Tootfinder

Around 13,000 years ago,
as the world was emerging from the grip of the last ice age,
much of the North Atlantic region plunged back into near-glacial conditions.
Sea ice expanded across the North Atlantic,
reaching as far south as the Shetland Islands.
Glaciers began to regrow in the Scottish Highlands,
while winter temperatures across Europe and North America plummeted.
⭐️Yet off the coast of Atlantic Canada, the ocean did the opposite.
In ou…

The Gulf Stream suddenly moved north during an ancient cold snap – and it’s a warning for our future
New evidence shows a major climate shift ‘within a lifetime’ 13,000 years ago.

Quartet 🎵
四重奏 🎵
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Ilford Pan 400
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Wise

I don't know much about site or server hosting, but I got this message from one of my providers this morning.
My site (just for content aggregation and not publicly viewable) is down for *8* hours.
Couldn't they have handled the transition without this kind of downtime?
"As part of our ongoing commitment to improve reliability and prepare for future enhancements, we will be migrating all New York City customers to our new and upgraded platform in Salt Lake City…

Then the hard labour part - dragged some old railway sleepers across the patio, as I’m going to make a raised bed with those in the near future. NOW, I have got a mug of coffee and can chill at the computer for a while.

A look at Meta Superintelligence Labs' growth in the past year, including a top-tier RL environment and compute ramp that could catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI (SemiAnalysis)
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-future-of-meta-superintelligence…

The Future of Meta Superintelligence: A 1 Year Progress Update
A top tier RL environment startup spawns out of thin air, the most aggressive compute ramp we've ever seen, 2000km+ scale-across, and some advice for Google DeepMind

Grand Staircase-Escalante’s stunning slot canyons and dramatic vistas make it instantly recognizable.
Bears Ears’ red-rock canyons house culturally significant petroglyphs and ancient dwellings that have endured for centuries.
Right now they are facing unprecedented attacks–again.
Donald Trump just took executive action to virtually eliminate both of these iconic Utah national monuments,
slashing their boundaries by more than 90%.
Vital wildlife habitats,

Homepage | The Wilderness Society
Our Mission: United people to protect our wild places. Our Work: Climate Solutions, Landscape Connectivity, Community Led Conservation Each day thousands of acres of wild places are lost to mining, drilling, logging and other development. But we don't have to give it all away. Together, we can save our wildest lands for future generations.

Just finished "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. A fascinating and epic science fiction novel with fascinating ideas about technology and also future societies. As I'm delving into a lot of sci fi looking for social imagination it's a good find in some ways but disappointing in others. The Qeng Ho culture is interesting, but their society is uninspiring; Vinge's rosy view of "trade" is not one I completely share, and their hierarchies and wealth accumulation are less compatible with their freedoms in my imagination than in Vinge's. That said, his perspective on the possibilities of galactic-scale civilization and the idea of the "age of failed dreams" are fascinating, especially right now, and his detailed ideas about programming, AI, automaton, and "Focus" are extremely relevant right now. Ultimately I didn't love some parts of the dénouement, and there's a lot of "great man theory of history" going on, including (only somewhat ameliorated) a focus on men over women. Vinge's damsels in distress have a lot more agency than usual for the role, but with the exception of Victory Sr. and Jr., the damsels are very much in distress, and Victory Sr. gets overshadowed a lot by Underhill.
It definitely helps one expand their imagination of what long-term and large-scale human existence could look like, which is great and no easy feat, and both the technologies that are written in and those written out are extremely convincing. The only thing I didn't find compelling was the transposition of capitalism onto such space and time scales. It's a very standard feature of sci fi from the last few decades, and I'm sure most readers don't question it, but I've become someone who can no longer imagine "capitalism across the stars" without questioning how realistic it is that its self-destructive tendencies could possibly last even a few more centuries, let alone succeed at interstellar travel.
One last extremely fascinating thing: how closely the strengths and weaknesses of Focus track with the strengths and weaknesses of modern generative AI. That, and the way that the "age of failed dreams" idea can help people imagine beyond generative AI in a positive way.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

The Greater Chaco region is a living, ancestral landscape,
replete with invaluable cultural resources and deeply sacred to Indigenous peoples of the Southwest since time immemorial.
However, the region continues to face the fossil fuel industry’s relentless attempts to drill these lands,
and the administration is now moving rapidly to revoke the area's 20-year ban on oil and gas development.
Roughly 90% of nearby public lands are already leased for drilling
—…

Homepage | The Wilderness Society
Our Mission: United people to protect our wild places. Our Work: Climate Solutions, Landscape Connectivity, Community Led Conservation Each day thousands of acres of wild places are lost to mining, drilling, logging and other development. But we don't have to give it all away. Together, we can save our wildest lands for future generations.

Joan Sebastian Guerrero,
a 26-year-old husband and father, reportedly possessing a social security number and the legal right to work in the US,
was fatally shot by federal immigration agents on the street in Maine on Monday.
Guerrero is the fourth person to have been killed by ICE agents this year alone. 
The surge of violence is again igniting anger at Trump's aggressive immigration agenda,
and the apparent lack of accountability for ICE agents.
Ma…

Will the Alps remain Europe's inexhaustible water source ?
The Waterwise project is collecting an unprecedented amount of data from across the Alpine peaks
to better understand the vulnerability of headwater catchments
— the high-altitude streams that feed the continent's major rivers.

The Alps are drying out: EU-funded project assesses the future of Europe's "water tower"
Will the Alps remain Europe's inexhaustible water tower? The Waterwise project is collecting an unprecedented amount of data from across the Alpine peaks to better understand the vulnerability of headwater catchments — the high-altitude streams that feed the continent's major rivers. #SmartRegions