Yes, it changes the criterion from “uptime of a server” to “uptime of a service” and that’s why I mention that the fediverse and even the old discussions on slrpnk.net kept being accessible.

But if we went to let go of the old world, we can’t have the back thought of “you know, worst case I’ll host that on a google drive, I know that one will be up”. We need to get to this last mile.

Really this is just a general remark, not something specially related to slrpnk.net and you are doing an awesome job, that I am grateful I don’t have to do. Please don’t see it in any form as a criticism of this server!

I am just saying that we should not embrace downtimes as an unavoidable thing or a problem we need to live in order to have a sustainable world. Resilience is also an important aspect of solarpunk.

I love the lemonaut.

Also, there is an advice I love, that can be applied to any genre: Do not write with the genre X in mind. Write what you want, pour your love in it, and let other label it. Maybe ‘solarpunk’ will end up not existing and will instead be dwarfed by a similar but different style, tidal romance, alt-earth utopians, skyships lesbian pirate slashfiction, whatever. Do not try too hard to shoehorn the themes of sustainability, it can simply be a background for the things you love.

Gibson hated the term “cyberpunk”: he said he was just writing the science fiction that made sense to him.

If you are attracted to solarpunk, you have some thoughts and hope about the future but you are probably also into other things that you love. Make it about that.

First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins.

First, yes, <3 to all.

Then:

Meh, I consider that resilience is not opposed to sustainability.

We don’t have to prioritize it right now, and I will always be grateful of volunteers who do the best they can with what they have.

And to me the lesson was that several communities (french-speaking jlai.lu) still worked and I just used an alt there to continue the conversations I had, and that I could still access through them the past conversations in slrpnk.net. This is a testament to the resilience of the fediverse architecture.

I just disagree with the sentiment that we should somehow romanticize power outages. Some people need a reliable power sources to survive, and it is a totally preventable thing. We can route around them in a radically different way though.

But thinking “this could be down for a week with no warning” also implies that I need to keep a fallback mechanism if I am using it to organize any sort of event with people.

It is fun as a quirky hobby, but really, depending on it for information and entertainment was really bad. Radio and TV are what created mass culture, removed local dialects and accents.

It is a one-to-many channel where people in charge of the station have disproportionate power.

It is nice to have as a simple alternate way of communicating, but boy, how am I never giving up internet access to get back to those.

Not much to say, I love your work! Thank you for what you do and for existing!

Ah yes, maybe something: I think the fediverse suffers from a lack of recommendation/search system. We are a bit burned out from the terrible consequences of the for profit recommendations of Youtube and Twitter, but I think a system that would be actually controlled by the user would be a very precious discovery and adoption tool. Is there something like that being worked on somewhere?

I wont buy electric until they are analog and disconnected from any sort of internet.

I have this one:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i_MiEV_-_Peugeot_iOn_-_Citroën_C-ZERO

As analog as you will get. Bought second hand for cheap. Only about 100 km range though so not for every use.

Most of the solarpunk crowd seems to equate anything LLM with Sam Altman and Elon Musk. They think it is a purely capitalistic endeavor that can’t run on anything else than methane-breathing datacenters. There needs to be some education about the real impact of it and the open source of it. To explain how it can fit into a post-capitalist society.

I do think that vibe-coding is one way to reappropriate tech yes, and is extremely solarpunk. It makes manipulating machines and designing system a far more inclusive capability, bringing it from the work of specialist into the political sphere.

But explaining that is an uphill battle. When I made a post about solarpunk AI a year ago, it was well received. I fear it would be downvoted into oblivion if I published the same thing today.

You should never have trusted images before generative AI either. Trace the source and only trust the image if the source is legitimate.

I am not sure what it is, but I’ll add a few rocks on the pile:

• One has to choose between the fight of a lifetime or a life of fights. I have chosen a specific fight but I will be a support or an ally where I can. I will never be an opponent or an obstacle.

• Anarchists praise praxis: practice as the best way to preach. Wherever possible, practice what you believe in and help create little bubbles of what “should be”.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited.

And yet here we are, with the internet running mostly on free software, the amount of work put into the linux kernel exceeding anything Microsoft could do and open source LLMs being serious competitors to companies investing 10B+ USD in research.

Open source is the biggest and most successful demonstration of what is technically an anarcho-communist effort. Communist: there is a collective ownership of the means of production (the source code) and anarchist: it is developed in the absence of a coercive structure, anyone is free to make a fork.

Are there any hybrid business models for funding tech developments, that eg. even allow the developed tech to be open source?

Public funding. Why is it always forgotten in these discussions? The funding that got us computers, space rockets, internet, deep learning is actually far more important than the “silicon valley” funding style that more often than not means “slap a nice UI on a result coming from a public lab”

In my opinion crowdfunding is indeed a core piece of a post-capitalist society.

Hi! Sorry for the late answer, I am not sure why I did not see an answer notification until now.

That’s really interesting.

I am not sure I understand what the different between productive and organizational structures are?

I have a few down to earth questions:

• How is the hierarchy organized/avoided? I guess there must be some managers, but are they considered like peers, are they elected with a mandate?

• My understanding is that wages are public. Are there wage differences? How big? How does that gets decided?

• You metion cultural differences, do you have any specific in mind when it comes to France? I know in the past there were frictions with unions, as Mondragon did not consider unions useful anymore as they have their own control structure, but is that debate still active? Are there any other cultural differences that can hurt?

• Do cooperatives compete between them? I could see reasons to do so, if one is dysfunctional, but I can also see scenarios where they would prefer to simply merge. Does this type of things happen? Has it happened in Mondragon?

I did not know about the knowledge courses, that’s a good information, thanks! I guess I need to start scheduling middle-term to find a window to go there.

Yes I know that there are many different things that are called cooperatives and that not all of them are workers cooperatives, one indeed needs to be precise when using that word. In theory consumer cooperatives should be called “mutuals” but we rarely see that word used outside of banking and insurance mutuals.

As a senior developer with 20+ years of coding behind, I am fairly excited at coding LLMs and use them a lot. And I realize now how little my coding ability actually matters in my job. What matters, and what I find the most interesting is the deep understanding of the various stacks that form the precarious edifice of modern IT.

We will maintain lower layers like we always did: with tons of tests, with strict APIs and with explicit invariants. The coding may change, but the engineering practices remain.

I am very excited at the idea that we have to design all the new best practices for this type of things. Imagine a coding pipeline with strict tests where, when a bug is found, we can just write a new test to demonstrate it and let the models figure out how to fix it without breaking the past tests.

That’s the first time I see “vibe coding” used seriously and not as a joke. And I use LLMs routinely to generate code.

Code LLMs do bring down the barrier of entry and changes the way we will code in the future, that’s pretty clear, but “vibe coding” is more of a meme that will need a lot more refinement before being something serious.

Oh! I am so happy to see one! I have soo many question!

• Do you like the member status?
• Did you join because of the coop?
• How much are people in Mondragon aware/proud of the coop status? Do some just not care?
• Do the management/discussion part of the work take a lot of time?
• I would love to have something similar around where I live (Isère, France) to do industrial robotics. Any tips on how to start? Does Mondragon help seed other coops?

Remote working from the countryside, taking my electric car (second hand, cheap, low range but recharged daily) to the fablab to discuss our current projects:

• A solarpunk video game (in discussion)
• A publicly funded research program about automating small scale production of several intermediate vehicles, focusing on Vhélio, an electric cargo bike. (ongoing, funded)
• A plastic press for making plastic sheets our of recycled plastic (done with 2 industrial partners, currently suspended but funded and started)

Last weekend I went to a local non-profit even of resistance against the far-right. Yesterday I got a call to help form a citizen’s list for the next municipal elections.

To think that I went as far as rural Japan to find the things that I was looking for and that they were waiting for me in my native country (France), just next to where my parents live.

You need at least the workshop to repair and maintain tools next to the tool library.

I think they fit a different niche.

After years going to hackerspaces and makerspaces, and being desperate of not seeing them produce big projects, I realized that they were not tool libraries for most of them. They are actually social spaces. Big projects, they start there but they usually move to more adapted places. A lot of the people with the knowledge and know-how to use these tools, they have ways to get access to them. They don’t need that space. But as the stereotype says, as geeks we are not that good at recognizing our social needs and we crave talking about tools, about making, about exchanging knowledge.

It is not about the tools, it is about what you learn there.

At the makerspace, you meet makers. Once you have the knowledge you need, you go at the tool library and you get the tools to get your thing done. Chances are what you want to do doesn’t fit in a shared workspace. Maybe you do something on a car, maybe you do something on a house, maybe you do something on a tree, maybe you want to show something to your young kid or to your family who lives in a remote place.

I write that from a workshop for my two mobile robots that I have founded thanks to the local makerspace. These robots they started their lives at the makerspace but now I need more room. I still go there when I have something to 3D print something or if I need the skill of the mechanical engineer there. But actually, I go there more than I need, because I like having lunch with them, I like hearing them exchange ideas about new machines, about the local politics, about board games, or about their latest crush.

I’m not sure I’ll have the time to go through all of your claims but I’ll try to address the most salient ones. Please tell me if there are things that I missed that you would like to see addressed. It may wait for a few days though, sorry.

What do you think of this report by GTK? See slide 23. I would be interested in what you are looking at more specifically from the USGS and how these views could be made consistent.

One of the crucial misunderstandings in this question is the nature of reserves and what it means. So let’s first check what the report you mentioned (which by the way does not cite its sources or its methodology) is using in terms of reserves. It is not clear where their numbers come from. Here is the 2018 report on nickel. They probably used the “reserves” numbers, but the USGS is a bit more pessimistic than they are there: USGS estimated 74 million tonnes. They also considered total resources of 130 million tonnes.

Here is the 2024 report on nickel: 130 million of global reserves, 350 million tonnes of resources.

What magic is that? Well, there is a reason I mentioned the definition appendix as mandatory reading:

Reserve: That portion of an identified resource from which a usable mineral or energy commodity can be economically and legally extracted a t the time of determination. The term “ore” applies to reserves of some kinds of mineral commodities, generally metallic, but for want of another term it is sometimes applied to nonmetallic commodities

Identified resource: A resource whose location, grade, quality, and quantity are known or can be estimated from specific geologic evidence. Identified resources include economic, marginally economic, and subeconomic resources.

These resources, they grow just because we explore and prospect. On most minerals, we would have between 40 and 80 years of identified resources because prospecting at a higher rate is usually non-profitable. There was a scare on lithium, and at one point on copper, because the reserves were very low. And the prices went up, not because there was a fear of a lack of geological availability, but because the mines were not opening at an appropriate rate. Since I started being interested in that question, the world has “run out of copper” at least three times.

I’ve seen other articles on a trend that worries the professional of the field, but it’s not about geological availability. It’s about the trend in prospection that change. People are not trying to identify new deposits anymore. They are trying to extend the one that they already have secured the rights to. Economically understandable, strategically problematic. There’s a chance that we cannot supply the demand for minerals, but it will come from market failing, not from lack of geo availability.

It is not at all readily apparent to be that you could have a self-sustaining closed loop system producing then maintaining ‘renewables’, all while decarbonizing the massive energy consumption everywhere else.

Here, there is a methodology question. Right now, we both agree that our current industrial ecosystem is not sustainable. It emits CO2, it uses fossil fuels. Therefore, nothing that you produce out of it will have a zero CO2 footprint. If that’s your criterion, then sustainability is just impossible to produce.

To me that’s not the criterion. The criterion is that at one point we reach a time where you don’t need to emit CO2 to run your production. We will emit CO2 and we will burn fossil fuels. Hopefully, as little as possible.

The consequence of that is that I disagree that you should integrate the indirect emissions of something into your calculation on whether it’s a piece of a sustainable society. The typical example is electric vehicles, which we consider to have a terrible CO2 footprint on production, because we assume they are produced in China with mostly coal electricity mix. What I find problematic with that view is that if you were to move the factory, the exact same factory, into a country like Norway that produces its electricity mostly from hydroelectric means, then you decrease the CO2 footprint of a car by a lot, even though that’s exactly the same car.

It makes sense in some contexts, like trying to lower your own individual footprint, to consider the indirect emissions. But in order to judge if a technology is sustainable and can be part of a sustainable zero-emission society, you should only consider the direct emissions.

And here, that’s pretty clear. Let’s focus on solar panels for simplicity. Solar panels don’t require CO2 to be emitted during their production. They just require electricity and they require transport. These may emit CO2, but that’s independent of the technology used. And we know that we can transport goods using only electricity. And we know that we can produce electricity by emitting zero CO2. Here is your loop. Similarly, mining minerals can be done without emitting CO2. It requires energy. And in the biggest mines, like I said, a lot of the big vehicles are actually electric.

I think that’s your loop. Isn’t it? You produce electricity, emit zero CO2. You use that electricity to mine minerals and to transport it without emitting CO2. And you use that electricity to run your factory without emitting CO2. And you produce solar panels that produce electricity. The loop is closed.

‘Renewable’ energy harvesting machines are still a blip in the overall scale of energy system and have only added onto energy use instead of replacing it

It is about 10% which is pretty decent but of course I want to see it faster. I find weird the argument that it’s only added energy instead of replacing. Yes, that’s because the world is using more and more energy as poor country gets richer. But do you think that without renewables, the growth would be different? They would just build coal power plants. In percentage, it’s definitely displacing fossil sources.

There are also examples of places where it did displace fossils pretty significantly. Germany is a good example:https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~DEU (though I find it stupid to get our of nuclear before getting out of fossils but that’s a different debate).

So the way forward to me is to anticipate the collapse and imagine creative ways how we are going to salvage survival in that environment and under those constraints.

I see many people arguing similar things, and I used to, because I used to be a post-apocalypse sci-fi enjoyer. But then I realized that I was starting from the conclusion, that on some level, I wanted that simpler world, that less stressful world that I imagined once that complicated industrial civilization collapsed. Re-establishing a link with nature, rebuilding simple machines out of things that I would have mined with my hand. For some time, that’s kind of a pleasant dream. And actually so pleasant that many video games use that premise.

So i have no way of knowing if that’s your case or not but really think whether you reach that conclusion through well-documented premises and careful reasoning or if that’s somehow a belief that’s actually your starting point.

The thing that I understood is that I do want a different lifestyle. I do want a less stressful lifestyle, I want to be closer to nature. And I also understand that hoping that the society would collapse is actually a comfortable way for me to avoid making life decisions, to go where I want to go. So I resigned from my job in Paris. I went back to the Alps, where my parents live, and I started exploring the freelance world and the remote working world 10 years before COVID hit, when no one was doing it. I now live in a nice house, surrounded by coves. Actual nature is 20 minutes away. I see my mountains every morning and I didn’t need society to collapse for that. I am helping the local hackerspace to produce lightweight electric vehicles and we are helping non-profits that recycle plastic. You don’t need to wait for the world to collapse to help it get better. And to me that’s the essence of Solarpunk.