exp1orer

I tried switching from Spotify to Youtube Music but the "download for offline" functionality is incredibly broken -- often doesn't recognize that it's on wifi to start downloading, multiple minutes to download an album that Spotify downloads in a few seconds, and for a longer playlist the pause/resume when you go off wifi doesn't work at all.

It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality, and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it.

[1] https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html

if anything is fungible, surely mushrooms are...

This is really cool!

If the author is around, I notice in the README you mention the GNU units program, which I use quite a bit. I'm curious if you've made any notable divergences from it?

a few clarifications (in the industry but not involved with this deal):

* carbon removal credits are a subset of carbon credits

* they are generally considered higher-quality than most other credits (which are "avoided emissions"). This is because, for example, turning on a direct air capture machine, is clearly something that would not happen without the sale of carbon credits.

* there's not always a clear line between carbon removal credits and non-removal (ie "avoided emissions").

* unfortunately the carbon credits that have come under the most fire (nature-based solutions like forestry) are also, technically, closer to being "carbon removal" -- and some sellers play up that ambiguity, to their advantage.

I love this essay. Anna Weiner's book Uncanny Valley has a great line about it as well:

> "it's like no one even read 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness,'" said an engineer who had recently read The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

I agree that this is likely missing data systematically.

However note the difference between carbon offsets vs carbon removals. I don't know what kinds of offsets Google bought but given that they started buying them >15 years ago, they were probably not removals.

I actually hesitated before posting for exactly this reason, and I don't think you're wrong to be sensitive to this. But you'll notice that there's actually no real political content in the link, nor was there any political discussion in the thread, so I think your response is a little bit of an overreaction.

Ha, no, just a fun exercise sparked by a conversation with a friend. It also doesn't take the road network into account, just county adjacencies.

Vaguely related, a few years ago I made a map of "how to drive from SF to NYC while passing through the minimum number of Republican-voting counties": https://github.com/louispotok/blue-road-trip

(OP but not author: the original seems to only have releases for windows, there's a python fork here: https://github.com/dlenski/wp2git )

This was the bit that got me:

> People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so.

If I'm reading your comment correctly, you may not be aware that methane abatement is also eligible for carbon crediting programs, which operate under the framework of "global warming potential" (GWP) to translate different gases into "CO2-equivalent tons" (tCO2e).

Maybe virtual assistant?

1. Incredible line.

2. That 6% is based on the most recent IPCC report which estimates 1.4 GT from HFCs, and another ~1.4 from CFCs+HCFCs, so 2.8 total. OWID seems to get its data from climatetrace, I haven't dug into their data, but if I'm reading that correctly it looks like that is only energy usage from manufacturing, rather than direct emissions of the gases. Looks like maybe this breakdown just ignores refrigerants, which is unfortunately common.

Tradewater is great, they are one of the original inspirations for this approach. The key differences are geography (they are mostly US-focused) and that they pursue stockpiles of gas where we go after the emissions from end-of-life equipment. So their counterfactual is slow leakage over time, and our counterfactual is immediate venting.

It's 2000x worse on a per-pound basis, using the Global Warming Potential (GWP), and 6% of total emissions on a CO2e basis. They are separate facts which are mentioned to serve different purposes: 6% is to emphasize the scale of the overall problem, and 2000x is to understand the leverage of this approach (small amount of material to handle for the impact).

Yeah, R600a is a so-called "natural refrigerant" with a GWP that rounds to zero. Not even close to in scope for us -- the lowest GWP gas we touch is R32, with GWP 750.

Your bio suggests you know more about the chemical details than I do, but we do have

1. A trial burn done by an independent lab to make sure that under normal operating conditions, when destroying refrigerant the levels of those + other chemicals are below certain thresholds

2. automatic monitoring and shutoff mechanisms if the kiln deviates from normal conditions

That is a super interesting idea! Hadn't considered it, have you seen anyone doing this with carbon credits before?