mbgerring

This is disappointing, I was hoping they were going to do something interesting with the display hinge to make it make sense as a touch interface. Can’t see it being useful as is.

> I have honestly given up on humanity

No you haven’t

Correct, and the reason I work in climate tech is Amory Lovins’ famous observation that people don’t care where their energy comes from, they care about “hot showers and cold beer”

Clean energy hardware meaning clean electricity generation, energy storage, or energy management and arbitrage hardware that reduces the need for fossil fuel-derived electricity.

I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.

I’m 38 years old, and I’ve worked in climate tech for the last 12 years. In my relatively short lifetime, and my relatively short career, I have seen the environment for political action, and funding for climate solutions, fluctuate maybe half a dozen times.

The physics, however, don’t change, and neither does the task in front of us.

I just spent ten months finding a job, the longest and most difficult job search of my career. It was hard because the macro environment is terrible, but also because I insisted on finding a role working on clean energy hardware.

At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.

We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself. The slow, steady work of transitioning away from fossil fuels is never going to be as profitable, as quickly, as the various forms of gambling and addiction that have driven the tech industry for most of my lifetime.

But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.

It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.

It’s so crazy that nobody wants a gigantic, loud, ugly building that raises their power bill and puts them out of a job in their neighborhood

No, they do not, they very clearly model the medium. Why do you believe otherwise?

Yes, we have been. Writing software was always the 21st century equivalent of being a skilled factory worker. Nothing at all like law, medicine, or real engineering, all of which require real credentials, licenses, and meaningful accountability for the practitioner if their work breaks something.

> We discovered a sophisticated recording device

did you though

State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.

Big picture, where this leads is a lot of physical stuff just getting unplugged from the Internet.

It's very easy to see how this goes — one side of the ledger is the cost savings you get from remote monitoring, remote control, automated cloud backups of access logs from employee badges, or whatever dumb reason this system was internet-connected in the first place.

On the other side of the ledger is the potential cost and probability of a shutdown from a cyberattack, whether that's from a belligerent state actor, a malfunctioning or maliciously deployed AI agent swarm, weird accelerationist hackers, or whatever, plus the cost of constantly defending and hardening systems against attack.

Chances are, the cost/benefit analysis will heavily favor just unplugging the thing from the Internet.

That’s correct, one of the many gigs I did during my 10-month search for a new full-time job this year was working 11 hours, 6 days a week, under the blazing desert sun, building solar and battery systems at Burning Man to take diesel generators offline. What were you trying to say about that here?

You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.

"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"

If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.