Hi! I’m Fábio. 👋🏻
I grew up on the island of Madeira and now live in rural Bavaria with my family.
I run a vet practice with my wife, take photos, try to ride bikes and read books. Very much an introvert.
My photo diary lives at https://fabioteixeira.eu.
Looking forward to getting to know you. 🧡
Periodic reminder that the Amish use plenty of modern tech (vaccines and fridges for insulin are great examples).
They merely reject modern tech when they perceive it divides their community.
They aren’t *afraid* of technology, they resent technology that *isolates* people.
I'm not saying we should all be Amish, or that Amish communities are perfect. But we could all stand to learn from this specific aspect of their culture.
That brushes up against something I've talked about before. Humans have messy language because that's actually the more competent tool for navigating a messy world, the ambiguity is fit-for-purpose. Machines operate in a much stricter logical paradigm where nothing is ambiguous, because that's what you need for reliably stacking abstractions. Programming is the work of translating between these languages which do not have the same raw concepts available to them - a translation that can never be perfect because neither side is perfectly expressible in the other, so you need human judgment about what makes for the best translation, like keeping the heart of a poem intact while picking words that rhyme in the target language.
And, in that thread, I talked about how LLMs suck by delegating this exact part to a machine which cannot be "aligned" in the way that a human programmer can. But a human doesn't automatically have that alignment either. It's a skill. It's an ethos. It's a responsibility.
„In der Volkswirtschaftslehre hat eine intellektuelle Verengung stattgefunden, die es so in keiner anderen Sozialwissenschaft gibt: Zulässig ist nur noch ein Paradigma, das Märkte idealisiert. Das sehen wir bei Aussagen wie jener von Larry Summers (demokratischer Ex-US-Finanzminister, Anm.), ein Mietendeckel sei so schlimm, wie eine Atombombe auf eine Stadt abzuwerfen. Wenn ich mir Wien anschaue, sieht es nicht so aus, als hätte hier jemand eine Nuklearwaffe gezündet.“ https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000344518/oekonomin-weber-wir-liefern-die-bevoelkerung-den-marktkraeften-aus-so-wird-die-demokratie-hohl
“Deciding whether someone can or cannot seek refuge in the UK is one of the most serious and life-changing decisions that the state can make about an individual.
But the Home Office continues to test AI on people seeking asylum in the UK without even telling them."
🗣️ ORG's @sarahalsherif
Read about our recent research in the use of AI in the UK asylum process ⤵️
🖼La desafección política es un privilegio, por javitxuela para El Salto.
I took the dogs down to the beach this morning. We saw that the golf course workers and their various diggers have now fenced off almost all the dunes and were busily digging up the beach. I guess they are poldering to protect the land value of the golf course. It was sad; the dogs love to play up and down the dunes. I'm surprised it's legal, but Aberdeen is controlled by oil and infamously dodgy politics.
When we talk about the "environmental crisis", we usually talk about three prongs - global overheating, extinction, and pollution. If we're trying to understand how this happens, it helps to add social crises as well: inequality and authoritarianism.
All that often gets reduced to climate change as a kind of shorthand. One unfortunate side effect of this is that, because planetary heating actually hurts people relatively slowly, there is a sense that there is somehow time and that solutions should be directed towards sea level rise or heat.
Pollution, on the scale that we now see it, already poisons huge segments of the human population (especially in the majority world, Indigenous lands, and war zones) and may sterilise us and many other species within a few decades (PFAs, etc.).. Extinction will cause a collapse of global food systems and starvation, especially insect extinctions, which are closely liked to pollution through uncontrolled deliberate use of toxins and pharmaceuticals (e.g., diclofenac or neonicotinoids). Syngenta, Monsanto, Cargill, and Bayer are right up there with Shell, Aramco, and Exxon.
It's not about sea level rise. By the time the waves reach us, we'll be gone.
Looking for speakers!
A global group of universities and research centres, coordinated by Fondazione Comunità Messina and our own Sci-Fi Economics Lab, are organizing four global webinars as a way to keep our collective fingers on the pulse of the great transformations we are living through. Each webinar focuses on a large-scale systemic shift.
https://scifieconomicslab.net/one-planet-one-humanity/
THREAD 1/n
"A straight line connects civilization-devouring monsters and the real history of European colonizers who left death and destruction in their wake.
Its real horrors are the Nazis, and the people too hypnotized by hollow promises of wealth and power to stand against their vicious campaign.
You’ll only catch all of that in passing, of course. You’re just a penguin."
@Andres4NY in college the campus police would cut locks on "abandoned" bikes and toss in a dumpster. I would dive and pull them out, restore, and ride around campus without locking them up. they would disappear and I always thought of it as increasing the riders
Heat pumps and insulation would cut UK living costs more than new oilfields, study suggests.
Warm homes plan would create 50,000 jobs, compared with about 1,100 for Rosebank oilfield, thinktank finds.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/18/heat-pumps-insulation-warm-homes-plan-beat-new-oilfields-cutting-uk-cost-of-living-study
@ChrisMayLA6 It's bizarre to be in the 2nd quarter of the 21st century, and still find The Guardian publishing what is basically a reworking of 1890s #LiberaIImperialism.
That sense of entitlement to an outsized influence on the world would be pathetic if it wasn't so destructive, both to the rest of the world and to Britain itself. That arrogance won't be ended until the UK is finally dismantled ... which is of course why most of the English political spectrum opposes Scottish independence.
Edo period garden renovations mean only 5 of the original 'landscapes' remain from Yoshimasa's time.
✨Tōgu-dō (東求堂)
✨Shinkū-den (心空殿)
✨Ryūhai-kyō (龍背橋)
✨Rōsei-tei (弄清亭)
✨Kinkyō-chi (錦鏡池)
(5 lost ☹️ = 超然亭/西指庵/太玄関/釣秋亭/夜泊船)
It is truly tedious the sheer variety of things one has to consider when it comes to safety as a woman. I was recently at a photography workshop where a male presenter was talking about the very extensive and expensive collection of gear they take out with them in the field. As a female wildlife photographer who has been harassed by men while out taking photos alone, not bringing gear that’s needlessly expensive, larger than I can fit in a boring looking bag or I couldn’t run with is a major consideration as if a strong dude tried to rob me, I’m not winning that fight. I doubt male photographers think nearly as much about that
In the same fortnight, I was asked to peer review a journal article and be the discussant at a seminar. It's been a while. Odd to perform these academic rituals without an academic post.
Some product innovation manager is very pleased with themselves for creating this wrongness. We're probably three years from cheese Hobnobs.
Pitched battle for food #Birding #BirdPhotography
Commanding fine panoramic views Ardlair Recumbent sits on summit of a hill in Aberdeenshire #StandingStoneSunday
More images on @megalithic here https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=630
The UK government's immigration and asylum policies are unfair and harm our communities.
That's why Scottish Green Party councillors in Edinburgh have joined councillors from across the UK in signing a joint statement condemning the government’s policies.
You can read the full statement from The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants here:
https://jcwi.org.uk/updates/more-than-160-councillors-condemn-governments-immigration-and-asylum-policies/
Times are pretty tough right now as we face major pushbacks on all our rights and freedoms, but it was good to be in a room of incredible people at the Scottish LGBTQIA+ Sector's Parliamentarians Reception, standing together and championing LGBTQIA+ rights.
As the Scottish Greens spokesperson on Equalities and International Development, I am keen to do all I can to best support my LGBTQIA+ constituents and be an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community across Scotland and beyond 🌈