A highly informative article on various strategies for developing and organizing community infrastructure without utilizing the extractive traditional banking system.

I personally find horizontally focused economic dialogue rare, so it's refreshing to see financial knowledge leveraged to pave the way *out of* our current system, rather than funneling resources back *into* it.

Along with all the tools spoken of in the article, there's also mention of Viable Systems, the framework behind Chile's Cybersyn and also revived in @Anark's A Modern Anarchism.

If you have a sufficient coalition around some community need and are unsure of how to organizationally or financially proceed, I believe this article is for you.

I also just recommend Resilience in general.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-12-17/tools-for-growing-the-commons/

#anarchism #organizing #community #solarpunk

A straightforward write up on how to organize with your neighbors in a way that allows you to take collective, direct action on matters that affect you.

My understanding is that a neighborhood popular assembly is one of the most potent forms of organization since everyone lives somewhere regardless of class, race, disability sexuality, employment. They can also easily federate together.

I find the second section helpful, where they talk about leveraging existing local meetups like at cultural centers and sports leagues as a low pressure way to meet your neighbors.

https://www.blackrosefed.org/how-to-organize-a-neighborhood-popular-assembly/

#organizing #solarpunk #anarchism

An interesting article on human cognition and rationality.

They talk about "computational rationality", essentially a framework for understanding how cognitive machines with limited computational resources go about making optimal decisions.

> ...for a finite set of coin tosses, the sequences we intuitively feel to be less random are precisely the ones that are least likely to occur. Imagine a sliding window that can only “see” four coin tosses at a time (roughly the size of our memory capacity) while going through a series of results – say from 20 coin tosses. The mathematics show that the contents of that window will hold “HHHT” more often than “HHHH”.

https://theconversation.com/rationality-research-shows-were-not-as-stupid-as-we-have-been-led-to-believe-108218

Finally got around to reading Parse, Don't Validate and I found the following to most tersely sum up the article among some other great morsels:

"Really, a parser is just a function that consumes less-structured input and produces more-structured output."

"Under this flexible definition, parsers are an incredibly powerful tool: they allow discharging checks on input up-front, right on the boundary between a program and the outside world, and once those checks have been performed, they never need to be checked again!"

Basically, when you can, turn your programmatic observations into structured, actionable data rather than tossing them out the window.

https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/

#programming

Really fascinating read on desert locations throughout the globe.

“The combination of the Earth's rotation and the interaction between land masses and oceans creates stable high pressure zones (sinking air) over the oceans west of the continents. The resulting aridity is reinforced by the cold ocean currents that also occur on western coasts at this latitude; the cold water further inhibits the potential for rising air currents that are necessary to make rain. Thus on the west edge of every large land mass there is a hyperarid area near 30° latitude called a horse latitude desert.”

And they provide a nice little graphic illustrating so

https://desertmuseum.org/books/nhsd_biomes.php#why