A fascinating dive into the mentality differences between Bandcamp and Spotify. Spoiler: Bandcamp comes out looking a lot more positive, particularly for artists. Interesting to see the CEO of Bandcamp point to Etsy (and blogging) as an ideal model for promoting musicians. Also that they used to be able to see people coming to Bandcamp from Google searches for torrents and p2p sites, then buying the album. More fuel to the fire that is "piracy is often about access, not theft".

(PS: I love npr's text mode if you decline cookies! 😍)

Amongst some general research into the British lammergeier, I stumbled onto this excellent resource. The entire forum and community are packed with great birding insights, but this rare-bird live map is easily the star of the show. Very cool 🦅

The tale of an AI-driven blog using GPT-3 that managed to garner 26,000 views in just two weeks and trend on Hacker News (where, ironically, the few people that called it out as potentially fake were downvoted to oblivion). It's certainly an interesting argument for "Buzzfeed-esque" writing studios being the first creative enterprise to be potentially automated out of work.

However, I think the real value here is not in blog posts, that was just to prove the concept. Its true value lies as a writing tool. The invention of GPT-3 for writers is like the invention of the McCormick reaper for farmers. It increases efficiency, and thus reduces labor costs, like any other technological innovation. The difference is, this is one of the first times technology has the potential to affect jobs in the creative sector.

In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable.

Not only that, but slight changes to the alignment between phone and charger decreased efficiency massively, so that millimetre tweaks could result in 80% more energy for a single charge. Plus, wireless chargers use electricity 24/7, amounting to as much as 6 watt-hours a day of energy just turned into heat. For all current smartphones to move to wireless charging, we'd need the equivalent of 73 more coal power stations to meet the additional global requirements; if all of those chargers used the worst-case alignments, it could be closer to 150 more power stations!

Interesting to consider the environmental impact of a purely convenience-based gimmick. Do we really need it?

I've seen some good reviews of Ecologi. For a relatively low monthly cost (<£5) you can fund tree planting, rewilding initiatives, and environmental community schemes all over the world. They've also produced an app that challenges you to change your personal behaviour and live more sustainably. There are definitely parallels with Pawprint.

A very early-draft stage proposal for a new web file verification system. Basically, you add a carbon.txt file to your site specifying where the site is hosted. Hosts would then provide a file stating where their data centres are. Those, in turn, state where the energy is coming from. Energy providers can do the same, though that data is publicly available anyway in most European countries. So by following the carbon.txt chain, you can verify whether a site genuinely runs on green energy or not.

SubToMe is a fun little open-source project: a reusable button that lets people immediately subscribe to your RSS feed from a huge list of feed readers. Simple, intuitive, solves a genuine issue. Nice 👍

Accuracy in carbon footprint tools will always be a little dubious, but the Website Carbon Calculator is still a neat idea. theAdhocracy is currently sitting at 89% "cleaner" than the average website, meaning that 0.14g of CO₂ is used to load the homepage. I'm hurt a fair amount by Netlify not being a green host, too. Room to improve, but I'll take that as a solid starting point.

Looks like the new CSS @property extension has landed in Chrome. Una has put together some interesting examples and explanations on the fallback mechanism in particular. Usage appears to be the same as initially outlined.

I love seeing new engineering ideas for creating low-energy buildings and the "earth, wind, and fire" method by Dr Ben Bronsema shows promise. Basically it uses a combination of solar energy/heating, thermal air currents, and natural wind to keep buildings cool; the idea was created through studying termite mounds (which are exceptionally efficient at maintaining internal temperature). The Breeze Hotel in Amsterdam will hopefully open this year and be the first true test of the system.

Of related note, this article references similar engineering principles being used in Seattle (for quite a while now). The building there was built with lots of windows and a central, open atrium (think doughnut shape) so that air in the centre would heat up, rise, and pull cool air through the buildings as the convection current got going on warm days. Neat.

Is Prometheus a good movie or a bad movie? My answer is yes, and I feel like this deep dive into the mythology underpinning the film is part of why. There's a lot to consider here:

• Christian motifs throughout the film were obvious to me on first viewing (including the "crucifixion" scene as the pilot destroys the ship to save humanity, the washing of David's feet, and much more) but it is verifiably nuts that the original script included a heavy-handed hint that Jesus was actually an Engineer and that his crucifixion was the inciting incident in why the Engineers fell out with humanity. Which, I mean, fair enough? I thought it was just a hatred of AI but that fits somewhat better.
• I'm not sure I'd ever truly considered the fact that the "black slime" was somehow mirroring the host's intentions, so when a selfish, self-preservation-fueled human ingests it the result is an abomination that only considers itself.
• Obviously the film has a lot of references to the Prometheus myth from ancient Greece, but I wasn't aware that this is seen as a stepping stone in an incredibly common proto-mythological narrative of the "Dying God". As a storytelling construct it's clearly ancient and ties in with a lot of religious and mythological constructs: the idea of a God that sacrifices themselves in order to bring life into the world or let it achieve a true potential. Nor had I noticed the common thread of torn open abdomens (very Alien of course), with Prometheus himself having his liver removed each day and obviously you have the spear strike on Jesus, amongst others.
• I also think that mural in the first chamber of the Xenomorph fighting an Engineer (with abdomen torn open) is evocative of the yin-yang concept.
• I generally like the concept that the film is about the difference between acting to save others (self-sacrifice) versus acting to save yourself (self-preservation). Plus, framing the Engineers as a culture that values self-sacrifice above all else makes sense of the panspermia scene, the attack on David/androids (considering they are life born without suffering or sacrifice), and the killing of Weyland, a man who has spent a lifetime coming up with ways to prevent death.
  

Critique of JavaScript-heavy frontend frameworks and useful deep-dive into the issues of using client-side scripts or libraries for webmentions. Nicolas rightfully points out that this isn't just less performant for users but also increases resource usage for the webmention.io service, which is run for free.

Sometimes, using the server-side build is enough to get data from an API and serve HTML to all visitors, which is much better for performance.