Spines: a VC-funded vanity publisher with added AI
Spines: a VC-funded vanity publisher with added AI
Spines Publishing plans to “disrupt” the book industry by releasing 8,000 titles in 2025 — with AI! Spines was founded as BooxAI in 2021, changing its name earlier this year. Spines claims 273 publ…Pivot to AI
Sheet mulching
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/22406409
Picture up top from yours truly, lmao
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Glovo fined five million euros by the Italian DPA for tracking rider's position outside of work and using profiling to assign shifts
Press Release: Reversing.Works Investigation Exposes Glovo’s Data Privacy Violations, Marking a Milestone for Worker Rights and Technology Accountability
A five million euros fine and corrective measures imposed by the Data Protection Authority todayReversing.Works
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.
We need solarpunk now more than ever
When our present seems increasingly cyberpunk we must show a better future is possibleSolarPunk Stories
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Fighting For Liberation in the Face of Fascism
They tried to bury us, but little did they know - we were seeds.
Plans for "The Mindful City" in Bhutan
Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis
With an economy hit hard by COVID, many Bhutanese have left for jobs abroad. Bhutan's government, which for years has prioritized Gross National Happiness, is now working to lure people back.Lesley Stahl (CBS News)
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.
Minutes from 7 November 2024 WG Meeting
2024-11 | ForumWG November Meeting
Julian update: re: CG report draft and repo usage Darius update re: Mastodon treatment of non-notes Hometown has a ‘good enough’ version of showing full articles Many edge cases, done 5 years ago.Google Docs
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!)
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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.
Bundespolizei lässt Neonazis ungestört reisen und angreifen
Am Montag, den 15. April, reiste eine Gruppe von etwa 30 Neonazis von Dresden nach Bautzen. Ziel der Gruppe war ein Demokratiefest, das gestört werden sollte, und eine rechten Montagsdemonstration, so Ankündigungen auf SocialMedia-Kanälen.Redaktion (Alternative Dresden News)
Collective Survival, Adaptation and Direct Action
Collective Survival, Adaptation and Direct Action
Defiance must be woven into the fabric of our daily lives, rather than simply proclaimed at marches or on social media.Kelly Hayes (Organizing My Thoughts)
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Fighting For Liberation
Fighting For Liberation in the Face of Fascism
They tried to bury us, but little did they know - we were seeds.HydroponicTrash (Sunshine and Seedlings: A Newsletter by HydroponicTrash)
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Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
How to Restore Community Economies: Reestablishing the Right to Associate
How to Restore Community Economies: Reestablishing the Right to Associate - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Growing US corporate economic control has impeded people’s capacity to self-organize. The time to rebuild community-scale economic institutions is now.Aine Creedon (Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly)
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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
UK Home Office speeds up visa and refugee processing with Copilot AI reject-a-bot
UK Home Office speeds up visa and refugee processing with Copilot AI reject-a-bot
Under years of pressure from the right-wing press, the previous and current UK governments have required the Home Office to reduce immigration numbers by any means possible — whether it makes sense…Pivot to AI
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
"Solarpunk USA" PeerTube videos
Solarpunk USA
A hopefully nationwide movement to organize ourselves into creating networks of communities to act as sort of a union for the planet in the age of climate fear and doomerism Current logo courtesy o...PeerTube
Draft Guidance for Long-form Text
Long-form text on the Fediverse
The Fediverse’s core strength is short, paragraph-length status updates, observations and comments. But more and more newsletter, blogging, and publishing platforms are implementing ActivityP…Social Web Foundation
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`!?!
Imrove "FEP-b2b8: Long-form Text" support by pfefferle · Pull Request #982 · Automattic/wordpress-activitypub
See: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/b2b8/fep-b2b8.md https://socialwebfoundation.org/2024/11/07/draft-guidance-for-long-form-text/GitHub
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.
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.
Sustainable Plastic Solutions becomes world leader in farm waste recycling
Before food even gets to the grocer, tonnes of plastic have been used to produce it on the farm. Now, Victorian farmers have built a recycling plant to tackle the issue — and it all started in the local pub.ABC News
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?
Lemmy v0.19.6 Release
Comparing 0.19.5...0.19.6 · LemmyNet/lemmy
🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse. Contribute to LemmyNet/lemmy development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
notiz.pulli
@simon hat mir einen Pullover mit dem notiz.blog Logo gestrickt besticken lassen und jetzt werde ich wohl nie wieder etwas anderes anziehen! ❤️
Still Don't Panic: An Election Response
Still Don't Panic: An Election Response
It Could Happen Here · EpisodeStill Don't Panic: An Election Response (Spotify)
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The Sky is Falling; We've Got This
The Sky is Falling; We've Got This
or: yes it's bad, no we need not despairMargaret Killjoy (Birds Before the Storm)
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“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)
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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…
Hacking Your Mind | Weapons of Influence | Episode 102 | PBS
Marketers and politicians hack into your autopilot system — learn how to fight back.PBS.org
Global Donut Days 2024 - Wednesday is online day
)
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
Writing contest
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…)
Tractor Beam | Bringing SciFi Down to Earth
Radical visions rooted in soil coming early 2025tractorbeam.earth
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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?
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.
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your Bayesian yacht is an outlier adn should not be counted
What Sank the Bayesian Superyacht in Italy?
A Times investigation has found that an unusually tall mast, and the design changes it required, made a superyacht owned by a British tech mogul vulnerable to capsizing.Jeffrey Gettleman (The New York Times)
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 […]
I wanna play the game. I wanna talk about units without having to constantly hear how bad they are.
@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
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.
Do Dishwasher Detergent Pods Really Clog Drains? Here’s The Truth!
Dishwashers have become an indispensable part of modern households, making the task of cleaning dishes a breeze. However, the convenience of dishwasher detergent pods has raised concerns among consumeAnna (HomeScale)
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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.
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.
The U.S. Southwest Offers Blueprints for the Future of Wastewater Reuse
The U.S. Southwest Offers Blueprints for the Future of Wastewater Reuse
No country is immune from water scarcity issues—not even wealthy countries like the United States. Population growth and climate change are stretchingFreddie Clayton (ZNetwork)
self
Als Antwort auf David Gerard • • •holy shit. I learned a new term today (resentment-based marketing) and I’m fascinated by how this could possibly work
Angus McIntyre
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.