A little packrafting trip out on the sea yesterday evening. I only have a couple of islands though, unlike @clement 's nice archipelago.
The two middle pictures give a nice show on how the last ice age sculpted the land, with a smooth raise on the side the ice pushed up, and the sharp tumbling bits where the glaciers pulled rocks out.
Happy Canada Day! :meow_canada:
time for some vi be coding
"the expenditure of European organisations on cloud and software services at around €400 billion per year for 2024. Of this spending, €330 billion went to US companies, representing 83% of the market share held by a small number of players of a single nationality"
The source PDF: https://www.cigref.fr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Cigref-Asteres-Cloud-Software-Price-Rises-Europe-2026.pdf
In 2025:
Global gas consumption grew by 1.6%
Global coal consumption grew by 0.7%
Global oil consumption grew by 1.3%
[1]
GHG emissions grew by 2.3% as a result. [2]
Data centres are the fastest growing sources of emissions.[2]
#ClimateEmergency
#FrugalComputing #NoToAI
[1] https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
[2] https://wedocs.unep.org/items/9f0bf855-2069-42a6-a856-4b389f740c5c
@tante Hi tante! To get a better picture about the AI crawler pandemic vs. the open web, we started an online survey, hostet at University Innsbruck. Please take a look at it and boost it. The more sysadmins participate, the better! Thank you so much!
https://umfrage.uibk.ac.at/limesurvey/allgemein/898996?lang=en
My timeline (which contains a lot of project leaders/sysadmins from big projects) is filling with posts about a new, ongoing wave of what most likely are scrapers collecting training data for „AI“ companies. They seem to be using botnets (or what some call „residential IP proxies“ to make it sound a bit more legitimate) with millions of IP addresses, making it really hard to defend against. Some have decided to take their sites down until this is over. This is now the world we live in :(
(LONG POST) Fell down a fascinating rabbit hole today about a few little boys and a little girl in ancient China about 2100 years ago.
Emperor Wu went mad with paranoia in his old age, accusing everyone of using witchcraft against him. This led to him needlessly launching attacks on his own eldest son, who never intended to betray him, and the prince's own sons. This whole branch of the royal household was wiped out in the attack. Except... there was a baby. A brand new baby boy, only a few weeks old, the Emperor's great-grandchild. The baby's name was Bingyi.
Someone brought baby Bingyi to a prison rather than kill him as ordered. The prison warden personally took good care of him; when word got out and he was ordered to finish the job, he refused to kill the baby, knowing it would presumably cost him his life. However, the Emperor came to his senses and stopped the witch hunt. The order to kill baby Bingyi and this random prison warden along with him never came. Bingyi safely disappeared into the household of distant relatives, to live an ordinary middle-class life.
Emperor Wu died of old age, and his dying wish was for the crown to skip over all the sons he distrusted and go straight to the only one not yet old enough to have earned his distrust, the surprise offspring of a May-December fling. Emperor Zhao was still a small child. He was immediately married-on-paper to another small child, Lady Shangguan.
A few years later, Lady Shangguan's family was accused of planning a coup by Zhao's regent and executed, but she was spared on account of being too young to have possibly been in on it.
Zhao was, apparently, a completely reasonable and level-headed young man. He showed wisdom in dealing with court rumors and did not do the ridiculous things young people with power often do. When he found out that Bingyi was alive, he visited with the other boy, treated him with kindness and made sure his needs were met.
Unfortunately, Zhao dropped dead when he was 20. (No indications of foul play, he was just unlucky). He had no children; his marriage to Lady Shangguan may not have even ever been consummated. The Empress Dowager was 15 years old.
A nephew of Zhao was brought in to be the new emperor; he was slightly older than Lady Shangguan, at 17. And he... partied. Immediately. Extremely. Incessantly. He was hinted to stop. He was told to stop. He was told more boldly and explicitly to stop. He did not stop.
An entire 27 days after this loser nephew took the throne, Lady Shangguan put on her best dress, entered the court, sat down on the throne, and called for the nephew. He came in. She unrolled a list of over 1000 complaints that had accrued since he arrived at the palace. She fired him. A 15-year-old girl with no actual hard power fired the Emperor of China in front of all his ministers. And he turned around, left, and went home.
(And in a very Ancient Chinese approach, he was allowed to live but most of his attendants were executed for allowing him to grow into such a brat. Only a handful who were known to have boldly rebuked him were spared.)
Lady Shangguan was now in direct defacto control of the empire. However, she understood that trying to hold on to that for the rest of her life would be destabilizing, since her claims were paper-thin as the childless widow of a child-emperor, whose family was already executed for treason. She sent for Bingyi.
Bingyi ruled under the name Emperor Xuan, and is considered to have been one of the wisest emperors, being possessed of common sense and moral sympathy for the poor after a heathy, normal upbringing. Lady Shangguan quietly stepped back after thus saving the empire from disastrous misrule, never remarried, and was pretty much the only person on either side of her family to never get executed, exiled or driven to unalive.
Lady Shangguan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Empress_Dowager_Shangguan
Emperor Zhao: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Zhao_of_Han
Bingyi / Emperor Xuan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Xuan_of_Han
Loser Nephew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_He_of_Changyi
I volunteer as a test subject. In the name of science. And to alleviate some of the fucking gloom. I like the idea of living in a world of pixie creatures.
'It sounds so impossible': Student studying fungus that makes users hallucinate tiny people may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough
@david_chisnall anyway - memes!
I am swimming in value right now. #goose #birdsofmastodon
Important admin notice:
We can now value.
🪿 :GoldenEgg:
EERA is in mastodon! The European Educational Research Association is in the better social media. ❤️🎈 And their huge annual conference ECER will be in Tampere in August. I'll be there too!
On an IRC channel some friends are talking about their first Debian installation. I feel old again.
https://www.debian.org/releases/ is a handy reference for figuring out code name vs version number.
Dutch people. Peoples of the North, who lack a strong cultural awareness of how to handle heat waves. Please heed my words
1) Pull all the curtains closed. Reflect sunlight away from the windows. Tape up a bedsheet or something if you don't have curtains or blinds (not that rare in the Netherlands)
2) Open windows on opposite walls of the house, prop open the interior doors with something heavy, get a cross-breeze going. (Yes, the curtains may get flappy. I tucked the end of a long one under my bed mattress to mitigate this)
3) Take a quick shower with water that is only slightly warmed (neither ice cold nor steaming hot). Do this two, three, four times a day if you have to.
4) Similarly, drinking water that is ice cold may sound good but it's liable to give you stomach cramps when you're very hot. Your drinking water shouldn't be more than slightly cool.
RE: https://rivals.space/@fedilucie/116795256258407496
I heard Joe Armstrong give a talk for forty minutes once and I walked out permanently converted to this way of thinking. Use queues. Queues only. NULL was not a billion-dollar mistake, NULL can be made sanitary. Memory-sharing multithreading was the billion dollar mistake.
#ClimateDiary “Above is a fictional weather forecast for August 18, 2050, broadcast by French television in 2014, intended to warn against the disastrous consequences of global warming.
Below is the weather forecast for June 22, 2026.”
(By @jakubwiech on unmentionable)
This brings out super starkly how #ClimateChange has accelerated so much more quickly than we thought even just 12 years ago.
Hiking above the Lysefjord near Stavanger today.
#Hiking #Mountains #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Norway #Lysefjord #Preikestolen #Ryfylke