@JulianOliver@mastodon.social
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JulianOliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social

Critical Engineering, tech art, techno politics, infosec, resilient infrastructure, communitarian survivalism, environmental defense, planetary futures.

I spend a lot of time helping defenders of human rights and the environment protect themselves with best-practice information and operations security. Alongside, I deploy secure infrastructure so they can safely organise.

Bows, arrows & rainforest conservation when I can.

Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, he/him, herbivore

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

JulianOliver, to random
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Loving that someone climbed the highest peak in this valley (Belmont, Lower Hutt), one of the windiest places in the world, to stencil 'Everything we do is political' on a cartographic trig station (AKA geodetic marker).

View over part of Hutt Valley from the trig.

JulianOliver, to random
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Serbian maestro Nikolas Tesla believed one day we might be able to harvest electricity from the humidity in air - dubbed 'hygroelectricity'.

Seems that researchers at the Univ of Massachusetts managed to do just that, pulling a small but continuous supply from an array of nanowires. 1.5V at 10 milliampere for now, but they plan to put 20k of these arrays into something the size of a washing machine, sufficient to power an typical UK household.

Paper here:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/adma.202300748

JulianOliver,
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Good piece on the hygroelectricity discovery here, detailing how it came to be. Prof Jun Yao, lead author of the study/paper:

“To be frank, it was an accident [...] We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”

Awesome.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power

BigTittyBimbo, to random

This could be us, but you bootlickin

JulianOliver,
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@BigTittyBimbo That's a still from the film Athena, not actual people in France rn.

JulianOliver, to random
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Europe is changing. The hard truth is that the far right have been steadily growing in Europe since the 1980's, and now they are "part of the landscape", says Catherine Fieschi, director of policy at Open Society Foundations Europe, expert on populism, authoritarianism and the far right.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/far-right-on-the-march-europe-growing-taste-for-control-and-order

JulianOliver, to random
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Great read on 'movement narcissm'. While penned in the context of social movements, it is no less endemic to environmental defense groups, ruining and draining them in short order. This I have seen first hand.

It's up with Founder's Syndrome (AKA 'founderitis') so far as ensuring a short life for even the most impassioned causes.

https://new-archives.org/carol-zou-movement-narcissism

JulianOliver, to random
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Own an Intel NUC anywhere near something critical? Time to update your BIOS with this laundry list of fixes. Yikes https://downloadmirror.intel.com/781235/BN_0092_ReleaseNotes.pdf

mathr, to random
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Debian Bookworm host with Debian Etch chroot. Got xterm working (running in chroot displayed on host) using xchroot but glxgears fails with BadValue in GLX X_GLXCreateContext. Tried with ssh X forwarding (had to enable old algorithms on client), same error. glxgears works fine on host,

Next I'll try building with static linking and copying the binaries across to new OS. Unlikely to work as some dependencies are from the distro...

Then I'll try building the old dependencies of the old software (some of which I had to get from the wayback machine) on the new OS. The old program built ok on the old OS but running failed for the same reason as glxgears...

JulianOliver,
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@nebogeo @mathr Haha, glorious to read.

JulianOliver, to random
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DataCenterLight, the Swiss datacenter I host a lot of projects with, is down and so my site and several others I host there. Upstream connectivity issues, apparently.

JulianOliver,
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Up again.

JulianOliver, to random
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Global ecological collapse likely far sooner than previously anticipated, based on new findings modeling planetary-boundary tipping points.

Prof Simon Willcock, co-leader of the study, says “We could realistically be the last generation to see the Amazon.”

The more cautious IPCC, whom does not model for complex self-reinforcing feedbacks, previously put it at the end of the century.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/22/ecological-tipping-points-could-occur-much-sooner-than-expected-study-finds

JulianOliver,
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@pixelpusher220 We can safely say that seen from the current time, with what is presently our best available information, it looks set to become very hard, very soon, for most life on this planet.

JulianOliver,
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@Pepperbike @pixelpusher220 I've little doubt complex life will bounce back following what appears to be Earth's 6th extinction event, just as it has after those before it.

Still, that is little salve for the forecast.

It's my belief all we have is damage minimisation and preparation, at this late stage.

JulianOliver,
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@pixelpusher220 @Pepperbike I think the jury's out on that one. We are good problem solvers, but also excellent problem makers. We are highly resourceful animals, but also highly vulnerable.

Here's a slide from one of my lectures, a quote from a highly celebrated atmospheric scientist, his name on hundreds of papers.

JulianOliver,
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@pixelpusher220 @Pepperbike I would hope so, but I think the jury's out on that one. We are good problem solvers, but also excellent problem makers. We are highly resourceful animals, but also highly vulnerable.

Here's a slide from one of my lectures, a quote from a broadly celebrated atmospheric scientist, his name on hundreds of papers.

It is what happens between now and then, I think most about.

JulianOliver,
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@pixelpusher220 @Pepperbike Negative Emissions Tech is wonderful, but also a serious moral hazard, giving license to pollute. Largest investors right now are the petro-states. None are gigaton capable..

Orca, the world's largest, is being used to sell carbon credits.

Even if we went zero carbon tomorrow, that does not halt the mass extinction crisis, biosphere collapse, whose biggest driver bar none is habitat loss, not warming (albeit warming will become closer to primary in coming decades).

JulianOliver,
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@pixelpusher220 @Pepperbike "my hope is that the remaining ecosystems are resilient enough to cope and rebuild over time." Indeed this is the central motivator in my own volunteer rainforest conservation work.

JulianOliver, to random
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ICYMI, perhaps a symptom of the anthropocene more profound than changing the climate: we humans have pumped so much groundwater, we've shifted Earth's axis

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rampant-groundwater-pumping-has-changed-the-tilt-of-earths-axis/#

JulianOliver, to random
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German right-wing tabloid Bild to sack hundreds in editorial roles, replace them with software.

Chief exec Mathias Döpfner said of the move that AI tools such as ChatGPT could “make independent journalism better than it ever was – or replace it”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/german-tabloid-bild-to-replace-range-of-editorial-jobs-with-ai

JulianOliver,
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@slothrop Agreed.

JulianOliver,
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@xkummerer Haha.

JulianOliver, to random
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Daniel Ellsberg 1931 - 2023. Rest In Power.

JulianOliver, to random
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Aotearoa New Zealand activist Rosemary Penwarden faces up to 10 years in jail for sending a satirical email cancelling an oil industry conference, on counts of making and using a forged document.

“I like to think I was a threat to this industry, but for goodness sake, I’m 52kg, five foot three inches high, and 64 [...] These are the biggest polluting companies in our entire world."

She sent it from a non-personal GMail address, arrested 7 months later

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/15/nz-climate-activist-faces-up-to-10-years-in-prison-over-fake-letter-saying-fossil-fuel-event-cancelled

JulianOliver, to random
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Since the birth of the plastic industry in the 1950's, this petrochem material has touched every corner of our home Planet. It's in our bodies, rain, soil, the air, animals both wild & domesticated. But perhaps the habitats most poisoned are oceanic.

Special filters placed on boats traveling in a race through some of the most remote stretches of ocean collected between 92 and 1884 particles of microplastic in every cubic meter studied.

We have ushered a Plastisphere.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/microplastics-found-in-every-sample-of-water-taken-during-ocean-race

JulianOliver, to random
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Great Guardian expose in honour of executed enviro activists Bruno and Dom. Here they expose how 800M trees in the Amazon, some 1.7m hectares, were destroyed in just 6 years to meet the global demand for grass-fed beef. That's atop soya livestock feed grown on deforested indigenous land, exported to EU & China to feed chickens, pigs, cows & even salmon there.

Few things better for the planet than to reduce your consumption of animals & animal breast milk.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-than-800m-amazon-trees-felled-in-six-years-to-meet-beef-demand

JulianOliver,
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Controversial but true, there are however rare contexts where meat-eating benefits forest biomes (& I say this as someone whom has not eaten it since a teen). Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, invasive species like goats, pigs & deer brought by European settlers are major drivers of rainforest stress. These animals have no natural predators here, & browse on the roots & undercanopies, ending regeneration. Damage is vast. Local subsistence hunters, many indigenous, are a force of forest conservation.

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