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Computering in 2026 disclaimer It feels hard to do anything, really, when it feels like a five alarm fire is burning down the institutions around you. My government is detaining toddlers and shooting civilians, threatening allies, destabilizing the world order for no reason, capturing people and locking them up. I thought we all learned about how to recognize and avoid this in school, but I guess…
What if I told you you can get a full Linux computer with WiFi and a GPU in a small, pocket form factor for about $30 USD on AliExpress ? You might say “but what about the new tariffs?” and I’d say “oof, oh right, okay who knows, but it’s probably still pretty cheap!” (Edit: looks like you can get one for about $40 now). It wasn’t a big hit with the retro…
If there was ever a chart that I would expect to cause abject panic in world leadership, it would be this one. This chart should be the front page news of every newspaper right now, but it’s not. The challenge science communicators have is that many people will look at this chart and say “so what? what does this mean for me?” and that’s a hard question to answer. Imagine…
A while ago, I came across this statement about Bing’s chatbot. It’s a Large Language Model, so it doesn’t have any opinions or knowledge at all. It’s just able to string together sentences based on its training data. I jokingly responded “me too,” but to be honest, I think the above statement is altogether way too frequent of a perspective. I think this line of…
This is the last part of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Okay, this is the end of my series! Nothing new in this post, I’m just going to sum up the situation as succinctly as possible. I think there’s a high likelihood that without spending military-level budgets on the problem and without changing the very…
This is part 10 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Get everyone you know to vote for politicians with a track record of caring for the climate, especially in Senate races this election. I wish this wasn't partisan, but currently that excludes Republicans! Maybe we can have enough votes in the senate to stop caring about…
This is part 9 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Armed with climate models , we can now make reasonable estimates: for a given area, is it hugely impacted by climate change? At least for North America, the answer for anything outside of the Rust Belt, weirdly, is probably yes, though some areas especially. Florida will be…
This is part 8 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . To learn about why we’re talking about climate models, please see It’s seat belt time . Let’s start with the conclusion today: I made a really hokey little web tool that shows you climate model forecasts for the contiguous US over the next 70 years. If you…
This is part 7 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Okay, I’ve pulled some punches. Let’s start with these articles today. Physicists: 90% Chance of Human Society Collapsing Within Decades There’s No Scenario in Which 2050 Is ‘Normal’ Once again, those articles are worth reading, but I’ll…
This is part 6 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Hurricane Ida from last year was the second most powerful and deadly hurricane to hit Louisiana ever. While Katrina still takes the cake, once-in-a-hundred-year storms are happening much more regularly than once in a hundred years! Climate change is clearly not the cause of…
This is part 5 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . In part 4 , we discussed how important it is to focus on your maximum point of leverage, and that the part of the greenhouse gas emissions pie you can make the most dent in is likely not the same as others. My part of the pie, at least right now, is cryptocurrency. I’m…
This is part 4 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . In part 2 , we discussed what I think the average person should do. In part 3 , we talked about how we’re way past time squabbling about what will have the most impact, and we must radically reign in emissions everywhere, now. But it’s extremely unlikely that you,…
This is part 3 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Here’s the EPA’s graph of what is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions : The problem with a pie chart is it gives you no sense of the overall magnitude. Here’s Our World in Data with a sense of magnitude : In 2018, the IPCC said that to limit warming to…
This is part 2 of an 11 part series. For the introductory post to set the tone, please see Holy shit things are super bad . Okay, so what can the average person do about the present climate catastrophe? First off, let’s assume that you yourself have already dramatically reduced or eliminated air travel, meat consumption ( especially beef ), and gasoline or other oil byproduct consumption. You are…
In 2016, shocked and appalled by the election, in a time where we can’t afford to have people in charge who aren’t taking the climate seriously , I just kind of completely flipped out. Having spent most of 2016 trying to attend every local rally and call my representatives daily, by early 2017 I had settled into the idea that what we needed to keep the momentum going as maximally squeaky wheels…