badtension
badtension on Hacker News
Very much so, people try to sell it like it's a magical solution to all the world problems. Even if it was as amazing as people tout it to be right now (it isn't) it wouldn't make our lives better. Maybe faster, a bit cheaper (for some) but not better in the most fundamental sense. We can do better right now but choose to ignore our most important issues to chase the new shiny thing.
AI R&D definitively has its place but certainly not like this, this feels like just another hype bubble.
A good read explaining some of it: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
Interesting, I would have thought in many cases it is maybe not trivial, but easily doable at worst. Do you have some personal experience with that?
Water heating, AC, fridges and freezers, maybe even EV charging (in some cases) could be done at any time during the 24 hour period, if setup with proper hysteresis.
Making thermostats that are aware of dynamic energy pricing or, better yet, are in part controlled by the energy company (
I want my house to be 21-24 C, I don't care when the cooling happens) would give us massive flexibility.
All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.
I feel like this is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? Is a habit of doing the laundry at night worth more than additional millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere?
I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
Dynamic energy pricing with smart power-hungry appliances controlled by the energy producer would be a great start.
I see, thank you for explaining!
Fair point about shared roadways that probably split communities,
Do kids attending the same school really live that far apart? Seems like a very long distance, especially in a suburbian neighbourhood.
Thanks for the info! What system / DE do you intend on using? What type of work do you do on your computer?
I was thinking about getting a wireless keyboard+mice and attach RPi at the back of my monitor to have a clean and very low-power setup.
I get the joke but let me just mention that wood campfire is one of the worst solutions (if done at scale). This may sound idealistic (like the other comments mentioned) but I think we just have to reduce our energy footprint and then many solutions will be green again.
One great example (some will say absurd and impractical) is just using energy whenever it is available, with minimum storage. That means cooking, heating water etc. during the day (or when the wind is high) and only using lighting and low-energy devices at night. Factories could work on a similar principle (producing more in the summer) but then we would have to rearrange a lot more stuff to suit the seasonal renewable energy production capabilities.
This may sound absurd but it only shows how much we are locked in our way of thinking about how reality is supposed to work, not what it is. There's no reason to have high quality on-demand electrical energy available 24/7/365 other than convenience. Convenience that fossil fuels brought us.
An interesting article that I stumbled upon recently:
Tidal Energy Is Not Renewable
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/tide.html
We really have to think this all through before jumping 100% on any particular bandwagon. Researching, testing, seeing how it goes and adjusting is a must.
Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.
Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.
That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
I've been washing dishes by hand my whole life and just recently got a dishwasher. When washing by hand pre-rinsing and soaking is essential so I kept doing that even after getting the machine, only recently discovering that I am wasting water this way.
Thanks for the tip about the old dishwashers.
Tangentially I want to mention that rinsing dishes before running the dishwasher is a known anti-pattern. The first washing cycle is exactly that - a rinsing cycle. I know this is off-topic but saving water is always a good idea.
In my experience visual tools like RoseRT can quickly turn into an obstacle. I think it's super important to not only know what the non-code solutions may be good at but also keep the solution limited or at least be prepared to go back to code if the problem domain is complex enough.
We are easily manipulated into thinking how stupid people must be but in reality it is often a bad process, tiredness, mismanagement or cost cutting that are responsible for it.
I encourage you to read about the "Hot McDonald's coffee" case which has unfortunately been a meme for a long time:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...
What? Software getting slower faster than hardware getting faster? Impossible!
Sure but why include that if a text processor is too much for the board? To display static images or demoscene visualisations?
Same here. A great advantage of such devices is they can later be easily repurposed to control home automation, audio system or make a simple DIY project with them. It is much harder with other types of hardware, like a laptop for example.
Are your other microcomputers capable of normal office operation?
Thanks. This is a bit surprising to me since they advertise two 60 Hz 4K display drivers...
I wonder if anyone here is using RPi as a main PC? Seems to be capable of most office work with a bit of multimedia on the side. My laptop is dying and I would love to get something stationary that is low-power by default yet good enough so that the internet wouldn't lag.
Mounted at the back of an LCD screen could make a nice wireless setup with the other peripherals.
Don't forget "refuse". A ton of stuff is not worth the materials from which they were made in the first place.
A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.
I just wonder how do "mishaps" like this square with techno-optimists looking at graphs going up and convincing us "everything is on track for an amazing future!" [1].
I don't know if this is just my cynicism but I just can't believe we are going to fix the climate. Every now and then something like this sees the light of day and it seems like we are just doing some clever feel-good bookkeeping rather than fixing the core of the issue.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3VVrggKz4
People will always need more energy, that's why cheap nuclear is a fallacy that many fall for (Jevons paradox).
We need high marginal energy prices, preferably progressively increasing with usage. Similar with other types of consumerism.
I'd pick recyclability over aesthetics any day.