Well it’s not “solved”, and they seem to be increasing in number, but its not like that became the “hive” (which I’m sure it’s not the right name for ants). Way way more cocoons are appearing and disappearing than the average amount of “nurses” shuffling them around. And crucially, while they walk around a metal beam inside, they don’t seem to care about my tomatoes and my plants. The feeling I get is that they are guests. I’m ready to regret my choice of not acting, but so far they keep behaving.

It might be a silly idea, but that’s what I do with my weighted blanket when I want it to be a bit heavier: I fold it just over my shoulders, and leave it single on the rest of the body. It doesn’t change the thermal properties much, but it feels better. So you could try a lighter weighted blanket (10 or 12 lbs), folded on the shoulder. The problem is that lighter weighted blankets are probably not necessarily cooler than a heavier one.

slrpnk.net was gone for a while, and I didn’t update the thread, but I wanted to thank you again, @StopSpazzing@lemmy.world We went through a cold-ish and super rainy week and into a heatwave, and while they kept shuffling their cocoons around, they seem to clean up after themselves and leave when hatched. Now, it seems like it’s an invasive species around here, and they are a bit annoying in some places (my wife’s workplace had an indoor wave of them). I’ll confirm the species when I get a chance. But for the specific case of the greenhouse, they are very considerate guests, ignoring my plants, nursing their babies, and GTFO. I think they leave the panels cleaner than they find them. A+ guests, would host again :D

The location is southern Germany. I don’t know if carpenter ants are a thing here.

They now amassed almost everything in the sections of the panels that are partially covered by the structure. It rained hard for 24 hours, so they are not shielding from the sun,

The ants are now spread on at least 4 panels (but crucially, not in the one that I flushed, fully damaging the tape). I guess it’s very humid in there, I let it bake off a bit before reinstalling it, but then I thought it would dry also while installed, given the damaged tape. The heavy rain didn’t make it worse (the openings are in a protected area)

I will have to spend the better part of a day to remove and fix all panels, so I guess I’ll observe the evolution until the weekend. I would not have the time (and the weather!) for major maintenance until then.

The garden has several spots with heavy ants activity. I naively expect that after hatching they will move out…

Yesterday night there was heavy rain, it must have been bumpy in there.

Are these crumbles a sign they hatched or broken? There seem to be more ants around today… Do they come out of that cocoon fully independent?

They also seem to be accumulating under the frame, so it might be already getting a bit too hot for them?

It’s fun to watch, I hope I don’t regret it 😅

Thank you! That seems to agree with what I observed in a mostly shady southern panel, where I observed the same early in the year, and while there are still some, they seem to have moved on (well, as long as I dont look on the north side :))

That is fascinating about them using it as incubator. I forgot that ants don’t all lay eggs… So they must be taking them there from where the queen lives?

I’ll leave them alone and observe for a while and ping you here if I have questions, thank you!

It’s on the north side, it gets sun but not too direct. The same cannot be said for me, working on it on the hottest day of the year so far. Stick a fork in me. I’m done.

The link to “green energy push” in the title is pernicious. There are laws, laws are broken while mining, green energy per se should be left out of the title.

After how many half-lives, if any, can those materials be declared “cool”?

Clearly a mistake to focus con electrification where we don’t control the supply chain. Better to keep pumping oil where we… * checks notes *… Yeah, well, end of the press conference, nothing to see here.

I don’t say that biofuels don’t have a reason to exist but I have a feeling they are mentioned just to say something “alternative” to electrification

I have all the same issues most of y’all have with the moral and environmental issues with giant corporate models but I take issue with this statement:

The core function of an LLM is to enclose public commons (aggregate, open-access human knowledge) in a centrally-controlled black box.

The core function of an LLM is to generate statically plausible text (which is what my totally open source mobile keyboard is doing as I type using a very small transformer based LLM, for instance)

Using it to provide an answer to a search instead of returning sources is 100% the evil you described. But it is a shitty use for a technology that would be unfair to reflect entirely on the technlogy itself.

LLMs are not going away. We might disagree on their usefulness (I flip flop daily on my opinion about it, which is usually a sign that something is inherently neutral) but zealot blanket rejections worry me a bit.

The other knee-jerk reaction about energy (and water, but that is not unavoidable) usage is also something I try to process a bit compartimentalized. It needs to improve and the scale of growth is unsustainable. Does that invalidate everything currently explored or researched?

The push for more efficiency is vital and rightful. Do more with less. But while it’s fair to criticize someone for using an incandescent light bulb instead of better technology to, say, illuminate a room, criticizing them for using light in that room is wrong, IMHO. We don’t need less light (well, yes, outdoors, but for different reasons), we need better technology and cleaner energy so we don’t need to worry about who is turning on which light. I get that “AI” is power hungry, and that needs to improve, but I am very uncomfortable with the idea that we should decide a priori if something is worth using energy or not. It’s… A bit draconian?

I know its not a super original position (“a tool is just a tool”). I’m trying to work through this myself. As I type this I think of PoW blockchains as a counterexample that I would bring up to debate myself. Yes, it looks like there are usages that appear to be inherently “wrong”. Why do I find blockchain worse? Because I consider it unworthy of the energy spent for it, which makes me “guilty” of what I criticized…

Damn, It’s hard to try to have opinions!

More in topic: vibe coding (super icky name, jfc) might be vaguely OK for prototyping in some cases, or extremely limited cases where you can almost prove correctness. Or yeah, personal tools where you’re the only person to be responsible and affected by the results. Anything more than that, and it makes me nervous. It has not much to share with solarpunk per se. But AI aided development (maybe a broader and less silly named concept) is not antithetical to solarpunk, IMHO. The DIY nature you ( @strongoose@slrpnk.net) describe doesn’t go down at infinity. To build a community garden from scratch you first need to invent the universe. You not knowing how to invent the universe. You still own the technology if you use a tool you don’t fully understand the internals of. You need to retain the option to understand it though, I agree.