Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social), page 2

…“Only quartz can withstand those high temperatures and only quartz specifically mined at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, is pure enough to be used as a crucible for the silicon.

Meanwhile, the other use for exceptionally pure silicon is in producing photovoltaic solar panels. The extraordinary expansion of solar energy in the last few years depended *critically* on the supply of high quality quartz to the solar industry…

…we can’t address climate breakdown because we have the wrong incentives.

Caring more about something we’ve made up (money) than what we’re made of will go down in history as the biggest collective mind fk in history.

In parallel to antibiotics that once worked becoming redundant (also in the news this morning), the worth of the vast pools of capital ‘looking for a return’ will evaporate https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112042715978488637

#climateDiary

I heard Alok Sharma on the radio this morning and his rhetoric gave rise to this linked observation https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113151427444744509

“One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question:

‘How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?’

There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”

https://mastodon.social/@cferdinandi/113119624244980479

It would be good if articles like this occasionally acknowledged *why* countries like the US and the UK are locked into dishonesty https://mondoweiss.net/2024/09/palestine-defines-us/

The lifestyles we choose every day *require* obscene amounts of energy that don’t stand up without exploitation and deals with psychopaths

“France’s constitution, bizarrely, allows its president to appoint any prime minister that he can get past MPs – but this is the first time in the history of France’s ‘Fifth Republic’ that a French president has refused to appoint a PM from the biggest parliamentary bloc. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s ‘France Unbowed’, which leads the ‘New Popular Front’ left bloc, has launched impeachment proceedings against Macron.”
https://mas.to/@therightarticle/113097376474154652

Hello centrists.

Your sitting in the middle for the sake of sitting in the ‘middle’ (that used to be right wing), while sociopaths steal our future is a big part of why the present is shit.

Maybe stretch your legs?

I hope Macron is severely punished for this. Prick.

So France is now a country of authoritarian centrists who get to choose whoever tf they like as PM?

Choosing someone from the party that got less than a quarter of the party that came first!

😒 Pretty good indicator that centrism is even more vacuous and scornful of democracy than it already was

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqjlxvg2gj7o

…politicians: gotta give the AI hawkers their capital runway though so we can waft the overvaluation bubble pop down the road until after the next election

…billions of dollars and years of effort spent on tools that are incapable of being safe but are put into the public domain to try and change them…

from being unsafe in unpredictable ways to… being unsafe in unpredictable ways.

#AI

LLMs don’t understand the text they generate. Which is how this happens:

“Today, as a test, I entered a criminal judge I knew into Copilot, with the name and place of residence in Tübingen: The judge was promptly named as the perpetrator of a judgment he had made himself a few weeks earlier against a psychotherapist who had been convicted of sexual abuse”
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/26/microsoft_bing_copilot_ai_halluciation/

Not sure Tim Berners-Lee’s vision was to have 148 requests transfer 5.3 MB of assets to deliver 15 KB of text

#pollution

@epistatacadam @ChrisMayLA6

There is so much more that should be done https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112877569716857593

People couldn’t understand why carbon emissions kept going up…

#climateDiary

Louise Lancaster:
4 years imprisonment for helping to cause traffic delays on the M25 by renting a house and buying climbing equipment.

James Nelson:
2 months imprisonment for smashing up 2 police vehicles and being “involved in the appalling and shameful violent disorder that impacted not just the national community, but in particular the Bolton community”

https://mastodon.online/@Geri/112919419079445049

Me: playing the ridiculous game of adding a hashtag to my post in the hunt for dopamine hits.

Because none of this is an *actual* conversation, but here I am

@EUCommission there are no net benefits to be had from accelerating

- energy consumption
- surveillance
- inequality
- feudal power
- eugenic thinking
- negligence
- mistrust

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111068171665440904

@aral bloody ell

One of the things you can still do on Twitter is to paste a URL into search and get back all the tweets that reference it, which is pretty cool.

I’d like Mastodon to embrace that: make the hrefs in toots part of search scope 🙏

#mastodonsearch