Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

Getting my thermodynamics lectures ready for this year. The Sankey diagram for the UK's energy demand in 2020 shows that for all the back slapping about renewable electricity, the scale of the challenge to decarbonize remains absolutely gigantic. I put this alongside the graph shown by @andrewdessler recently about where our emissions need to be in the 50 years. Even a government that isn't asleep at the wheel will find it hard. Very hard.

He slow-travelled from Germany to Papua New Guinea for a field trip, taking boats, trains, busses, and #notflying.
There he talked about #climatechange with locals and made a promise not to fly on his way back either.
Then his institute sacked him for wanting to slow-travel back and not get on a plane to Germany.

He is our hero and he is on his way back on boats, trains, busses.

You can follow him here: @gianluca_grimalda

#climatecrisis #civildisobedience #ifnotnowthenwhen #goGian

Holy shit I think I’m in love.

#Protomaps, a way to serve vector #maps of the entire world using a single static file and HTTP range requests.

It’s basically a static site generator for interactive maps. Tile servers are pretty much obsolete now. No database needed, you can run your interactive, smooth-zooming vector map from any HTTP storage. S3, Caddy running on your Wi-Fi router, even GitHub pages.

https://protomaps.com/

It’s open source & free to use. Wow. 🤯

via https://chaos.social/@djh/111280447304607540

Engineering professor and materials scientist @debcha's new book *How Infrastructure Works* is a hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way - forever:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

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Rishi Sunak, the Posh EconoRobot who is currently PM, has put the nail in the coffin of Britain's high-speed rail...and done a radical U-turn on getting the UK to Net Zero.

I write about why political expediency could prove to be the death of the best laid climate plans... 🧵

A very inspiring book i'm sinking into right now is a free read of "Art + DIY Electronics" by Garnet Hertz.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5589/Art-DIY-Electronics

#art #diy #electronics #book #mit #edu

Flight-free travel: The best new European train routes launching in 2023 and 2024
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/08/16/flight-free-travel-europes-new-long-distance-train-routes-for-2022
#Trains #PublicTransport

I've gone through 3 million manuals in the Internet Archive's collections and produced a "Manuals Showcase", a few dozen manuals that are sure to catch your eye here and there. Readable online, downloadable, and ad-free.

https://archive.org/details/manuals_showcase

Look who's got fall colors

How retro kick ass is that? Flash is resurrected sans the neglected, proprietary, security ridden, plugin bs of Adobe; thanks to Rust, and modern day sandboxed WebAssembly. No plugin required; small, compact, compatible engine, that unlocks decades of lost SWF content in all its vector visuals, MP3 stereo, and ActionScript-y glory. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle #flash #adobe #webdev #javascript #rust #retrogaming

Now available: Skill Tree poster sets! This is a digital download available on my shop to support the continuing growth of the open source skill trees project.
Colour in the boxes, show off your skills and get inspired to keep levelling up. Also wanting to get these available as physical posters: Black and white or Black with gold foil? Posters here: https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/makerqueenau

Hey folks, I've seen a lot of talk going around about adblockers lately. I worked in the advertising technology and security industry for five years and the one core piece of advice I have is:

Holy fuck never give an advertiser your data. You cannot believe how bad it is. Don't. I run three layers of ad block protection and I'd run more if it was feasible. If you want to support creators give them money.

Hacker leaks millions of 23andme genetic data profiles.

Please resequence your DNA asap, make sure you use at least four different letters and a minimum length of at least 3.2*10⁹ characters.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker-leaks-millions-of-new-23andme-genetic-data-profiles/

It's funny: Both Bandcamp and Patreon had the easiest and most straightforwardly long-term profitable business models imaginable: Sit between indie creatives and their fans, provide some basic services for mediation (comment sections, media posts, semi-global payment) and take enough of a cut of any payments to cover the costs and then some.

But because that business model wouldn't scale forever, they are instead being gutted, because ever _increasing_ growth is the only model capital accepts

No wonder they get so worked up about language models, they truly see themselves in them?

Remember, the fact that they can confidently generate vast amounts of text doesn’t mean there’s any actual intellectual capacity inside the tech billionaire.

Our home cable-based internet had 10kBit/s upload speed yesterday and I needed to get 200Mb to a printshop.

Do not ever underestimate the data transfer rate of a guy with a thumbdrive and a bike!

#bicycles #data #commuting #internet