted

    Olio

    Buy Nothing

    Too Good To Go

    Websites:

    European Co-housing

    UK Co-housing

    US Co-housing

    Brought By Bike (connects you with zero-carbon delivery goods)

    ClimateBase (find a sustainable career)

    Environmentjob (ditto)

    Businesses (🤢):

    Ethical Superstore

    Hodmedods

    Fairtransport/Sail Cargo Alliance



  • I keep seeing posts about wetransfer alternatives and so far haven’t seen wormhole.app mentioned. Does it have bad juju I don’t know about?

    We built Wormhole with end-to-end encryption. When you use Wormhole, a key is generated on your device and used to encrypt your files. In transit, your data is unreadable to Wormhole and service providers like your ISP. The key never leaves your device and you’re the only one who has it – unless you decide to share it. With Wormhole, you’re in control of who has access to your files.

    When you share a Wormhole link, the key is automatically included in the link so it’s easy to share with the exact people you want, and no one else. Wormhole never sees the key. And we don’t want to see it.

    Every design decision in Wormhole begins with the safety and privacy of your data in mind. We can’t read your files, and no one else can either. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Wormhole works.