At one point we had a long back and forth with my cousin, a post-apo fan, about the credibility of various scenarios, various shortage, various technological regressions. My conclusion: if you humanity loses the ability and the knowledge to make CPUs, then CPUs are not the first thing you will miss.

It would have meant that a generation-long obscurantist crusade would have purposefully destroyed that knowledge.

I don’t see anything natural nor a human-made disaster that could durably erase all knowledge and industries on a global scale. You would need an intelligence geared at destroying knowledge specifically.

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.