“The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think” – Caitlin Stall-Paquet (The Walrus)

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“He cites S&P Global’s estimate that, in transitioning to green energy, manufacturers will need more copper in the next three decades than the world consumed over the past 120 years. Demand for copper is expected to roughly double between now and 2035, to make hardware such as rechargeable batteries, solar panel heat exchangers, and wind turbine generators. The question now is whether biomining can scale up fast enough to meet soaring demand”

The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think

“Bill Gates is bad for humanity” – Quinn Slobodian (New Statesman)

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“Although Schwab’s book is a tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Perhaps we are starting to solve the “Bill Gates Problem” by the creeping (if highly uneven) return of faith in the ability of public authorities to do better than private world-makers, alongside the ongoing discrediting of the tech saviours who enjoyed such a gullible audience in the early years of the millennium”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/11/bill-gates-is-bad-for-humanity

“Cake and Casualties” – Christoph Reuter (Das Spiegel)

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“A family stands at the grave of Danylo Boguslavskyi, born on April 7, 1990, and killed in action on October 16, 2022. “We always come on Saturdays,” says his brother Roman. “One Saturday, I drove him to the station. That was the last time we saw him. He was a lawyer and historian and was present at the Maidan protests in Kyiv in 2014. He volunteered after Russia’s invasion and was then wounded several times. For a while, he was in the hospital every month,” Roman recalls. It was almost as if the injured man maintained the hope that, by getting wounded again and again, he would be given a reprieve and would never be killed. Until he was”

https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/russlands-krieg-gegen-die-ukraine-uschhorod-der-friedlichste-ort-der-ukraine-a-48943553-cba2-4c04-8cc2-6dd4f6a10a14

“Begin End” – James Somers (New Yorker)

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“Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself.

In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

“The end of anonymity on Chinese social media” – Caiwei Chen (restofworld)

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“other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over 500,000”

https://restofworld.org/2023/weibo-legal-display-name-influencers/

“The worst thing about writing a book is that one day you’ll be done” – Marcin Wichary

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“All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for the word “paroxysm.”

Here’s something I should confess, but also something you all probably already know: I live for diminishing returns. I love staying somewhere long after everyone else left, fiddling with minutiae to never be noticed (although sometimes I will try to make people notice), finding pleasure in superfine tuning that comes after fine tuning. I love connecting things and pouring myself into the cracks of a project that few others notice”

“Warhammer Records: Brian May, bungled tours, and 40,000 hard rock anthems” – Callum Bains (Polygon)

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“Warhammer’s gothic ultraviolence was clearly gelling with the studded leather getups of Britain’s burgeoning metal scene. And with Games Workshop embracing what Jones describes as an “entrepreneur spirit” where “anything was possible,” the idea of following up these musical dalliances with a full-blown record label seemed less like pivot than a natural next step.

“We hadn’t got a clue about making a record, or what that involved,” says Jones. “We just thought, Well, how difficult can it be?”

https://www.polygon.com/23954679/warhammer-records-oral-history-brian-may-john-blanche-metal-af

“I Hereby Swear to Hate Henry Symeonis, Whoever That Is.” – Lowering The Bar

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“for more than 500 years, anyone who wanted a Master of Arts degree from Oxford had to take an oath promising they would never “agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis” (this was in Latin, so quod numquam consencient in reconciliationem Henrici Symeonis). The requirement was added to the university statutes in 1264, and wasn’t removed until 1827—more than half a millennium later. The good part is that for most of that enormous span of time, nobody had any idea who Henry Symeonis actually was or what he might have done”

“I Hereby Swear to Hate Henry Symeonis, Whoever That Is.”

“Zombie news: the strange resurrection of the local paper” – Will Dunn (New Statesman)

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“It was not a real newspaper but a zombie – a piece of promotional material created for the local Conservative MP, Robert Largan, by a company in nearby Manchester. As such, it was just the latest example of how the local newspaper industry, which has been all but destroyed, is now being replaced. Freed from the oversight of local reporters and editors, businesses and politicians have begun to create their own information networks – they look like local news, but report only the things their owners want the public to see”

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2023/11/zombie-news-the-strange-resurrection-of-the-local-paper

“The Cooperative That Could” – Ryan Cooper (The American Prospect)

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“S Group poses a more fundamental challenge. Here we have a hyper-efficient retail operation, run with cutting-edge management and logistics, dominating half the grocery market of a wealthy country, without minting a single billionaire in the process. It is not just competitive with capitalist businesses; it is more successful. It’s enough to make the ghost of Ronald Reagan cry.

https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-11-cooperative-that-could-s-group-finland/