Nostr notes by The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉

I've written elsewhere that moving to renewables may only ...

2026-03-11T16:55:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…lgvc
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I've written elsewhere that moving to renewables may only usher in a new era of eco-colonialism, as most of the minerals needed for the machinery of a "green transition" (electric batteries, wind turbines, solar panels etc.) are located in regions such as Latin America, Africa and Greenland. We need lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt, and nearly 60% of these resources are on or near indigenous lands.

So yes, it's not gonna be as straightforward as many seem to imagine.

Just in case anyone isn't believing the numbers they're ...

2025-10-12T12:15:00Z

Just in case anyone isn't believing the numbers they're hearing, here's an aerial view. Yes, this was by far the largest national demonstration in Britain since 2003.

Hey you hearing this yet, Starmer? Or do we need to muscle our way into the Houses of Parliament to get your attention?

It's the influence of Big Finance, a world in which magical ...

2025-09-16T17:05:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…v7n2
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It's the influence of Big Finance, a world in which magical thinking really does work regardless of fundamentals...until the bubbles pop.

The real economy, on the other hand, is just real people who can't afford basics anymore and have no significant savings. The idea that ordinary folks are figuring in future market fluctuations when many of them don't even know who's the PM, is nonsense. If it's Tuesday, they're thinking about how to survive Tuesday.

Optimism is useless to them.

This new Bluesky feature notifies you of non-bridged comments but ...

2025-09-11T17:38:25Z

This new Bluesky feature notifies you of non-bridged comments but doesn't give you the ability to respond directly. Aah I see. Clever.

It already looks like a way to provoke fedi users into joining the corporate platform to respond. Nope.

But I'll write a whole thread here though. Why not? It's been a while. Let's talk in detail about that widely-debunked Quillium Foundation report...

1/n

These thugs were outside a hotel full of refugees awaiting ...

2025-09-06T23:35:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…fwns
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These thugs were outside a hotel full of refugees awaiting decisions on their asylum applications. They go to confront vulnerable people for being "groomers" and "rapists" over here for "our women and girls".

For perspective, a huge 2 in 5 (40%) of the flag-shaggers who were arrested after last year's race riots (often outside hotels housing migrants) had previous convictions for domestic abuse, and at least 20 members of the English Defence League were convicted child sex offenders.

Batten down the hatches, folks! For those who don't know, The ...

2025-08-21T19:49:17Z

Batten down the hatches, folks! For those who don't know, The Telegraph is among the most uber-conservative newspapers in the UK. Not the sort of outlet that would want to risk upsetting investors with alarmism.

"The US stock market has seen $1 trillion wiped off in four days as a sell-off in tech companies deepened on Wednesday.

The S&P 500 fell for the fourth consecutive day on Wednesday amid fears that an AI-powered stock market rally could be about to collapse."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/20/us-tech-stocks-tumble-on-ai-bubble-fears/

The Mercator became standard mainly because it was useful for ...

2025-08-16T15:51:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…eh8p
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The Mercator became standard mainly because it was useful for navigation. The meridians and lines of latitude are all parallel, so any straight line corresponds to a route on a constant heading (known as a "rhumb line"). Gerardus achieved this by mapping our globe onto a cylinder.

However, yes, it also had the useful ancillary benefit of flattering European colonialists! I don't recall ever being taught in school that it distorts the relative sizes of nations and continents.

Great article. "The two-page memorandum reveals ...

2025-08-12T22:08:43Z

Great article.

"The two-page memorandum reveals that...federal agencies had searched everything from databases to hard drives to locked cabinets and closets for documents pertaining to...Jeffrey Epstein...DOJ/FBI said its extensive searches had turned up 300 gigabytes of Epstein-related data. (For an idea of how much that might translate into if converted into Microsoft Word documents, it comes out to approximately 19.5 million pages or 65,000 pages per gigabyte...)"

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/11/the-billionaires-in-the-epstein-files-and-their-ties-to-israel/

The housemate spent hours trying to locate a non-existent ...

2025-08-07T19:42:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…s9hx
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The housemate spent hours trying to locate a non-existent synagogue in Germany that an LLM (Perplexity) had told him held records about his ancestry. Like many Jewish people, he's still trying to trace all his antecedents following the Holocaust.

Later, visiting a friend in Munich, he discovered not only that the synagogue never existed, but there was definitive proof another building was there. These models just spew out convincing bullshit, and can't be relied upon.

The more people rely on generative AI, the more the internet ...

2025-06-19T11:00:42Z

The more people rely on generative AI, the more the internet becomes swamped with error-strewn content which then gets hoovered back up into LLM training datasets. The cumulative long-term impact of all this is a gradual degradation at the societal level not only of a population's capacity for critical consumption, but of the quality of the knowledge-base itself. Couple that with AI being deliberately used by governments and Big Tech to influence public opinion, and it's hello techno-dystopia.

Not disagreeing in the US context, but a word of caution from the ...

2025-06-14T00:50:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…jewm
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Not disagreeing in the US context, but a word of caution from the UK: we dramantically *succeeded* in taking over the Labour Party, almost winning a national election (by an eye-watering 2,500 votes!) in 2017, so the many arms of the Establishment united to destroy the political power of the left here, ensuring a crushing defeat in 2019. Now we *do* have a Labour government...run by right-wing entryists.

The attacks on oligarchs have to be full-spectrum, it can't all be about voting.

I'm sceptical of Kurzweil. I read his 2005 book and found it ...

2025-06-11T18:18:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…w8fn
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I'm sceptical of Kurzweil. I read his 2005 book and found it to be a tad...evangelical? What we're actually seeing with current iterationa of AI is model collapse: they're slowly poisoning their own training data as the internet becomes flooded with slop.

I don't know anything about multiplying matrices, however, so may be making an irrelevant point here!

It's an energy war. "[Nafeez] Ahmed published...revealing ...

2025-05-26T14:51:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…pthw
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It's an energy war.

"[Nafeez] Ahmed published...revealing a plausible motivation - Gaza’s natural gas reserves - for Israel’s endless belligerence...(The story had until then been confined to minor and academic publications, including my own contribution...) Israel wanted to keep control over large gas reserves in Gaza’s waters so that it could deny Hamas a resource that would have bought it influence with other major players in the region, not least Egypt."

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-12-04/why-the-guardian-axed-nafeez-ahmeds-blog/

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 (npub18x7…p6e7)

Following Starmer's "Island of Strangers" speech with ...

2025-05-12T20:13:50Z

Following Starmer's "Island of Strangers" speech with its sinister echos of Enoch Powell and his "Rivers of Blood", two book recommendations from me for followers who enjoy slim volumes that cram a lot in.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah, for why on a deep philosophical level, Starmer is wrong.

The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right by Oliver Eagleton, for why Starmer is exactly the vapid, soul-sucking wraith of a man some of us saw from the start.

The only real "special relationship" was a post-war ...

2025-03-01T10:51:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…58fr
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The only real "special relationship" was a post-war security and intelligence-sharing alliance, and even that is in jeopardy now that the USA is to longer a trustworthy partner.

Disentangling ourselves won't be easy, however, as it provides the UK with significant leverage over the Americans, without which we'd be even more isolated. We also share physical infrastructure such as cable taps and signals stations.

We really are in uncharted waters here.