Comment by lucid-dev
21 hours ago
New generations have new language and are attempting to define themselves through their usage of certain terminology and re-framing of words (Arduino -> Arduina).
This isn't satire and it doesn't have to be dismissed. While I don't find increasing the definition and perceived uniqueness of one's personality and identity is necessarily a positive social thing, it's pretty much the most common thing in today's world - so we shouldn't be judgemental of anyone for doing it, even if "their unique terms and identification process" don't match our own.
From a project perspective, I find this to be SO creative and VERY HELPFUL energy in terms of truly starting from a primitives/first principles perspective and shows how having a specific ethos and concept allows for development of new forms.
Like it or not, it's easy to find out the date that oil (petroleum) will run out. It's easy to see the writing on the wall for anyone who cares to see - a high tech utopia Earth will not be. So enjoying the process of pre-emptively creating new tools, new techniques, and flexible terminology - all of this will BE OF AID to all people who must live through this century together.
I share your supportive and generally charitable attitude here. I don’t have to understand the constraints they choose for themselves in order to admire that they’re working within them.
For example, I had a reaction to their ethical objection:
> During our initial experiments with porcelain, we were immediately aware that the higher temperatures, and therefore electric consumption, were not compatible with our standards for ethical hardware.
If an ATMega IC is in bounds, would solar-sourced electricity be in bounds? Maybe accumulated in rust batteries if lithium is out for supply chain reasons? If you’re seeking to avoid electricity in general, would technologies like bellows and charcoal-making get you where you needed to be?
Of course—as they demonstrated—why do all that, when the local clay and stick fire work just fine! In that sense, my pre-conceived requirements would have gotten in the way of my learning what they learned.
So often we’re stuck so far down the road of “the way things are done” we forget how many of those technology choices reflect path dependence along the road to maturity, rather than the One True Technique… good on the authors for developing within different, human-scale production constraints.
What I liked about their approach is that they picked things that would otherwise be considered trash (clay and dead tree branches from under their feet) and used them in a creative and productive way.
This of course is not scalable. But hacker technology, in its original definition, is not about scalability, but about creative use of existing things.
At scale, solar electricity of course would work better, and likely standard PCB processes would even have a smaller environmental impact. But it's not the point.
> it's easy to find out the date that oil (petroleum) will run out
No it isn't! This can be estimated, but things can change rapidly. We don't even know when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, which makes a 5% difference to global production.
Trying to put a precise date on it reminds me of the clergyman who came up with a "precise" date for the creation of the Earth of 4004 BC, by analysing the biblical genealogies.
Nor is it a hard cutoff. Each individual well is like a tap that gradually gets slower and slower, and more and more mixed with water. They are almost always shut off with some oil left in, but exactly how much depends on the oil price at that time.
> a high tech utopia Earth will not be
There are eight billion people on Earth. We're dependent on antibiotics, global food transport, and Haber nitrogen. It's either a high-tech utopia or a much, much smaller number; and we'd better hope that's achieved by falling birth rates and not by one of the other routes.
What date is that? Petrochemicals aren't all stored in a big tank somewhere. My model is that there are many marginal sources which are not cost-effective to exploit, but which could be exploited with better technology or at a higher cost. I do not think we will ever extract all of these; instead, the cost of extraction will increase gradually, shifting incentives towards other energy sources.
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like.
Some napkin math suggests July 11, 2478 AD assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch.
Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.
>assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch
Is that assuming a large fraction of the supply will be synthetic fuels created by electrolysis?
I would like to see the napkin. I wasn't aware synthetic fuels were on that kind of a trajectory.
2072. This date hasn't changed from 4 years ago.
Try google:
The fact that we do not know what the future will look like, means we should make our best efforts to understand certain likely scenarios, and adjust our own behavior and actions accordingly in order to be a part of designing a future that is attainable and practicable given the current conditions/inertia at all socio-economical levels.
Your assumptions are equivalent to the "big tank" model. You assume that there's a fixed amount of petroleum, we know where all of it is, and we'll extract all of it. My point is that increased costs of extraction will push us away from petroleum before we reach a hard limit. Also, we could discover more petroleum -- you specify "known reserves" but it seems unlikely to me that we've really found all of it. (Not an expert though!)
Personally, I hope we transition to green energy sooner rather than later, but I think that these predictions are overconfident. A lot more will change in 50 years than in 4.
The language bit is dual purpose. For one it's clearly tongue in cheek. Furthermore, it's a way to scare off people who would get set off from a little bit of language play. It's a way to make an online space free of people they don't want without actually putting up hard borders or moving it to a less public space. (Personally I think it's a wonderful strategy)
All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what they were hoping for
While I appreciate your perspective, I'll note that for a certain group of people that I know personally, this language is NOT tongue and cheek. Though I find myself to be neither a woman nor an artist, I know people who are both - and this language is becoming more and more common as people reach for a way to set themselves apart from a social precedent and past language that they feel is neither inclusive nor representative of their own ambitions or experience.
What's really interesting, is the boundary they are crossing given this "tech-artistry", which clearly HN is pretty far removed from. It's quite interesting for someone who's seen plenty of this before to observe the polarized response from a different slice of society.
It depends which language you're talking about I guess. The "Arduina" bit is clearly a joke
3 replies →
> - a high tech utopia Earth will not be.
Press X to doubt.
We will be fine, we will build a high tech utopia or die trying. Anything else is defeatist nonsense.