I acknowledged this in my last paragraph. We should care about value though and we need to fight for that value to be something positive and meaningful (human and non-human health and wellbeing is a good start imo) not just shareholders.

Ultimately, there is a lot flawed in carbon accounting systems but we do need measures that allow us to assess if individuals, organisations and nations are doing enough and importantly articulate what pathways to zero emissions look like and that does mean trying to work out which processes are producing something we want with low or no emissions or not.

Sorry for delay I wanted to take the time to respond to you properly because I've probably thought similar to you at some point in my life and I want to explain how understanding what is happening has shifted that.

Yes, you are right the analogy isn't perfect. Loss is part of change and change is a permenant. You are right that species and human history and culture has gone through both action and inaction from humans. My comment was about my own realisation that I (and probably wider society) was guilty of placing reverance and value too much on the human artifacts and not on the incredible natural history (the web of life that we all rely on) that we are losing. I looked at my feelings of potential loss about Van Gogh and questioned why I didn't feel that way about our natural history and living beings we are losing daily and could stop destroying if we wanted to. So, you are right that losing the links to our human past would be tragic and we should try and preserve it* but the same is as true if not more true of our natural history. We are not separate from the climate and ecological systems we've evolved and developed in and whilst we could survive without links to our human history being disconnected from our natural heritage causes a number or mental and physical harms (the science is only just really beginning to understand these connections) and ultimately we rely on (e.g. food and clean air).

What I would say is that I think what you articulate is climate denial here. I realise, unfortunately, its an emotive term and I mean this in the way denial is talked about with respect to grief (which is what climate change is about to be honest coping with loss). You say that things always come and go and will regardless of our level of action. Whilst that is a truism it misses an important understanding of what's happening. We are not just losing a few species or ecosystems here we are actually drastically changing the ratio of the rate of which things come and go. I.e. we are massively upping the rate at which things go whilst also limiting the rate at which they can come. Even this is an understatement unfortunately because what we are actually doing is pulling so hard on so many strands of the web of the life (Earth's natural living systems) that the web itself is at risk of coming apart. Earth's living system as a whole is as far as we know intrinsically unique to the whole universe and if we don't manage to stem this collapse all those intrinsically unique human artifacts will likely be lost or in the worst case there won't be much life to reflect on it. Its worth once again reiterating that the risk they took to the rocks was mindblowingly low espcially relative to other risks.

On their strategy I agree this is where there is room to start having a discussion about Just Stop Oils actions but we can't do that I don't think unless we start with the acknowledgement that their assessment of the stakes is valid and correct and that if effective their action (and tbh action that took real non trivial risk with Stonehenge) would be overwhelming worth it.

For what its worth I do think their theory of change is flawed and their self-care of their activists is lacking but if their aim is solely to keep climate change on the agenda with more people pushing for change they are succeeding (people hate them whilst they think about climate change and spend time on the internet and in person discussing climate change and what should and shouldn't be done). The flaw I think is that they believe in an idealised vision of democracy where change happens when enough ordinary people want it whereas the reality is that public pressure is only one component of change espciaily when an issue is as complex and "spinnable" as climate change.

This is already too long so I won't go into it but I also don't think this issue boils down to a game of political chicken with governments. One of the challenges is the climate change is so sprawling and complex it brings up challenges to across lots if different scales and disciplines. The solutions are fundamental to our human story not just small technocrat shifts. There is no area of human activity that isn't upturned by climate change and that ibudes archeology and anthropology.

Finally, if you are interested in learning about where I and others are coming from and the scale of our problems and challenges I recommend the following books:

• The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. This covers human history and we have created meaning and how it links with the environment and interconnects with the current issues we face
• Inflamed: deep medicine and he anatomy of injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Whilst not directly about climate change it does talk about how interconnected our health is with natural systems and how failure of connection to them leads to amoung other thing inflammation and disease.
• The climate book by Greta Thunberg. I haven't actually read this but I know a number of the experts involved in areas that overlap with mine and I trust them. It might be guilty of focussing on the technical aspects of the issues rather than the human stories I think are more important which is why place it lower.

• There's a lot of discussion to be had about Stonehenge particularly and how its been prioritised to be "preserved" at the cost and neglect of the surrounding archaeology. It also sad that none of the discussion and worry about potential risk to it covered the fact that the government is pushing ahead with sacrificing the wider site to car culture ( big underground new road, believing in the myth that more lanes stop traffic rather than the opposite). If we truly cared about that era of British and global history we would doing a lot more than "preserving" a few rocks which the Victorian moved about and romanticised anyway.

The idea is GDP is a measure of activity. So using per GDP allows you to see the efficiency which you are producing "value". That's not a terrible idea in general but it accepts a very narrow definition of value.

GDP is a really flawed measure of how well a society is performing. I wonder what it would look like if we used Gross National Happiness or Total Quality Life Years. Could also think about ecosystem health or biodiversity as a valuable output of a country but that's highly linked to CO2 emissions so wouldnt be meaningful.

Also worth saying whilst per capita is absolutely important as a measure for us to understand the performance of human economic systems the earth systems only respond to gross total emissions.

Lots of people seem to hate this and I do on some level get it. I'd be happy to talk about whether its a winning strategy or what alternatives there are (I'm not sure personally its the optimum form of activism)

What I would say is the evidence suggests:

• General public do seem to hate this stuff.
• There is a relatively little spill over from the organisation to the wider issue (as in people think these guys are idiots but don't link to climate change or environmentalism more generally).
• It is evidenced to increase the saliance and perceived importance of climate change I.e. people hate them but spend more time thinking climate change is serious than before.

Lastly, what I would say is from my own visceral reaction to the Van Gogh painting: I felt a huge and sudden feeling of cultural loss. That something of our heritage was at risk and we may lose it and initially I was angry and sad but I realised that we are routinely doing this everyday with lost species. Heritage we haven't even been able to document yet. All that is to say it maybe we have a discussion about what the best activism is and who we need to influence and how (I think we need to do better than just think we need everyone on side) but what we shouldn't do is entertain for a moment that the scale of this action isn't proportional and valid to what we face. We are hurtling towards a cliff edge and some people still have their foot on the accelerator. This is the equivalent of worrying about a vase in the boot. I want to save it too but at the moment we are endangering it more through business as usual than through some cornflour.

I won't rehash the arguments around "AI" that others are best placed to make.

My main issue is AI as a term is basically a marketing one to convince people that these tools do something they don't and its causing real harm. Its redirecting resources and attention onto a very narrow subset of tools replacing other less intensive tools. There are significant impacts to these tools (during an existential crisis around our use and consumption of energy). There are some really good targeted uses of machine learning techniques but they are being drowned out by a hype train that is determined to make the general public think that we have or are near Data from Star Trek.

Addtionally, as others have said the current state of "AI" has a very anti FOSS ethos. With big firms using and misusing their monopolies to steal, borrow and coopt data that isn't theirs to build something that contains that's data but is their copyright. Some of this data is intensely personal and sensitive and the original intent behind the sharing is not for training a model which may in certain circumstances spit out that data verbatim.

Lastly, since you use the term Luddite. Its worth actually engaging with what that movement was about. Whilst its pitched now as generic anti-technology backlash in fact it was a movement of people who saw what the priorities and choices in the new technology meant for them: the people that didn't own the technology and would get worse living and work conditions as a result. As it turned out they were almost exactly correct in thier predictions. They are indeed worth thinking about as allegory for the moment we find ourselves in. How do ordinary people want this technology to change our lives? Who do we want to control it? Given its implications for our climate needs can we afford to use it now, if so for what purposes?

Personally, I can't wait for the hype train to pop (or maybe depart?) so we can get back to rational discussions about the best uses of machine learning (and computing in general) for the betterment of all rather than the enrichment of a few.

Ethernet over power devices are surprisingly good.

Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft's climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).

Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn't. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there's also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.

Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can't do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it's accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn't actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.

I was experiencing with both X11 and Wayland. I'll give 555 a test. Thanks!

Were you having any kernel panics before this beta?

I was having this issue https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/series-550-freezes-laptop/284772/163 I disabled the GPU for the time being and was hoping the new driver would fix.

Me too. Noticeable Delay around 6s.

I also worry that the systemic vs individual argument is actually used by some as a distraction too. "No point me trying unless the whole system changes" particularly when the change might seem like it involves some level of sacrafice (which often isn't as clear cut as it seems or is presented).

I wonder if its more about paralysing perfectionism rather individual vs system. "Can't be zero emissions as an individual without structural change" so don't do anything. Similarly on the other side "can't overthrow the whole global system so no point doing anything".

I really we wish we talked a lot more about the intermediates between I individual and systemic/national. There's so many smaller organisations that individuals have more agency in changing and in turn have more agency in changing larger numbers of individuals and influencing more of the systemic level

I would argue you've actually articulated exactly why individual action inevitably leads to wider collective action. It take attempting to do the right thing on individual level for some people to see the systemic issues that are there (like the subsidies you mention).

I'd be keen to know your (or others) experience of biking and driving in those conditions because in my experience cars aren't well suited to those temperatures either. I don't have direct experience of biking in that low but I know people who do and they swear by it.

Of course you could throw fuel at it and keep your car running all the time to stop it from freezing. 😷

https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/329955-russia-cars-extreme-frosts

Anyway as others have said no one is actually saying cycling is the solution for all extreme use cases that's a strawman.

This makes sense in principle but none the less I still feel my self struggling to quickly see the difference between to points on these plots.

Right this is the thing I cant ever seems to quickly get.

They are common and yet I still really struggle to quickly understand what any points but the three extremes mean. I'm not sure there's an alternative though.

Its a great idea. I think it would be challenging to implement and would need quite a lot of domain expertise to really unpick. Need to have enough teeth to be able to assess whether level of action and emission mitigation is: above and beyond; in line with paris agreement needs; below needed but active work due to constraints; actively harmful company . E.g. some companies might be intrinsically high emitting because of their sector (e.g. steel manufacture) but doing all they can to decarbonise whilst some might instead be "decarbonising" largely through accounting tricks like offsets and others still just bankrolling delay and denial. Assessing what a Paris Agreement compliant pathways for sub- and multi-national organisations is actually really tricky. Similarly tricky to assess what "as fast as possible" really is for the same organisations.

For finance sector I know this: https://bank.green which might help some.

No, for sure a lot of it is happening anyway and unquestioningly (e.g. use of "AI"). I have definitely seen a shift to video conferencing away from phone calls since the pandemic though. Either way I doubt video conferencing would be enough to tip the balance unless everyone was commuting by bike before and using the most extreme technology.

I do find people assume digital being virtual doesn't have any impact though which I find frustrating, especially now we are in a time where the technology is beginning to be significant source of emissions relative to alternatives.

I think we would do a disservice if we only talk about this being a North American phenomenon. It is true that North America sets itself apart for the scale of the chasm but quite a lot of Europe suffers from the same problem albeit on a reduced scale. Car culture having reshaped non-city (and city) urban landscapes combined with an international and local capital class that has horded city property as a form of profiteering is sadly a story you could apply to a large swathe of cities across the planet. I do also think that those wealthy people who do fantasize about "the countryside" sadly are winning near me in the sense of moving out and demanding and lobbying for modern infrastructure.

I think, this does demonstrate a key issue with unpicking impacts on climate: accounting for how humans will adjust their behaviour in reaction to a new policy or technology (see also e.g. Jevon's Paradox). This is absolutely vital research that needs to occur but rarely does. The climate doesn't actually care about why the policy made worse impacts only that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than there would otherwise be. I do agree with you: our job is to interpret the facts and try and assess the different situations we can have as much as as we can at the system wide level and compare those to where we need to be. That will likely involve sorting out building and housing as well as measures to decrease the total amount of travel as well.

The reason its not seen as clear cut is when research has been done such a change changes a whole host of other behaviours of people e.g. where they choose to live or even how they travel.

For example, a policy that allows hybrid working or fully remote working might lead a portion of employees to move from a city centre where car ownership is low to a suburb where it is high. So you might replace a 5-day a week short commute by public transport with a 2-day a week long commute by car which would generate more emissions. This is more than just a hypothetical and has been observed in some cases.

It's also worth just noting that whilst digital infrastructure at current levels is usually less carbon intensive than any amount of carbon intensive travel it does have a cost and that the trajectory to more and more intensive technologies is increasing that impact (e.g. blockchain and modern AI techniques)

Lastly, there are efficiencies of scale for heating and cooling that might be achieved in offices which might outweigh the transport costs. This is true where I am partly because offices have been brought up to modern spec by regulation where housing has been let go: being more draughty and less insulated.

Personally, though my take is that whilst these second order effects are super important to look at (since in the short term will be linked to real world emissions) I think they are probably best thought of as ways of showcasing issues in other sectors that need tackling serpately (e.g. the suburbs needing to transition away from carbon intensive travel and land use policies to ensure that we don't lose the necessary density of our urban environments).

The only time I think it would be important as an assessment of a particular policy is when some cost is intrinsic to that change. Say, for example that the only way home working could function for a particular use case was by using some sort of energy intensive block chain system for authenticity and the additional emissions costs outweighed the benefits of avoided travel.