The biggest pain in the ass of a generation project and the thing slowing everything down is the interconnection queue and the cost of transmission system upgrades So the easiest thing to do is stick panels next to a dead coal plant and use their existing interconnection facilities and capacity

Whoa 🤯 in Slow-Mo@0lsi.bsky.social · 6d ago

Minnesota just plugged a 710-megawatt #solar farm into a coal plant that once burned 30,000 tons a day. The unique approach to connecting the panels to the grid allowed it to sidestep a typically years-long connection process.

OpenSeadragon 6.1.0 is released, with support for non-power-of-two tile source levels, cooperative gesture handling for scrolling pages, and a number of improvement and fixes! github.com/openseadrago...

Release v6.1.0 · openseadragon/openseadragon

Now properly supporting non-power of two tile source levels (#2884 @Aiosa) Added discardLevelsBelowDownsampleRatio option for both viewer and individual tiled images so you can control the pixel ra...

github.com

Health care, food, video games, tvs, computers, sneakers, insulation, rain jackets, toilet paper, stoves (induction), central HVAC (heat pumps), mattresses, car safety (just literally saved life of acquaintance last week), power drills, solar power, amusement parks, farmers markets, gyms

A class in Responsible Tech should be required for all students that'd include: - internet'ing safely & securely - communicating with nuance & thoughtfulness online - evaluating text and multimedia for authenticity & truthfulness - understanding ethical ramifications of online choices

Would anyone be interested in this, but for Bluesky? www.ThriendOrFaux.com (It's a Chrome extension that offers a quick impression of someone's post-and-reply history to help you quickly decide whether or not to engage with a fellow community member) I'd be open to building it for Bluesky if so.

Mark Ferrari's original color cycling playing pieces from 1991 are now back in the Clockwork Goldfish puzzles! iangilman.substack.com/p/clockwork-...

Clockwork Goldfish Color Cycling

Mark Ferrari's original artwork is back!

iangilman.substack.com

This is a good thread. If you actually meet people who are "the party" they are mostly people doing somewhat thankless unpaid labor at the local level, and anybody willing to do thankless unpaid labor gets to influence things.

Dana Houle@danahoule.bsky.social · 3w ago

People complaining that “the Democratic Party” doesn’t do anything? Then take it over! That’s what the Dean people did in a lot of places. And a lot of what party orgs do is vet/endorse/support people for municipal & county govt, school boards, local judges, etc. Stuff that may not sound…/1

Kevin's Law: no matter how many times you explain Goodhart's law to people, they will find a reason that THIS metric is ok to set target's for, which people will then game

We need to, as a society, move away from the "lots energy use = bad" argument and towards a "lots of dirty energy use = bad, lots of clean energy use = good" one

My tech work is so visual, I finally realized I need a demo reel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hQh... Dang, I've made some cool stuff 😄

Ian Gilman Web Dev Showcase

YouTube video by Ian Gilman

youtube.com

oh yeah, in terms of good news- I haven't seen anyone talking about this??? In short- worst case scenario of 4C warming by 2100 is no longer possible, new worst-case is 2.8C now DOES NOT MEAN we just relax- the only way we got here is through hard work- but it means THE HARD WORK IS WORKING

In general, I feel like the worst element of social media is that it really aggravates that impulse to be the first to say something or share something, and the truth is that focus on the novel is good for movements that are without merit and bad for positions that are well grounded.

Be easy to please and hard to impress

This post by @mikecaulfield.bsky.social illustrated where #GenAI can be helpful (doing the grunt work) and where it is not (determining a good goal, refining the grunt work, establishing the use case). Rather than brute-forcing GenAI to do everything, I like Mike's augmentation approach.

Tilling the Garden: A different way to use AI to make interesting and useful apps

Rebuilding the internet of weird little things one data enrichment at a time

mikecaulfield.substack.com

I have been creating arcane diptychs for a while now. It started as an exercise of vocabulary and humor with my teenager. Due to some encouragement, I started adding images via Midjourney and sometimes my children. I am slowly sharing these adventures. Now for more limacine escadrille.

Need music? I will be on a film project soon, but I currently still have short-term availability for one-off projects such as podcast themes! You can listen to some demos and contact me through my general film reel: play.reelcrafter.com/jpO3BtNETBqD...

Film Music Reel - Emmanuel Clement

I produce orchestral and electronic music for film, games, and podcasts, and I write online about art and mental health. I love exquisite food, clever puzzles, ...

play.reelcrafter.com

I highly recommend that everyone follow artists. If you do, your feed is filled with art every day. Real, original art. It's bonkers that you can even have this. Amazing. Undeniably cool. And then support those artists, when you can, because that helps the delight continue.

Hello. The moment you gate educational videos behind a paywall, a massive wall of bureaucracy goes up. Teachers have to beg administrators for budgets, companies have to wine-and-dine school boards, millions of students get locked out, and people get forced into using material they don't like.

Preach. blog.val.town/slow-mode @val.town @petemillspaugh.com

Slow Mode

Updates and articles from the Val Town team

blog.val.town

Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” was originally published in 1993. An immediate critical and commercial success, it went on to become the most widely cited book about comics. Among comics scholars, McCloud's opus is both beloved and widely debated. 1/10

The news media (and social media) focuses too much on the negative when there's actually plenty of good news out there as well. This is doing real damage to our society as it pushes everyone into panic. Here's one of my favorite, humble antidotes to that phenomenon: fixthenews.com

Fix The News | Substack

Fix The News is the world's leading solutions journalism newsletter. We share hidden stories of progress with readers from 195 countries, and donate 30% of our revenues from our paid subscriptions to ...

fixthenews.com

This week's Fix the News has so much encouraging news in it, things I usually don't see elsewhere. Yes, there is much to be angry and anxious about. But there is so much good going on around the world that it is worth it, imo, to pay attention to the positive: fixthenews.com/p/338-ten-th...

338. Ten thousand shades of green. M̶e̶a̶s̶l̶e̶s̶. Koala. Glioblastoma 🪄✨. Water from air.

A fairytale comes true?

fixthenews.com

Today I learned: fredchan.org/blog/localit... Via lobste.rs/s/g4lj0n/set...

Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain

In the US, you can get a domain name like `somename.city.state.us` for free. If your town has its own domain, you can get nameservers from Amazon Lightsail, send the *Interim .US Domain Template* to t...

fredchan.org

Just a reminder I'm available to help on your tech/design/art project! ✨ I specialize in data visualization, prototyping, and custom interactive experiences. My portfolio: iangilman.com/projects/ Tell your friends! 😉

Just as a PSA never engage in long back and forth chains of conversation with an LLM like this, it tends to degrade on both sides. Context becomes very muddled and unpredictable. If you have a relative that has a multi day thread open ask questions & show them how to port clean context.

Matthew Sheffield@matthew.flux.community · 3mo ago

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

Ask Jeeves has officially shut down on May 1, 2026, ending its 25-year run

1993 communal internet shaped me: https://sive.rs/netizen

I'm looking for volunteers to help with VFX on a short film. We're down to a specific kind of shot that we have a lot of: Planar track a surface (street, fence, wall, etc.) and place an artwork or word there, blending as appropriate, then mask out any foreground elements (actor, trees, etc.).

Maelstrom, the beloved asteroids game from 1992 (that I did all the animations for), has been resurrected for modern devices! You can play it for free now on Steam, iOS, Android, and the web: steamcommunity.com/app/4239950/... What are you waiting for?? 😁🚀

Announcing Maelstrom 4.0 :: Maelstrom General Discussions

Maelstrom is an open source port of the original shareware game for the Macintosh by Ambrosia Software. It is a fast-action, asteroids-like game, with classic pixel graphics and original sounds. In ad...

steamcommunity.com

a reminder that a lot of the things people find unpleasant about cities - along with the noise and dirtiness - are largely a product of filling them with cars. get rid of the cars and the pleasantness of the environment improves dramatically

Doug Gordon@brooklynspoke.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Amazing. In Paris, school streets "with the full treatment — trees, gardens, light-colored pavement — were on average, an astonishing 9 degrees (Fahrenheit) cooler than nearby non-school streets."