Tootfinder

"The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells
is a stark, scientifically grounded "travelogue of the near future"
detailing the catastrophic, cascading effects of climate change beyond just rising seas and temperatures,
including widespread famine, refugee crises, disease, and extreme weather,
while also exploring how these changes will transform politics, culture, and technology,
serving as an urgent call for immediate…

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Book — Non-fiction. By David Wallace-Wells. 2019. 320 pages. This book raises the alarm over the Earth's climate crisis and demands radical action to save human civilization as we know it.

Civilization or whatever is left of it has been saved.
I won't spend a minute on flakes today.
Or in any minute of the foreseeable future.

The end of civilization is upon us.
I will master the skill of using flakes on NixOS today.
#nixos

"suggesting that the enigmatic Shu civilization engaged in 'broad exchanges with many areas'" Did they wanna be enigmatic to the future

"Due to [nuclear's] cost and complexity, it will not provide cheap or low-emission electricity in timeframe or scale that matters as climate change continues to broil an indifferent civilization."
The New Nuclear Fever, Debunked - resilience
https://www.resilience.org/stori…

The New Nuclear Fever, Debunked
An honest and imperfect response to the climate crisis would require a political, behavioural, economic and moral transition that would systematically reduce our energy and material consumption at an unprecedented pace. But that’s not an action any modern politician seems to be able to contemplate, let alone discuss.

In this final talk of the "Civilization" course, #Jiang #Xueqin explains the rise and fall of the American empire.
Thesis:
At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, America proposed that the dollar should be the world's reserve currency.
In return for this "exorbitant privilege," Am…

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

Just beam me back there again... Right now, exactly two weeks ago. Alone in the valley, on my way back to civilization. Alpenglow forming at the peaks opposite...😍
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography

Varje stort spelsläpp ser vi samma sak. Spelet släpps. Sedan sparkas utvecklare. Föreslår att spelutvecklare börjar se maskning som sin centrala kampform. Varje försenat spel är några fler månadslöner till arbetarna.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/2k-

2K confirms layoffs at Civilization developer Firaxis
2K says the decision will "restructure and optimize" its teams within Firaxis. Sources say dozens could be impacted.

Knap hoor, Elon heeft het voor elkaar gekregen om een AI om te bouwen tot een persoonlijke propagandamachine.
https://gizmodo.com/grok-says-elon-musk-is-smarter-than-einstein-and-more-fit-than-lebron-james-2000688999

Grok Says Elon Musk Is Smarter Than Einstein and More Fit Than LeBron James
While Musk wants you to trust Grok to organize all of human civilization's knowledge, the bot's fealty to Dear Leader is out of control.

Most see civilization, hence inequality, as a tragic necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial equivalent to ‘primitive communism’, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the basic structure of the story.
There is a fundamental problem with this narrative.
It isn’t true.
https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

taken at the FDR Memorial in DC, a few days ago. #nokings

Feeling very inadequate after watching 7Asian craft an entire floating village by himself. Watch 1 year of amazing engineering & hard work in just 1hr.
▶️ He Left Civilization to Build a Floating Self-Sustaining Island | by 7Asian
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AJSXVUd819

From Earthbound to Stars: Analyzing Humanity's Path to a Type II Civilization
Jonathan H. Jiang, Prithwis Das
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03249 https://…

From Earthbound to Stars: Analyzing Humanity's Path to a Type II Civilization
Humanity is at a critical juncture, marked by rapid technological advances and the pursuit of higher civilization stages on the Kardashev scale. This study explores humanity's potential progression toward Type I and Type II civilizations, defined by planetary and stellar-scale energy utilization. Building on Kardashev's framework, we propose refinements that integrate energy consumption, information processing, construction mass, and population dynamics. Using machine learning, we analyze globa…

I’m reading Civilization Before Greece and Rome, by H. W. F. Saggs. Published in ‘89 so some interpretations are outdated, but a section on the emergence and rise of the god king in Mesopotamia for instance shows how the evangelical butt kissing of 🍊💩 and their efforts to sanctify him have been a part of human behavior for the past 5KY that we have written records of, and likely for a long while before that. Our constitution tries to buck the trend, but the odds for success look slim.

Remember back when civilization meant something positive? Like "these people figured out that shitting into your drinking water supply is not the best idea, and eventually managed to reduce child mortality rates and extend lifespans"?
When did it start meaning "we choose kids wanking over who can shit into the drinking water supply the most to lead us"? And we don't care because drinking water was never good anyway, you should just buy the bottled stuff.
#AntiCapitalism

This is my flag.
It means unity, freedom, peace, democracy, equality, civilization, diversity, rule of law, science, beauty and strength.
There is nothing more important to fight for our values!
If you don’t like it, pack your bags and leave!
Long live Europe!

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@dougcoulson/115693460558643639
Such a circle jerk.
"Faculty who teach a foundational education in Americanism and Western Civilization course would be eligible for tenure, including submitting expedited applications,…

Redshifted civilizations, galactic empires, and the Fermi paradox
Chris Reiss, Justin C. Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00377 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0…

Redshifted civilizations, galactic empires, and the Fermi paradox
Given the vast distances between stars in the Milky way and the long timescales required for interstellar travel, we consider how a civilization might overcome the constraints arising from finite lifespans and the speed of light without invoking exotic or novel physics. We consider several scenarios in which a civilization can migrate to a time-dilated frame within the scope of classical general relativity and without incurring a biologically intolerable level of acceleration. Remarkably, the p…

A proud achievement of my half-century IT career happened in 1996 consulting to the #UNDP toward the first published edition of the Humanity Development Library.
It seemed easy enough: "It can be fairly estimated that 1/3, or about 20 million pages of UN, and as much University and NGO material are very useful. Those 20 million pages useful UN publications probably contain about 50% of solutions for major World problems. This information must be released in digital format for non-profit redistribution in all countries."
also portable and accessible to all platforms, everywhere.
Happily, not only did the project live on, but thanks to @… our once-intractable problem of global delivery is now globally solved!
So, whether or not this is timely, I don't know, but should you need to suddenly rebuild some semblance of civilization from scratch…
Humanity Development Library 2.0 CD-ROM 1998 : #HumanityLibrariesProject : #InternetArchive
https://archive.org/details/humanity-development-library-2.0

“The Belem deal launches a voluntary initiative to speed up climate action to help nations meet their existing pledges to reduce emissions, and calls for rich nations to at least triple the amount of money they provide to help developing countries adapt to a warming world by 2035.”
This is suicide. We can’t adapt forever. Our civilization is based on 10,000 years of relatively stable climate. That climate is now changing in ways we can only guess at.
Yes we will have to adapt to what we have already done… but continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere means we will continue to adapt to worse and worse and worse conditions until we can’t adapt anymore. No amount of money changes that.
When you can’t adapt… you die.
Canada and every provincial government is part of the problem. They are killing us now and killing our future.
#extinction #climate #climatedisaster #climateadaptation #endfossilfuels
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/cop30-talks-grind-into-overtime-eu-objects-proposed-deal-2025-11-22/

Archaeologists in Peru have found new evidence showing how the
oldest known civilization in the Americas adapted and survived a climate catastrophe without resorting to violence.
A team led by the renowned Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady, 78,
concluded that about 4,200 years ago, severe drought forced the population to leave the ancient city of Caral, and resettle nearby.
In the new settlements, they left intriguing friezes depicting victims of a famine with message…

Back in 1991 or so, during renovations, they took down a wall in the Engineering Building and discovered a rack of Sun servers happily doing their job, apparently so well, at some point they were walled up with drywall!
I do remember uptimes in the hundreds, even thousands of days, but it's fuzzy. Lately having more than a month without kernel upgrades seems rare, and browsers rarely last a month.
If all the sysadmins in the world took their lunch hour at the same time, would civilization survive?

Read "Revelation Space" by Alastair Reynolds, a story about some future space people investigating the demise of an extinct civilization.
Some of the people are software uploads or implants in other people's brains, or infectious biological agents and things.
The story is galactic in scale across time and space with good world building, a good tale weaving of elements together.
I liked the scene where the woman falling to her death in a lift-shaft remembered she was on a space-ship which only had gravity coz of engine thrust, so saved herself turning the engines off with a wrist controller.
Trouble is I came to it infrequently with long gaps and so struggled to keep track of what's going on quite a bit. Lots of different elements to keep track of.
My fault, should try and concentrate harder and remember things.
#reading #books #novel #alastairReynolds #revelationSpace