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Spines: a VC-funded vanity publisher with added AI


Als Antwort auf David Gerard

Spines’ pitch is heavy on resentment-based marketing: “… you will receive the feedback you so long for from the publishing world: a personal touch.”


holy shit. I learned a new term today (resentment-based marketing) and I’m fascinated by how this could possibly work

Als Antwort auf self

"You will receive the feedback you so long for … from a LLM that will generate a plausible-sounding critique of a book that may or may not resemble the one you wrote.”

They should really market this as the perfect gift for the guy who already has an AI girlfriend.


Als Antwort auf felixwhynot

Great idea. That stuff is also used as packing paper for packages or moving. I think I'll start saving it as I get it.
Als Antwort auf felixwhynot

I've been using this extensively in my garden / yard over the last few years with great success. We've used it in our vegetable garden, our herb / tea garden and now we're doing it for a section for cut flowers and Dahlias for next year. We haven't bagged any leaves in the last few years using them and some of our neighbors on our gardens. Sheet mulching for the win



We need solarpunk now more than ever


Today, imagining a better future is a powerful act of resistance. It’s a way of reclaiming our agency when it feels like the ground is falling away beneath us. This isn't about naive optimism or pretending the difficulties we face aren’t real.

Rather, it’s refusing to let these problems dominate our thinking. It’s about creating mental and emotional space for ideas that push beyond the status quo, even when the present can feel like it’s crushing us with its darkness.

If we only resist, we risk becoming defined by what we oppose. To change the world for the better we need visions to sustain us. Vivid and inspiring ones that helps keep us going through the tough times and challenges ahead. Ideas of the future that don’t deny the difficult work ahead. They give that work purpose and meaning.

This is why we believe in the power of solarpunk. Not as a fantasy to escape to but as a radical re-imagining of what we can build if we work together for a deliciously sustainable world.

Als Antwort auf countrypunk

Great question! If you look in the sidebar of this very community and its larger instance you will find that our admins have placed helpful links to answer exactly that question. You can find the articles "What is Solarpunk?" and "A Solarpunk Manifesto" on our wiki





Plans for "The Mindful City" in Bhutan


I didn't know anything about Bhutan before reading this, so it sounded fairly Solarpunk to me. I'm hopeful for their new city.
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)
Als Antwort auf jeffhykin

I didn't know anything about Bhutan before reading this, but their culture sounds outstandingly Solarpunk to me.


Not so sure about that. Their happiness index and "culture" are a marketing stunt to lure tourists.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_c…

Als Antwort auf juli

Yeah :/ it does appear that way. I looked into them a bit after reading the article, they've got a 61/100 score on the freedom house index (US is 83/100). From freedom of speech to freedom of religion, there seems to be a lot of not-as-advertised realities.


Minutes from 7 November 2024 WG Meeting








The Viridian Design Movement, a 1998 precursor to Solarpunk?


I was digging up old layers of the Internet and found out about old (well, late 90s, early 2000s) texts by Bruce Sterling who mentioned his Viridian notes where he describes something very close to a solarpunk movement (sustainability focused tech and social changes). It is fun to read because some have very strong cyberpunkish vibes but with the twist that cyberpunk describes the world we are in right now and viridian is the world we want.

It led me to learn that there is a label that more or less matches solarpunk in political theory: Bright Green Environmentalism

This is a huge corpus of text and I obviously disagree with some things, and the 1999 vibes of promoting at the same time intense air travel (for multi-culturalism) and sustainability sounds a bit tone-deaf, but I find it interesting to dive in with a tolerant curiosity.

(Dig that 1999 GIF btw!)

Als Antwort auf Tinker ☀️

Ah I mixed up light and bright haha

But I still think solarpunk may be a bit darker than even "bright", as technology is not only the tools to make the change, but technology is one aspect of it and direct change in the political and economical system is needed as well.

Als Antwort auf thisfro

- Yeah! That's solarpunk! 😂 Degrowth, mutual aid, decentralized and localized economies, anti-capitalism, social justice, ethical and thoughtful approach to technology, climate and ecological sustainability, etc et al. What you're describing is solarpunk.


Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (10 Monate her)




Collective Survival, Adaptation and Direct Action


Als Antwort auf Sine_Fine_Belli

Thanks for posting this here. I don’t understand how this article was a violation of the rules on the LW politics community. Perhaps the mod simply did not like the content.



Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project


Idk where this goes but it made me happy

Als Antwort auf poVoq

A fucking wonderful read, thank you very much for sharing. I'd encourage anyone who seeing this comment to stop for a minute and give it a read.

The article does an excellent job of dissecting how we can build towards a more mutualistic world from where we are today

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)
Als Antwort auf poVoq

Great idea. Too bad corporate America will never allow it.


UK Home Office speeds up visa and refugee processing with Copilot AI reject-a-bot


Als Antwort auf David Gerard

The Home Office scrapped a previous machine-learning visa review tool in 2020 after it was caught being insanely racist. That tool had been in place since 2015.


oh my god. just accidentally running the racism machine for 5 years during a rise in global fascism

no we won’t let you examine how the racism machine 2.0 now with LLMs works

Als Antwort auf self

you tell people there is literally a racism machine for the purpose of doing racism, and if they know what the Home Office is they say "sounds about right"


Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th November 2024


Als Antwort auf Amoeba_Girl

Its gonna be the largest embezzlement scheme in US history, that much I'm certain. How much damage the pair will do to the federal gov I'm not sure, but I expect there won't be much left of it once they're done.


"Solarpunk USA" PeerTube videos


Als Antwort auf demesisx

How is this comment related to this the topic of this thread?
Als Antwort auf poVoq

Did you use slrpnk.net leading up to the election? Did you not see the innumerable articles trying to GreenWash the Democrats? If this is the same solarpunk movement, I’d appreciate it if they weren’t corporatist shills.


Draft Guidance for Long-form Text


One of the Social Web Foundation's programs for this year is to work on making long-form text more useful and available on the Social Web. By this, we mean multi-paragraph texts of "web page" length, like a blog post, a magazine article, a newsletter, a f
Als Antwort auf Evan Prodromou

I think #WordPress is already pretty close to what you specified... I like the featured-image idea github.com/Automattic/wordpres…

Maybe we could/should be more specific how to deduplicate `images` and `attachments`!?!


Als Antwort auf Sine_Fine_Belli

Shouldn't it be more important to reduce the amount of water usage to as little as possible? Southern California is all dessert and is constantly in a draught.
Als Antwort auf go $fsck yourself

Residential water use (especially in cities) is a very small portion. Entire cities use less water than some farms. The problem with water in Southern California is Imperial Valley.
Als Antwort auf Sine_Fine_Belli

Urban gardening in the news: wow so healthy so easy!

Urban gardening in reality: the squirrels ate all the fruits, the rats bit the buds off of everything, I just wasted so much water and money to increase the vermin population and have no food to show for it.

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)


Sustainable Plastic Solutions becomes world leader in farm waste recycling


In just over two years, their small Hamilton-based business, Sustainable Plastic Solutions, has reclaimed 3,000 tonnes of plastic and has created a world-leading closed-loop circular economy for grain tarpaulins.

They've just received a federal grant for matched funding of $9 million that will expand their operations to 16,000 tonne capacity per year and should enable them to tackle the so-far-unsolvable problem of recycling silage wrap.

But in the beginning, it was all financed by local farmers.

Als Antwort auf Taleya

In the short term we need more like this. In the long term we simply need to stop producing and using plastics on this scale. Recycling is good but by the time plastic gets to this stage in its 'life-cycle' much of the environmental damage has already been done through production, manufacturing and transport.


Solarpunk mystery novel released today


Als Antwort auf AEMarling

Just wanted to drop a note and say I binged this and then Murder in the Tool Library in 2 days. What a nice little universe you've built! I had never even heard of smashwords before your mention, but I've made a couple of other purchases in the last few days and will certainly use it to try and build a big enough library to distract me for the next 4 or 5 years :)

Out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for other solarpunk or similarly utopian indie fiction?

Als Antwort auf will_a113

I finally started reading Missing Mermaid today. Grabbed me right away, AE. (btw, my solarpunk, cli-fi book The Working is also on smashwords... and elsewhere)
Als Antwort auf will_a113

I’m delighted you enjoyed your visit to New Tollan. I recommend Solarpunk Creatures and Solarpunk Summers anthologies.


Lemmy v0.19.6 Release


#4916


notiz.pulli


1882468

@simon hat mir einen Pullover mit dem notiz.blog Logo gestrickt besticken lassen und jetzt werde ich wohl nie wieder etwas anderes anziehen! ❤️



Als Antwort auf poVoq

“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”

—Buenaventura Durruti, Van Paassen interview (1936)



Required reading for Solarpunks: “Tyranny of Convenience” essay by Tim Wu


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Als Antwort auf HubertManne

Political ads are not designed for targetting unpersuadables. Over the very long term propaganda that over and over blames undocumented people for problems starts to take a toll which could pull someone out of the unpersuadable demographic. But to a great extent they influence pursuadable voters in swing regions.

You say you would not switch to voting for Trump, and yet the sole reason Trump took power in 2016 was precisely due to advertising. Read about Cambridge Analytica and Peter Thiel. If Peter Thiel had not introduced Cambridge Analytica to the Trump campaign and bought Facebook data, Trump would not have taken power in 2016. THAT is how important advertising is. C/A master-minded indentifying the most important pursuadables, did a deep analysis of exactly what issues would be of interest to those individuals, and targeted them surreptitiously.

I strongly recommend you watch the PBS series “Hacking your Mind”. This episode in particular:

pbs.org/video/weapons-of-influ…

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)
Als Antwort auf activistPnk

I tend to like pbs so I will give that a watch when I get the chance but what I get from this last reply of yours is its not spend amount but how its spent. I recall a big thing with obama was utilizing internet at all as it was pretty traditional before then. I do see the effect as my wife gets to much info from youtube and I will hear dei and immigrant stuff from her. Its tough because it takes much longer for me to take a particular thing and find out what the specifics are and what they are and are not saying from the video than it does for her to watch one. I have been going over and over the way things will not be bald face lies but will distort or leave out important truths or such with each thing and despite that I will have to do it again. Im trying to get her to use fact check sites.


Global Donut Days 2024 - Wednesday is online day


Events by initiatives across the world, which build upon Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics (Summary by herself:
)


Writing contest


Hello! I hope this is the right place to post this!
I'm part of a small team launching Tractor Beam, a new fiction publication dedicated to optimistic visions of the future loosely related to soil, farming, agriculture, etc. We're doing an open call for short stories for our first issue. Details here
More details / updates on judging etc, on instagram: [@tractorbeam.earth] (instagram.com/tractorbeam.eart…)
Als Antwort auf Clarity

It's called Tractorbeam Earth because it's a quarterly publication run as a sweepstakes by Tractor Beverages, Inc.

Tractor Beverages is a corporation in Coeur d’Alene, ID that sells canned beverages through Amazon and Walmart, correct?

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)
Als Antwort auf Clarity

(Glances at AO3 stories left un-updated for 2 years. Glances away as if I didn't see that.)


I'm writing a book on how environmentalist themes in The Lord of the Rings are relevant for the modern movement to confront the climate crisis


This summer I read The Lord of the Rings to my eight-year-old and was struck by how much the themes continue to be relevant for the modern environmentalist movement. Ents destroying Isengard (the industrial power) is the classic example, but there's so much more. Mordor as an imperial, extractive power. Hobbits regenerating the land after it has been degraded. Gimli trying to preserve the Glittering Caves of Aglerond. And of course, growing trees symbolizing renewal and prosperity. So, I decided to write all these themes down, and compare them to instances where similar things are happening today.

I just reached a milestone in the writing process and wanted to share a sample my work so far! Please take a look and let me know what you think.



your Bayesian yacht is an outlier adn should not be counted


archive: archive.ph/wRpVA
Als Antwort auf David Gerard

Do not mess with HP, they have the *real* orbital weather control lasers! /s


How often have you heard or read the phrase „we can’t play $UNIT any more because of rule changes“? Too often for my liking.

There is no unit you can’t play in your game of tiny fighting men. It’s your game! You play what you want. The only limiting factor are your opponents.

Sure you might not be able to take some units to an official tournament but that is a different beast. That’s the […]

warmonger.de/you-cant-play-the…

Als Antwort auf SunDancerGE

omg so much this. I started to ignore the german discord server for conquest even though it's often interesting. But the amount of complains about the newest changes to the Nords is so damn annoying.
I wanna play the game. I wanna talk about units without having to constantly hear how bad they are.
Als Antwort auf MyLuLei

jupp. And I feel the more competitive a game is (aka the bigger the tournament scene is) the worse it gets.


Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024


Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)
Als Antwort auf David Gerard

He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheney's wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didn't.
Als Antwort auf Mike Knell

@techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane "Eurabia" conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If you'd taken his word salad and substituted "jews" for "muslims" Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (That's when I added ESR to my list of "people I will not share a platform with".)

He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.




FOSDEM 2025 – Social Web Devroom – Call For Participation


The Social Web Foundation is pleased to announce the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2025, and invite participants to submit proposals for talks for the event. FOSDEM is an exciting free and open source software event in Brussels, Belgium that brings togethe
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)

Matthias Pfefferle hat dies geteilt.



Solarpunks do not use detergent pods


First of all, detergent pods are for dummies who cannot measure the right amount of detergent for a job and those who don’t know that water hardness is a factor. They are for convenience zombies who cannot be bothered to think. So from the very start, pods are not for solarpunks.

Someone told me they had a problem with their dishwasher because undisolved gelatin sacs were gumming up their drain. The linked article goes into clogs. This article (if you can get past the enshitification) says there is research on an environmental impact by pod sacks. So that’s also antithetical to solarpunkness.

So do it right. Fuck pods. They cost more anyway. Buy powdered detergent if you have soft water (or if your dishwasher has a built-in water softener) and use less (to avoid etching). If you have hard water, either use liquid detergent or just use a bigger dose of powder.

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (9 Monate her)
Als Antwort auf activistPnk

GDI, pods seemed really good on the surface: liquid detergent with less water to reduce the amount of carbon used to transport it.

I'm no material scientist but I suspect they probably could have made pods out of materials which are actually biodegradable under normal conditions but chose to use this liquid plastic junk instead to save a buck.

Als Antwort auf the_artic_one

I think liquids are heavier to transport than solids because solid detergent is more concentrated (no water). Liquid detergent (which comes in all viscocities) still has its place: for people with hard water. But apart from that I think solid detergent is the best for the environment.

There are those solid tablets which are like powder pressed together. Sometimes those are in a plastic wrapper that needs to be removed before use (yikes), and sometimes they are in a disolving gelatin like the liquid pods. But I guess the sacks of powder need not be as thick as the liquid ones.

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Als Antwort auf activistPnk

They are also in single use plastic, just like liquid detergent. I used powdered detergent from a cardboard box. Works great! Same with clothes washing machine.

Als Antwort auf Midnight

I know of at least one golf course in Arizona that was only allowed to be built if the grass was only watered with reclaimed water. The reclaimed water plant has become a major money maker as it has been selling its non-drinkable water to farmers in exchange for a smaller amount of drinkable water


Challenge: Commandeer time itself as the maximum Solarpunk


I've been thinking of trying this for a long time, but I'm beyond sick of the idea of standardized time. I want real local time. I want to center my day around solar noon, not some hackjob convince for trains and business gambling systems. That is coordinated time. It can still exist when needed, but among friends and in daily life, I want to reclaim MY day. I exist on Earth and have an unalienable right to maximize MY daylight hours. I want a FOSS app that juggles LOCAL time and coordinated time for me. I'm sick of being subject to time authoritarianism and noon placed at random real times. Noon is what matters. It centers your day and perception of time. Take it back. You have a right to exist exactly how you are right now on Earth without being subjected to the tyrant of dictated time.