]]>They say real courage isn't being fearless, it's being afraid and doing it anyway. Whatever, I don't have real courage. But one thing I do, that I don't feel like doing, is helping other people. They sure need it! Supposedly we are all one. I can't see it, but I have to trust the experts, just like with germs.
I work with a ton of Gen Zers and am often struck by how they just do not give a shit about authority or traditional standards. They will happily call the CEO an asshole in an all-company meeting with a couple of thousand attendees, they'll tell you they can't make a meeting because they have to go to therapy, they'll go into a public Slack channel and post that they got literally no work done all week because of stress.
Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information. It's about the volunteer tagging system at Archive of Our Own, and I think volunteers are better than non-volunteers at almost anything. Human motivation is the most powerful force in the world, and right now it's being suffocated by the motivation of giant blocks of money to keep getting bigger. If we ever get a UBI, it will eventually make a day and night difference in how well society operates.
Hacker News thread, Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar. Blender is a free and open-source graphics software tool. From one comment:
I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene. But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue!
Harvesting the sun twice, an article about agrovoltaics, in which crops partly under solar panels do better than crops in full sunlight. Related: Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops.
Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice. I know we can't bring back woolly mammoths without also bringing back their habitat, but this is still really cool, and genetic tinkering has already done at least one great thing: Pink grapefruits were created by bombarding seeds with gamma rays.
And two positive political links. Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States
And I can't remember the last time the Democrats did something this inspired, a Reddit thread about congressman Ro Khanna holding town hall meetings in Republican districts. The fact that Republicans are reluctant to meet voters in their own districts, suggests that they're already feeling the squeeze between serving their leader and serving the public.