A well researched and referenced video (see yt description for references and spreadsheets), from Sharath of Building Beautifully.

The cost of building transit in the Anglosphere has spiralled out of control. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong are all terrible at managing transit costs. Meanwhile, nations like France, Spain, South Korea and Turkey are running laps around the Anglosphere, building world-class transit at unprecedented speeds for prices up to four times cheaper. There is no reason for building transit to cost this much. Follow me as we unpack the staggering reasons that costs have spiralled out of control, and what we can do about it. Thank you to Jedwin Mok for appearing in this video! Jedwin introduced me to the transit costs crisis in mid-2025, which led me to ultimately create this video and interview him for it.

Ceccanti believed ChatGPT could help as an organizational tool for their housing project. He aimed to create a bespoke chatbot that would help steward the land, keep track of their things to do and show others how to emulate their project.

During this process, Ceccanti didn’t spend “ridiculous amounts of time” engaging with ChatGPT, said Fox. He continued to work, while also farming and taking care of their animals: goats, a horse, his cat, a dog and several chickens. Invested in the people and relationships around him, he spent quality time with his friends and wife, she said. Life went on without any issues for years while they slowly made progress on their housing plan.

In the spring of 2025, Ceccanti’s obsession with the chatbot began. He told Fox in late January that he needed a bigger record of his conversations with the bot so that he could continue using it to work on their sustainable housing project with longer prompts and conversations – upgrading from a $20-a-month subscription to a $200 one. By mid-March, he had begun spending more than 12 hours a day in the basement, sometimes up to 20, typing to ChatGPT, Fox recalled. That’s when “he decided to really start chasing the creation of an independent AI on a home server”.

Over time, his relationship with the chatbot came to replace his human connections, Richardson said: “Every time he went back to ChatGPT, it hooked him a little bit more, and after a while, he stopped being interested in anything else.”

On 11 June – day 86 after Ceccanti’s heaviest engagement with the bot – Fox begged him to stop using ChatGPT. In a moment of clarity, he listened to her. He unplugged his computer and quit ChatGPT.

On the third day, however, when Fox and Richardson were out for work, they received a phone call from their neighbor saying Ceccanti was in their yard acting strangely. When they returned, they found him talking to their horse, with the horse’s lead rope tied around his neck like a noose.

“He was absolutely enraged with us. He did not recognize that he was not himself anymore,” said Richardson.

Ceccanti moved to his friend’s place in Portland and eventually resumed using ChatGPT. After a month, however, he quit ChatGPT again, just a few days prior to his death.. “He was going to go to Hawaii and not take his computer, and he was going to work on finishing a story and get his shit together,” said Fox. By the time he stopped engaging with ChatGPT, he had 55,000 pages worth of conversations with it, according to Fox.

https://reg.bom.gov.au/

Also, reminder that the places interface they were developing on the old site is awesome:
https://reg.bom.gov.au/places/
-- you can navigate to an arrangement of weather info for a place and just bookmark that URL.

Sick of our elected representatives warmly welcoming a leader of a genocidal apartheid state?

Reckon the reckless acceptance of massacaring the family and friends of our own community is not helping social cohesion?

Then make it known! Turn up! 5pm on a weekday for your convenience.

As Agence France-Presse reports, Venezuelan officials say the US air strikes that killed at least 56 soldiers also destroyed numerous non-military targets, including the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC).

On Wednesday, the country’s science and technology minister Gabriela Jimenez shared footage of an obliterated building which she says housed the mathematics department at the IVIC. On top of this, Jimenez said that four other IVIC buildings were targeted for destruction: the physics, chemistry, ecology, and nuclear research centers.

“Two missiles struck the area directly,” Jimenez wrote on Telegram referencing the mathematics center, per AFP which translated the comment. “The attack was total: these areas housed servers and equipment essential to our computer networks that were completely devastated.”

In addition to the academic buildings, the governor of La Guaira, Jose Alejandro Teran, said the US air strikes destroyed a medicine warehouse located on the coastal city near Caracas.

“Tons of medicine burned to ash, tons of food,” Teran said in a video posted on social media. “Here are the results of what the bombs and missiles of the United States government have done… to destroy our warehouses full of medicine and food.”

cross-posted from: https://theblower.au/users/DropBear/statuses/115824013993575742

A Jewish woman who grew up in Bondi wore a keffiyeh to an event at Bondi, after the massacre.
"All of Israel is illegally occupied Palestinian land; Israel is an illegitimate entity that never fulfilled even the requirements for UN membership, and the deeper you go into the history, the clearer that becomes."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/29/fwdd-d29.html
@palestine@lemmy.ml
@palestine@fedibird.com
#Palestine
#Israel
#CrimesAgainstHumanity

The NSW parliament is being recalled on Monday to address legislative changes in response to Sunday's terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, which saw 15 people killed in a shooting targeting the Jewish community.

The government will seek to outlaw the public display of "terrorist symbols" such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) group flag, and give police more powers to require someone suspected of committing an offence during a public assembly to remove their face covering.

The laws will carry penalties of up to two years' imprisonment or a $22,000 fine for any individual publicly displaying terrorist symbols. For organisations, the fine will be up to $110,000.

Under current laws, face coverings only have to be removed for police to confirm someone's identity post-arrest. The new restrictions would mean the threshold would be lowered to include all suspects.

Minns said the chant 'globalise the intifada' would also be banned, saying "horrific recent events" had shown that the phrase "is hate speech and it encourages violence in our community".

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=3nF3j3bK35M

Everyone wants a piece of the Bondi massacre, it seems. I took a look at some of those factions and the things they've done in the wake of the tragedy. After the clown show, I have a chat about the conclusions I've come to.

---

thank you

Tom Tanuki
Shared December 18, 2025

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40525859

We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime.

According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry—and we're now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

It's been a long time coming that we would be though—Earth has plenty of other material spread through its upper atmosphere via meteorites burning up. In fact, even now, according to the paper, the total mass of material injected into the atmosphere from rockets and satellites is only about 7% of the mass of meteors that hit Earth annually. However, since rockets and satellites are primarily made up of metals, whereas meteors are primarily made up of silicates, the amount of metal we inject into the atmosphere is around 16% that of natural causes.

That may not sound like much, but for a few particular elements it's much, much higher. In 2015, anthropogenic (i.e. human-made) sources were the highest contributor to 18 different elements in the atmosphere. In 2024, that number jumped to 24 different elements. That could grow to as many as 30 different elements that will be the primary reason for their increased levels in the atmosphere in the coming decades.

[...]

The paper itself: Space waste: An update of the anthropogenic matter injection into Earth atmosphere