I'm not really sure that's true. Labour has also downgraded its climate ambitions and ruled lots of necessary change out in favour of promising technosolutions. That means when change is needed the expectations have not been managed and we risk a megabacklash. The victory is dramatic and large but mainly due to FPTP. The victory is very shallow beneath the surface with lots of marginal seats and in lots of them Tory+Reform share is bigger than the labour share.

We can absolutely enjoy this moment but the big fight for climate I think has only just begun in the UK.

Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft's climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).

Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn't. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there's also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.

Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can't do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it's accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn't actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.

I would argue you've actually articulated exactly why individual action inevitably leads to wider collective action. It take attempting to do the right thing on individual level for some people to see the systemic issues that are there (like the subsidies you mention).

The reason its not seen as clear cut is when research has been done such a change changes a whole host of other behaviours of people e.g. where they choose to live or even how they travel.

For example, a policy that allows hybrid working or fully remote working might lead a portion of employees to move from a city centre where car ownership is low to a suburb where it is high. So you might replace a 5-day a week short commute by public transport with a 2-day a week long commute by car which would generate more emissions. This is more than just a hypothetical and has been observed in some cases.

It's also worth just noting that whilst digital infrastructure at current levels is usually less carbon intensive than any amount of carbon intensive travel it does have a cost and that the trajectory to more and more intensive technologies is increasing that impact (e.g. blockchain and modern AI techniques)

Lastly, there are efficiencies of scale for heating and cooling that might be achieved in offices which might outweigh the transport costs. This is true where I am partly because offices have been brought up to modern spec by regulation where housing has been let go: being more draughty and less insulated.

Personally, though my take is that whilst these second order effects are super important to look at (since in the short term will be linked to real world emissions) I think they are probably best thought of as ways of showcasing issues in other sectors that need tackling serpately (e.g. the suburbs needing to transition away from carbon intensive travel and land use policies to ensure that we don't lose the necessary density of our urban environments).

The only time I think it would be important as an assessment of a particular policy is when some cost is intrinsic to that change. Say, for example that the only way home working could function for a particular use case was by using some sort of energy intensive block chain system for authenticity and the additional emissions costs outweighed the benefits of avoided travel.

Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn't make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance ('merit') is complex interaction between an individual's skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on "merit" you are just further entrenching that discrimination.

This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn't survive.

I'm glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.

This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It's about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.

Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.

Lots of discussion on the technology and the pros and cons and likely implications which is super interesting but also think it should be noted how cool taking a concept like this and making some art out of it.

Really nice way of showing other worlds are possible using a technology thread that got closed by the take off of fossil fuels. I think a lot of the future solutions will look like this.

Kudos!

Just to be clear this might work at organisational and individual levels but not at a global system level where net zero or net negative human emissions is the only viable way to limit the damage and begin to repair.

I do agree with you rule of thumb at lower scales though as there's too much accounting mitigation which can directly oppose system wide net zero (i.e. by buying up small bits of negative emissions that need to happen anyway whilst not mitigating your own emissions).

I suspect this will generate a lot of discussion and opinions on both sides but what I think we lack is a culture of longitudinal data and study. Maybe you are right or maybe dropping new users in the deep end puts them off forever. It would be nice to see some quantative study on the Linux user experience. Does it shift wider tech beliefs or political beleifs?

My understanding is the internal calculation is that they know the time is up and eventually the money train of fossil fuels will come to an end the only question for them is how much more money they extract before they cut their losses, hide the wealth and move on.

The calculation is that, because of the sheer scale of profits from FF any amount of delay in the transition away from them (even say six months) is worth to them billions of dollars which massively outweighs the size of any fines.

Basically they are banking on there being no real consequences or accountability and to the extent they think about the climatic consequences at all they think they'll just be able to buy their way out of them.

Just a note on the climate science that might help here. We aren't facing a binary outcome. Our actions now, even small ones, have tangible effects on the outcomes we face in a highly non-linear way.

The FF (and meat) industry absolutely want you to feel that you have no agency and no amount of change will not make a difference so may as well give them your last lot of money as you settle for a worse (if any) future. Its absolutely not inevitable, other futures are possible. Avoiding the very worst is the difference between all out collapse of human and earth systems and a situation where things gets dicey for a while but one we can recover from. I know it can feel bleak and trigger the reaction you are talking about but the best solution to that is to pick up a shovel and start helping. There's so many ways to do that doing small but easy changes to your personal consumption is a good start. The best are those you do collectively with others as it multiplies your impact and gives you tangible resiliance networks for the changes that are coming.

Both are the problem. An activity that is less harmful but more people do can add up to more than a more harmful activity that very few people do.

No pathway where we avoid the worst of what's coming doesn't involve this sort of change for most people.