JulianOliver

JulianOliver, 6 months ago to random

Incredible landscape. Hotels and high rises in the seaside resort city of Acapulco, Mexico, after Hurricane Otis hit.

Photo: AFP/ Rodrigo Oropeza

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

Last night I opened up YT in a private window, & clicked on an unrelated video to that of the one I had just watched. It was a video on arctic ice melts that turned out to be 100% denialist.

One click & there I was in endless fetid scroll of Jordan Peterson, climate change denial, 'what is woke' explainers, 'lol snowflakes' shorts, Trump propaganda, knife fights, & misogynistic, racist garbage.

Don't tell me Big Tech aren't culpable for the hate out there. They're farming it, on a vast scale.

JulianOliver, 7 months ago to random

Very useful list, The Eight Stages of White Settler-Colonial Denial.

This very process is playing out with precision to this day in countless colonised lands, as seen recently with the Indigenous Referendum in Australia, in right wing and center-right political rhetoric in LATAM countries, North America, and sadly also here in Aotearoa New Zealand

JulianOliver, 2 months ago to random

No need to paraphrase. First paragraph says it all:

"Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/07/ai-climate-change-energy-disinformation-report

JulianOliver, 8 months ago to random

Calling all off-gridders, frontline gardeners, fastidious foragers, community-facing survivalists, radio geeks, degrowthers, organisation theorists, seed bankers, disaster researchers and dumpster-diving technologists!

We're writing a wiki for uncertain times, using the Fedi as a knowledge-harvester. Sign up to Collapsible.Systems and help us do it!

https://collapsible.systems/about

JulianOliver, 9 months ago to random

Excellent short article by an ecologist on how the biophysical demands we have placed on this planet make 'degrowth' inevitable, whether we like it or not.

"Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same "adjustments" as other species."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/495938/critics-of-degrowth-economics-say-it-s-unworkable-but-from-an-ecologist-s-perspective-it-s-inevitable

JulianOliver, 6 months ago to debian

Finally putting my x230 to rest, the last sudo poweroff. Hardware is failing beyond the point that makes continuing to repair it worthwhile.

On this laptop I deployed nearly 60 servers (most for at risk groups), 12 tech art projects (solo & collab, some toured worldwide), & gave many lectures & workshops.

If there was ever a loyal and electric steed, it was this x230. It ran #Debian & was good.

I bought it in 2015, for EUR145 on the German eBay, 2nd hand.

#permacomputing #righttorepair

Photo of my x230 Thinkpad, sitting on a wooden decking. Plants growing up through the cracks.

JulianOliver, 11 months ago to random

It turns out that the Sixth Mass Extinction event is not only well underway, but happening at a scale and pace far worse than previously thought.

New research has found that "48% of [all] species have declining populations and just 3% have rising populations. They also found evidence showing that 33% of species currently classified as nonthreatened on the IUCN Red List are actually spiraling toward extinction."

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-anthropocene-sixth-mass-extinction-event.html

JulianOliver, 1 year ago to random

Hitachi HDD: Z7K320-250 / 250GB / SATA 3.0Gb/s.
Data erasure method: 50lb Longbow, two arrows at 15 yards.

image/jpeg

JulianOliver, 10 months ago to random

The widely told hero story that Britain innovated the technique to make wrought iron from scrap, propelling it in the Industrial Revolution as a powerhouse, turns out to be false.

Named after the British entrepreneur that capitalised upon it, the 'Cort Process' to make wrought iron was in fact stolen from 76 black metallurgists near Iron Bay, Jamaica. Cort patented it in the 1780's, claimed to be inventor, & forcibly shut down the Jamaican foundry.

New research:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2023.2220991

JulianOliver, 5 months ago to random

UN says 3C this century on our current course. Little kids alive today will be in their 30's in 2050, & will already witness and/or suffer coastal cities submerging, drought, hunger, water wars, displacement, hurricanes, novel pathogens & infrastructure collapse.

Yet the #1 meeting of minds to address this, COP28, has an oil baron as its president & non-binding agreements twisted & watered down by over 2400 oil/gas industry lobbyists, all given more access than journalists.

It's not working.

JulianOliver, 3 months ago to random

Intense and very beautiful dawn conservation mission today, checking out bush health in a rarely visited part of the Remutaka ranges. Tracing a knife-edge ridgeline through some regenerating rainforest, we were on the lookout for invasive species that might stunt its growth.

On the climb in, our redlight headlamps lit up the young canopy,an armada of clouds setting sail in the distance. #notai

Photo of a mountain forest landscape at dawn, foliage lit up in the red from our headlamps. Above a distant ridgeline long cigar-shaped clouds are seen, as though a fleet of ships on a voyage.

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to infosec

Google fesses up to spying on people's browsing habits in Chrome's not-so-Incognito mode, promising to destroy billions of records tracking U.S. citizens. Sadly it was not out of the goodness of their electric hearts - it took a formidable class action lawsuit (that they'd probably already prepared for):

https://apnews.com/article/google-chrome-privacy-lawsuit-settlement-203cc5063f1a1d4013de1900d9376814 #infosec #privacy

JulianOliver, 4 months ago to random

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed [...] Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

• James Hansen, former Nasa scientist now at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/world-will-look-back-at-2023-as-year-humanity-exposed-its-inability-to-tackle-climate-crisis

JulianOliver, 11 months ago to random

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, 9 months ago to random

Huge. Was going to write a summary but the first paragraph does it just fine.

"Ecuadorians have voted in a historic referendum to halt the development of all new oilwells in the Yasuní national park in the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/21/ecuador-votes-to-halt-oil-drilling-in-amazonian-biodiversity-hotspot

JulianOliver, 9 months ago to random

The IPCC said the Gulf Stream System wouldn't collapse this century. New analysis suggests it could occur as early as 2025, if not in the coming decades, on our current trajectory. Shutdown of the Atlantic circulation system (Amoc) is one of the primary planetary boundaries which scientists agree we must never cross "At all costs".

“This would be a very, very large change. The Amoc has not been shut off for 12,000 years.” - Prof Ditlevsen, University of Copenhagen

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests

JulianOliver, 2 months ago to random

Antarctic research expedition, comprised of Aotearoa New Zealand and Italian scientists, finds sea ice melting at rate far faster than expected.

"The changes to the sea-ice indicate that in the coming decades coastal cities will need to be reconfigured because of sea level rise." - Dr. Craig Stevens, leader of NZ research team.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/510696/signs-found-of-worryingly-fast-antarctic-ice-melt-new-zealand-expedition

JulianOliver, 10 months ago to random

Indeed Mastodon does not have to "win". It has already succeeded in becoming home for vast numbers of us that want to build and share without the pretense of exploitation, and for whom the principles of free and open software, community-ownership and resilience are important.

Let the BigTech continents go to war and cannibalise each other. Let those that want to participate in that do so. Our Fediverse archipelago is wild, free and has no part in that war. It will continue to thrive regardless.

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to opsec

Test case: You get a voice msg from a friend in the middle of the night. They're in a local park and they need your help right now.

Soon, we will not know whether to act.

Time to work on 'code words' with family and friends, to help filter people from their simulations #opsec

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/31/openai-deems-its-voice-cloning-tool-too-risky-for-general-release

JulianOliver, 11 months ago to random

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, 6 months ago to random

A tyranny of so many map projections is that they distort area in favour of preserving shape and distance, the Mercator Projection being perhaps the most well known. Such distortion can visually inflate some regions, a power of its own.

And so I have been especially enjoying playing with this map tool by Josh Horowitz that maintains area/scale across two views as you zoom and pan:

https://joshuahhh.com/projects/same-scale/#3.73/55.96/-6.27/-40.60/173.20/Map

Here is my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand, compared to both Japan & the UK.

Side by side size comparison of the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand using the map.

JulianOliver, 5 months ago to random

Dr Bill Hare, the climate scientist and chief executive of Climate Analytics, who has been to 27 Cops in person, says of the draft text at COP28:

"Iwould say it’s giving every fossil fuel exporter on the planet everything they need to expand fossil fuel production. They might not say it, they might have crocodile tears, but I think any country involved in exporting coal, oil or gas would be privately very happy.”

(Source: The Guardian)