Notices by Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot), page 4

Well, trust me to put a mortice right through not one but two big knots. However, today's joints are much better than Monday's!

This is the first end frame of the new workshop sort of done. I'm thinking about whether to add diagonal braces. I really should, the would make the building a lot stronger.

It's widely reported that #China has been building out huge amounts of #solar photovoltaic generation, and of course that is a big contributor to slowing #ClimateChange. But what I discovered to my surprise this week is that China is also #Reforesting faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, which is an equally important contributor, and also contributes positively to the #Oxygen cycle.

https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

@yogthos

"However, by 2015, support for independence stood at 52% among those on the left, compared with just 24% among those on the right – a difference of 28 points... In our most recent survey in 2024, those on the left were 34 points more likely than those on the right to say that Scotland should become an independent country"

#ScottishIndependence
#ScotPol

And this is why the #SNP should stop chasing right wing votes!

https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/scottish-social-attitudes-25-years-devolution-scotland

@LillyHerself The Scottish Government has always had the power to reform local government taxation, in any way it liked; but hasn't done so. We could have a #WealthTax; we don't. We could have more progressive #PropertyTax; we don't. They would have to have been local taxes, but we could have them.

We've done shockingly little on #LandReform. We're lagging way behind our own goals on decarbonisation. We have not defended #TransRights against the recent UK assault.

Need I go on?

@hellomiakoda unfortunately, having fecal material (specifically of other people, especially close relatives) in your food is pretty much the only way to develop and sustain a healthy gut biome.

Over-cleanliness is the root of a lot of disease (but under-cleanliness is the root of a lot of other disease, so the balance isn't easy).

It's not that our politicians don't know what's needed to slow #ClimateChange. It's that they don't care.

Their two priorities are

1. winning the next election, under the UK's absurdly dysfunctional, archaic and undemocratic system;

2. pleasing the big donors, who include the #FossilFuel industry, the car industry, and the armaments industry.

They do not care what happens ten years ahead: five is as far as they can see.

#ClimateEmergency
#Corruption

https://theconversation.com/we-surveyed-british-mps-most-dont-know-how-urgent-climate-action-is-266703

@aral We live in a world in which a person who says "I will always be a friend of [a state actively committing #Genocide]" is not only not arrested, not only not expelled from Parliament and from her political party, but is allowed to hold the second highest political office in a country which considers itself 'civilised'.

#GazaGenocide

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25510910.rachel-reeves-says-will-always-friend-israel/

"the #AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector...

when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone" — @pluralistic

#LLMs

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

@alexshendi @amszmidt @neptune22222 that, sir, is a dirty, low blow.

@amszmidt I must be doing it wrong, then.

@thibaultmol As an #ActuallyAutistic person, crowded noisy places, like rock concerts, festivals, sports arenas, city centres, aren't accessible to me. But you can't change these places to make them accessible to me without taking away the things which make them useful and interesting to a lot of other people.

There are accessibility things which you can do easily at no significant cost to anyone, like wheelchair ramps and #AltText and hearing loops and so on, but there are some you just can't.

"Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars (also a big number). Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the proper amount of resources they need. If you want to talk about possible risks to your supply chain, a single maintainer that’s grossly underpaid and overworked. That’s the risk. The country they are from is irrelevant."

#OpenSource

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/

I don't often quote Counterfire, but:

"Britain has many options for acting, such as:

* Supporting and enforcing the International Court of Justice rulings against Netanyahu and other Israeli ministers.
* Expelling Israeli diplomats.
* Inviting Israeli opposition leaders to meet with Britain and other countries to draw up a peace proposal.
...
* Calling a summit with EU member states to impose sanctions on Israel"

#GazaGenocide
#Complicity

https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-reality-of-israeli-genocide-finally-hits-british-politicians/

We're continuing with rendering the outside of the #roundhouse walls; the new render is sheltered by damp Hessian curtains to protect it from direct sun, to prevent it drying before the lime is fully cured. This is all hard physical work and we've at least six days more of it, but it's going well.

@catgirlQueer @vashti As I myself wrote, years ago,

"At nanosecond resolution (if I've done my arithmetic right), 128 bits will represent a span of 1 x 10²² years, or much longer than from the big bang to the estimated date of fuel exhaustion of all stars. So I think I'll arbitrarily set an epoch 14Bn years before the UNIX epoch and go with that. The time will be unsigned - there is no time before the big bang."

So, yes, if you're content with nanosecond resolution...

https://github.com/simon-brooke/post-scarcity/wiki/cons-space#time

@vashti and this is why we shouldn't store numbers in fixed width fields, or compute using 32 or 64 or 128 bit or any other fixed size integers.

Bignum arithmetic has been a solved problem in computing since Maclisp in the 1960s.

#Lisp

HM Govt is flushing another **fourteen billion pounds** down the toilet that is Sizewell C, a plant which will certainly never generate a kilowatt hour of unsubsidised electricity, probably never generate a kilowatt hour of needed electricity, and certainly cost our descendants far more to decommission than it costs us to build.

At the same time as stealing money from tidal and wave installations we urgently need.

#ClimateEmergency
#NuclearEnergy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gr3nd5zy6o

@ntnsndr you're right about cathedrals, of course. But bazaars?

@quixoticgeek see, this is one of the things I know I get wrong. I've been doing 'ps aux' for decades, from when I used BSD, which is more than thirty years ago. I know I should read the GNU ps man page and work out what options I really need... But 'ps aux' is good enough, and I have (increasingly) limited brain space for new knowledge.

Humbaba was born on May 19, 2022, and was killed yesterday. Why did I choose to kill him? I wanted an animal to go in the freezer -- I eat about one animal a year -- I didn't want him for breeding, and he'd managed to rip out both his ear tags. So although he wasn't in any way a troublesome animal, he drew the short straw.

He was shot by a local vet who is licensed to shoot animals in the field, using a 9.2mm rifle.