Charlie StrossNew blog entry: The Pivot: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
Sandra Bond@cstross Happy birthday. Rock on, les vieux.
Ben Hardill@cstross typo in the date of Deadnought 1095 > 1905?
Sam Livingston-Gray
kdgregory
Stiofán de Buitléir@cstross Solid analysis. I have a similar sense.
Add to the material crises the widespread sense of No Future, to quote the Pistols, leading to a secular mental health crisis, especially among the young.
We can't go on like this.
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)@cstross Forwarding the basically good energy economics news to the resident engineering student about to graduate with a focus on electric grid work.
"distributed sources" are harder to use as leverage, bringing me back to my Economic Anthropology class, decades ago, about what drives territoriality. Oil is a prime actor here, as you say.
Isaac Ji Kuo@cstross It would be nice if we could replace cryptocoins and generative LLM AI with aluminum-coin. And its close relative magnesium-coin.
Turning electricity into aluminum (and/or magnesium) actually produces something useful. For example, it can be used to store electricity during the daytime and produce electricity at night.
Or, of course, we can't have nice things.
jimmynohands@isaackuo @cstross To add to those: it was on Charlie's blog - maybe by Charlie himself - that I saw it pointed out that ammonia can be produced electrochemically; ammonia can be burned for power quite handily on top of its many other uses, and we know how to handle ammonia (mostly) safely. There are options!
Terence Eden@cstross
FYI your website is blocked by the British Library's WiFi.
Doesn't seem to be blocking other Let's Encrypt certificates.
FYI your website is blocked by the British Library's WiFi.
Doesn't seem to be blocking other Let's Encrypt certificates.
gwire@Edent are you able to see https://valid-isrgrootx1.letsencrypt.org/ and https://valid-isrgrootx2.letsencrypt.org/ ?
R13 is signed by X1 and has only recently started being issued
@Edent I have no idea why and no idea how to fix it. Their problem, not mine.
@cstross @Edent Chrome is a bad diagnostic for this - it's something that browsers don't care about, but other network equipment might.
Your cert is fine, but your webserver is also sending intermediate certs that have expired. See the "NotAfter:" dates:
https://gist.github.com/gwire/4feba9e5e09daff5efb7fbd0e60fbf11
Gary Parker 
zenkat@cstross Spot on, absolutely brilliant!
There is a new world waiting to be born. It's delivery will be messy and painful. But we must be ready to help envision and build that future!
fdrThe he opened up a book of quotes
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian Marxist
From the early twentieth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Creatin' the counter-hegemony
Tangled up in blue
🔏 Matthias Wiesmann@cstross To your point, the prototype of the french high-speed train was powered by gas turbines. The oil shock killed that idea…
@thias Same with the APT-E prototype here in the UK.
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)@cstross
Happy almost nearly birthday!
("HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY" I believe Owl spelled it for Eeyore)
@cstross Also note that Switzerland largely switched to PET-R, i.e. recycled PET for bottles, which is significant as up to now, PET was recycled into lower value plastics…
@cstross happy birthday for the weekend, fella. Hope it’s a good one 🍻
@cstross I still feel we are living through 1989, but in reverse. One generation after winning over the soviet empire because of economical neglect, the US seems to be collapsing because of political neglect…
@thias See also: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2023/11/22/abby-innes-introduces-late-soviet-britain-why-materialist-utopias-fail/
Abby Innes introduces Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail - LSE Review of Books
Abby Innes introduces her new book Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail on how factors such as the rise of neoliberalism have destabilised Britain
Bruno Nicoletti@cstross Great essay. Good news, renewables have caused the peaking of fossil electricity generation in H1 2025. Growth in global solar and wind generation now outpaces growth in electricity demand leading to a 0.6% reduction in coal generation and 0.2% for gas.
I have hope, but idiots like Trump, Badenoch and Farage make me so bloody angry when they double down on zombie technologies like coal, gas and nuclear.
FWIW wholesale solar is 9.8c/W last time I checked.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-met-all-electricity-demand-growth-in-h1-2025/
@cstross And happy birthday.
@cstross As you say, the geopolitics is going to be “interesting”. Renewables insulate countries with minimal fossil resources from global energy prices, wind and sunshine are free after all (well until a hedge fund can figure a way to monetise them). You may need to import panels/turbines, but doing that every 25 years is much more secure than having to constantly import fuels. This has really been the main drive behind China’s “electrify everything and use renewables to do that” strategy.
Gerard Cunningham ✒️This turned out to be unexpectedly optimistic in a long-road-ahead solarpunk kind of way..
mike
Tom Bortels+1 insightful.
The one quibble I'd have is "the end of Moore's law" - which has been predicted for 20 years now. The reality is technology moves in s-curves, and yes - the semiconductor S-curve is near the end, we won't get another order-of-magnitude improvement in photolithography - but there's multiple S-curves, and photolithography itself was a paradigm shift, and there will be others. Honestly - we grossly underutilize the insane amounts of power we have, hardware outstripped software practice in like the 80's. And the new S-curves in software are paradigm shifts, not process - the inventions of things like the web and PKI and (sadly) cryptocurrency. Guarantee you 20 years from now in computing there will be a new big thing, basically unanticipated right now - and it'll run on the hardware that exists today.