I fully agree being able to build your own DIY batteries is indeed very solarpunk. I only wanted to clarify that we allow non-literal BIFL suggestions, as you mentioned that all personal ev’s are not technically BIFL (which is true).

The replies you are receiving are not from slrpnk.net accounts, but instead are from off-instance, likely from people who simply subcribe to this BIFL comm or saw it in in the /All view, and who do not consider themselves solarpunks.

This community also allows recommendations for items that only last significantly longer than usual, not just literally something that will last for an entire lifetime :)

Busses still use oil. Solar energy is still dependent on violent exploitation of the earth. If you choose to go vegan, you’ll likely still need monocultural practices to sustain yourselves.

Busses are quickly becoming EV powered, which when combined with a renewable grid, make them certainly a far better option climate wise. Ideally we would also advocate for solarpunk urbanism, which heavily encourages walkable and bikeable cities combined with electric trains/trams as much as is possible.

Even just monoculture veganism would be a substantial win for the climate (and animal suffering). However there are also non-monoculture ways of farming as well, as well as urban farming, which shows good promise.

what I’m saying is we’re going to be in the gray no matter what. No right life in the wrong one and all that.

IMHO that’s a thought terminating cliche, a way to continue to use harmful tools without it causing too much cognitive dissonance. Or in other words, it’s something we cab choose to tell ourselves so we don’t feel as bad about it.

However, or so I like to believe, many there do wish to create tools to create a quote unquote better world.Honor those honest people and forget about the control freak of a greedy ceo.

Without meaning to offend, that is a very naive view of how corporations and CEOs operate, as they all ultimately are beholden to profit over all else.

When I use AI, it feels like what you’re describing: I’m trying. Trying to play the hand I’ve been dealt. What else can I do?

…Not use it? Like you and everyone else would’ve had to do just a few years ago before LLMs existed.

Perhaps, yes, we must leave everything behind and opt for some sort of primitivism

Solarpunk is not compatible with primitivsim, nor do we advocate for it (as that would only bring untold suffering and death).

Solarpunk is an attempt to be as logical and realistic at balancing having a habitable and stable climate and habitat with an appropriate and non-ecologically damaging use of technology to achieve maximal individual and collective freedom and happiness. If you haven’t you may want to read our “What is Solarpunk?” wiki article to have a better idea of what we’re striving for.

I don’t see how AI with its undeniably emancipatory possibility can’t be part of that as well.

For the reasons mentioned before, it is genuinely in direct opposition to building a solarpunk or habitable world.

You don’t need a big team of well-paid engineers anymore to get actually functional shit of the ground anymore and that is frankly exciting!

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

One last note on degrowth:

Being more communal, having human connections, the other things you describe are all good, fostering community is essential to building the world we want, but there is also a hard physical reality that we are extremely close to making the planet’s ecology completely collapse due to our dependence and addiction to fossil fuels, meat, and now the tools that only further empower the very people who ensure those addictions continue until it is too late to reverse on any meaningful human time scale, and at that point all we will have left is our dances as the planet crumbles.

Collectively we can’t just keep taking the easy path because it feels good and doesn’t require us to feel like we’re missing out, otherwise there will be no future for our children to inherit.

It might feel good to see the AI make a somewhat functional app quickly, but it’s important to keep in mind the external cost to have that done quickly. Was it truly worth funding the billionaires that wish to enslave us further? Will that app be worth it 10 years from now if all our lives are made miserable from fascists rising to power with the aid of AI surveillance? When our family members are imprisoned, deported or killed, where healthcare is inaccessible to most, and we all seek ways to numb ourselves as the world burns around us?

We have to keep in focus what we are enabling by taking that easy route, and the suffering we may cause to ourselves and others in the future by not taking a stand while we can.

well of course, but this argument could be extended to the use of just about any technology (ethics of mining, reality of elecitricty etc.) and also most societal structures (opressive, classist, racist, sexist, whatever).

Yes, and part of solarpunk is about trying not to perpetuate those things as much as possible, which collectively makes a difference. That’s why Solarpunk advocates for degrowth (avoiding unnecessary consumption, repairing instead of buying new, gift and library economies), trying to avoid as much electricity and fossil fuel consumption as much as possible (using an public transport or an ebike where viable instead of a car, utilizing solar energy where possible), reducing meat consumption as much as possible to avoid unnecessary animal suffering and climate emissions, and to try to build the world we want to live in within the shell of the old through prefigurative politics.

Not everyone will be able to do those things 100%, but it is absolutely still worthwhile to do what they can to whatever degree is feasible.

Corporate AI use in particular is the easiest of all of those things to avoid using outside of a tech job that may enforce its use. If someone chooses to hand wave the harmful externalities it causes just because it feels convenient, then how are we to address any of the other problems humanity faces, which will generally require bigger lifestyle changes? All of us choosing to use it also sends the others looking at our movement that we are a “Do as I say, not as I do” group, who give lip service to trying to solve things while being unwilling to actually put our actions where I values claim to be.

We are ultimately incredibly unlikely to build the world we want to live in by directly funding the very people who most wish to oppress us and stop our efforts, who would see the world burn to a cinder without blinking an eye.

I’d really recommend checking out some of the links I provided in my first comment to fully grasp the scale of the problem that corporate AI is, and how supporting it by its use is incredibly self defeating.

whats your thoughts on LLM’s in coding

IMHO, using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of the big tech companies that host them (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are owned by fascist CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

There is also the problem of all current LLMs being trained on copyrighted code, and being prone to perfectly reproducing the code, introducing the possibility of unknowingly committing copyright infringement into the code base, which could lead to small open-source developers getting sued down the line.

Lastly, LLMs are extremely prone to hallucinating, which can often result in bugs or vulnerabilities that won’t be caught by a developer that doesn’t intimately understand every aspect of the code, and often results in an unmaintainable code base long-term.

Overall I don’t think LLMs are at all compatible with solarpunk ideals, and appears to contribute negatively towards the very problems solarpunk is trying to solve.

Hi @socialistpartyca@slrpnk.net, this video and all of the other videos on this youtube channel are AI generated, which goes against solarpunk ideals (AI use funds fascist AI companies and causes increased environmental destruction).

Because of that, I removed it, but I hope that doesn’t discourage you from finding good non-AI created posts in the future :)

Hm, the captcha worked on my end without issue and I was able to watch with audio.

I tested it just now with Freetube instead (should be available in most linux repositories), and that appears to work well for me without any captcha. Hopefully it should allow you to watch it without as many issues.

I don’t see a way to download the video from within Freetube. I suppose a much more inconvenient but guarenteed method of capturing the video would be to capture it live by recording the video and audio in OBS.

Would an invidious proxy count? https://yt.chocolatemoo53.com/watch?v=0jco-RKzRSo

If not, the video could be downloaded from there with the help of a browser addon or perhaps the youtube-dl application, then re-uploaded elsewhere for you to share.

No anacharchist society could ever survive being in competition with a legitimate nation state with mordern weapons.

An anarchist society would need manufacturing capability to create weapons that would be effective against the enemies they faced (much like Ukraine’s local drone construction is essential to their survival). That was an issue in the Spanish Civil war, especially as no outside countries were willing to help logistically except for the USSR, which had strings attached, and was mostly diverted to the Marxist army.

These two concepts are so incredibley far removed from each other

I don’t believe they are. Rojava modeled its society on Democratic Confederalism as laid out by Abdullah Öcalan. Abdullah himself was heavily inspired was inspired by the works of Murray Bookchin, who advocated for a form of Eco-Anarchism, which Solarpunk itself is partly based upon.

I am not saying that Rojava is a solarpunk society, it is not, it’s also not considered properly Anarchist by most Anarchists, but it is currently an existing society that at least is attempting to decentralize societal power in a meaningful way (to varying degrees of success), similar to the Zapatistas.

Solarpunk and its Anarchist ideals are a pretty direct threat to virtually every other societal system. Fascists, Capitalists, and Authoritarians all either see it as an enemy to starve out, or even directly attack in an attempt to prevent its spread, as was seen during the Russian Revolution with Mahkno’s Black Army, and the Spanish Civil War.

As long as there are still state governments with military might at their disposal, a Solarpunk society is likely going to need to be able to defend itself against them. The Anarchists of Spain organized their voluntary militias from the bottom up, where the soldiers themselves would elect someone to lead the group (but with the ability to immediately recall them outside of battle if they didn’t perform their duties to the satisfaction of the soldiers who elected them), and those elected leaders would then elect a commander to help organize them more effectively, with the same recall rules applied. It seemed to work out quite well for them.

However, there may be a point in time where the advantages of the alternative solarpunk system are too apparent to ignore, which could spark mass-civil disobediance or even revolution in those other countries causing their governments and capitalist economies to collapse, hopefully then leading to them joining in with their own solarpunk movements. Were that to eventually happen the world over, the need for militias to exists would likely dwindle.

It relies on a legitimate government outside of it to provide actual protection from outside lawlessness.

An solarpunk society would decentralize power as much as possible in-line with Anarchist principles. Anarchist Catalonia (which had over 3.5 million participants) demonstrated that a decentralized society is entirely viable, and how it functioned was documented quite well (such as in this book). We also have a modern example of how Rojava (a somewhat decentralized society in Syria of 4.6 million people) does community defense.

Cyberpunk depicts a dystopia that assumes capitalism essentially ‘won’, but how punks at the bottom of society can still resist it and use the system’s technology against itself.

Solarpunk instead depicts a future where capitalism lost to the punks, and how society would be organized from that anti-authoritarian eco-anarchist perspective.

Agree 100%.

I’m not sure a high temperature oven with a convection fan can truly be “buy it for life”

This community also allows for things that won’t literally last forever. Just lasting significantly longer than average is enough :)

Off ebay (though I’ve seen thicker ones in hardware stores too), they should pop up from searching 20x20x4 Merv filter (or whatever dimensions your fan is).

The thicker ones are much freer flowing compared to the thin ones due to their increased surface area, making them comparable to a Corsi box, but easier to move around.

Definitely not :p

(just to clarify, the OP article from Lowtech Magazine about thermoelectric generators is in no way related to the Primitivism guy wanting no tech).

Looking into their blog again just to be sure, it appears they think a return to, I guess medieval/bronze-age technology is ideal? Based on this quote:

Where might one look for meaning? The guideline is simple. If it requires non-renewable materials, modern forms of energy (fossil fuels, nuclear, electricity from any source), industrial processes, or purchase with money, then it’s probably best to treat it as being devoid of meaning.

I assume they would consider a steam engine as falling under industrial processes.

Under the conditions that the Lowtech Magazine article is suggesting these thermoelectic generators would be useful, a steam engine/generator combo would perhaps be prohibitively expensive for an impoverished area to afford, except maybe through a group purchase where it becomes a central power supply for an entire village, but at that point they may as well instead do the solar microgrids, which would require a lot less time and effort to keep fueled, and probably cost less overall.

I think the other primitivism blog guy would be against the use of a fossil fuel powered anything. I’m not actually sure what level of technology he would be okay with.

Was it a 1" thick filter, or 4" thick?

Ehh, from what I can tell based on reading through the summaries he provides on the later episodes of that series, he appears to be advocating for Anarcho-primitivism, even going so far as to say cities, and even modern medical care and medicine are a part of ‘modernity’, and thus unsustainable. He is not far off from a doomer, but instead is spinning it as ‘letting go’ and mentally accepting that we’ll collapse into a more primitive state, which he sees as more in-line with positive ecological practices and ultimately a good thing. Some of his language even comes off a bit cult-y, IMHO.

I think there definitely needs to be severe degrowth, an end to capitalism, and a heavy focus on regenerating our natural environment and the species that live within it, but we absolutely do not need to have some mass die-off event to have a sustainable planet, we just have to stop the practices that are killing it.