FeedCity

Forthcoming book from Bill McKibben: Here Comes the Sun. “Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history — if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.”

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Bill McKibben: Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? In many countries, getting rooftop solar or “balcony solar” can be as easy going to the store, buying some panels, and plugging them in. In the US, it’s not so easy.

Rebecca Solnit: The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology. “It is nothing less than astonishing and unbelievable that we have achieved so much progress in so little time.”

Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the clear signs that the same thing is happening here in the United States under the co...

Mark Zuckerberg, concluding a 600-word essay ostentatiously typeset in the style of web pages circa 1994^*:

Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.

What about the metaverse? Wasn’t that the thing? What Zuckerberg, and thus Meta, actually believe strongly in is jumping on whatever trend becomes a hype bubble. The company’s soul is empty.

* Actual web pages from 1994 didn’t include nearly a megabyte of JavaScript to display 3 kilobytes of text.

Link: meta.com/superintelligence/

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Apple has voiced its opposition to the case many times over the last year. Now, it has officially filed its answer to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint, pushing back forcefully against the allegations. As a refresher, the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit focu...

Side effect of the Tour de France: pro riders gobbling up all the Strava top times (King of the Mountains) across France: “1,809 KOMs nabbed by the pros during the three weeks of racing”.

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How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic. “Evidence hasn’t emerged” to support that idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory. Here’s what the evidence says.

We follow a long set of wooden stairs deep underground to a sea cave with a mysterious and colorful past, and take in a spectacular, hidden view of the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla. 

Learn more about The Cave Store: https://www.cavestore.com/

All this week, the Atlas Obscura Podcast is hitting the sand, and taking a tour of the world’s most unusual beaches.  

Plus: Pre-order your copy of our new book, The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide to Inventing the World, today! 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ollama's new app

Ollama has been one of my favorite ways to run local models for a while - it makes it really easy to download models, and it's smart about keeping them resident in memory while they are being used and then cleaning them out after they stop receiving traffic.

The one missing feature to date has been an interface: Ollama has been exclusively command-line, which is fine for the CLI literate among us and not much use for everyone else.

They've finally fixed that! The new app's interface is accessible from the existing system tray menu and lets you chat with any of your installed models. Vision models can accept images through the new interface as well.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, ollama

The Wirecutter’s list of the best canned cocktails. Very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. None of these are available at my local liquor store, but we do have Barr Hill’s canned G&T, which is the best canned cocktail I’ve ever tasted.

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How to Leave Substack. “Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation. You should probably leave Substack.”

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the west’s help. The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty bluster. They knew what was happening all along.”

Photos: Starvation and Chaos in Gaza. “Israel’s blockade of most food and aid, along with distribution difficulties inside the Gaza Strip, have driven many of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians to the brink of starvation.”

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it! [...]

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt. [...]

If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

— Steve Krouse, Vibe code is legacy code

Tags: vibe-coding, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, steve-krouse, ai, llms

A compilation of super hero landings from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Covid safety measures drastically reduced flu deaths, but the fatality rate has risen sharply again. “90% of reported pediatric deaths this season have occurred in children who were not fully vaccinated against influenza”.

Tea remains #3 overall in the US iPhone App Store. Here’s a screenshot of the top free iPhone apps today, and a list of the current top 10, using the full names the apps choose to display: ChatGPT Wingstop Tea Dating Advice Threads Google Google Maps WhatsApp Messenger Par...