At around 2am this morning, I heard these two spikey but enthusiast characters cavorting beneath our bedroom window. Because they were both noisy & incompatible with our lizard sanctuary, I put on some gloves, got a bin, and collected them for release in the reserve across the road in the morning... Keen to keep them out of the yard.
Proposed North Yorkshire fracking site becomes source of clean, #geothermal energy - https://news.sky.com/story/proposed-north-yorkshire-fracking-site-becomes-source-of-clean-geothermal-energy-12988955 fab idea: I wonder how many fracking sites could be converted like this...
Neglected to post this cartoon from a couple weeks ago: Always blame the left!
Next November 10-12 in Naples there will be the 2nd edition of the Reclaim The Tech festival! We're thrilled to contribute in a laboratory exploring "Participatory, Inclusive, and Community-centered Technologies as alternatives to capitalist platform".
Kudos to the great community bringing all of this to life! See you in Naples - Ci vediamo a Napoli! 🎉 Check out the agenda: https://reclaimthetech.it/programma-lab/"
@themarkup has 15K followers around here, but they deserve many more.
The Markup is a nonprofit journalism site that publishes investigations and and tools to hold technology firms to account.
E.g., you can use their tool https://themarkup.org/blacklight to investigate exactly how a site is tracking you.
Or you can read investigations like this one into the police-industrial surveillance complex:
Beyond following, consider donating if you value their work!
A few months ago I got pretty annoyed with Gmail. The motivating event was noticing ads interspersed among my emails. It maybe wasn’t a super big deal, but it spurred me to realize that, while Gmail was the best-of-class email platform for many years, that moat has narrowed or disappeared. It’s now possible to pay for a service better incentivized to make product decisions for users rather than business clients. I opted to switch to Fastmail.
"While the university’s enrollment numbers reflect 87 self-identified first-year Native students, Logan said the number of engaged students with ties to their culture and communities is closer to 35..."
It's not only universities that did land grabs, but individual settler state citizens want even more. They'll check boxes and play Indian to get it. Self-identification alone is an open invitation to fraud.
“It’s easy to understand that when people arrived on this landscape, that it was a landscape that was shaped and maintained by fire and that it was exquisitely beautiful,” White says.
“It’s easy to understand that traditional knowledge of #fire should be integrated into fire management practices today, but, man, that’s hard to achieve.”
#forests #wildfires #forestry #books #california
https://www.rewildingmag.com/indigenous-forest-management-a-culture-of-burning/
Curious to know where this stands, 11 years on.
Stallman and Mance on solidarity economy and FLOSS.
Every Presidential briefing includes this:
We'll know AI, for software development, has actually become intelligent when it can report its own productivity in function points or starts producing code at a higher level of abstraction than 3GLs. Until then, we can assume it's at most as stupid as tthe average software developer.
#SoftwareEngineering
I think having basic programming skills is useful for high school graduates, but justifying it by the rise of AI is like justifying metal shop class in the 1970s by pointing at the new welding robots starting to show up at factories.
Teach CS and metal shop because they are useful and interesting knowledge, but not because they will lead to a job.
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Chip in to help Freedom of the Press Foundation with a tax-deductible donation before the end of the year. https://freedom.press/donate/
“We don't want to enable our language to be mined for our cultural and scientific content, to create wealth for the very people that stole all the wealth and resources from our people in the first place.” — Peter-Lucas Jones
DOJ Antitrust Lawsuit- Google extends its control over the search engine market to include Apple iOS end users who may believe they are avoiding Google surveillance business practices by using Apple iOS devices instead of Google Android devices.
Read: https://puri.sm/posts/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-apple-sells-access-to-ios-end-users-to-google/
At this point, it is widely understood that Benjamin Netanyahu helped to support the rise of Hamas. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas,” Netanyahu said in 2019.
But there is less discussion about how US foreign policy also set the stage for the events of October 7, 2023.
In an article published in 2006, we suggested that one way to make sense of the Bush administration's otherwise incomprehensible decisions in Iraq was to assume that they were not trying to suppress jihadism, but rather to create an environment in which it could proliferate.
At the time, the text was received as imaginative speculation. Seventeen years later, it looks prescient. It foretells the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, predicts the extension of the label “terrorist” to ordinary activists in the United States, and foresees how the situation in Palestine foreshadows other ethnic conflicts and forms of mass repression.
"By a process of natural selection, they have come to pursue policies that tend to get their supporters shot down, blown up, and kidnapped, because these unfortunate effects drive more supporters into their arms."
#ShlaerMellor, #FunctionPointAnalysis, #punk, #environmentalist, #unionAdvocate, #anarchosocialist
"with a big old lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time" - Frank Zappa