BLDC motors, also called brushless, is the silent geeky revolution that brought us lighter, cheaper and more efficient robotics. It also allowed to make battery-powered electric version of many gardening equipment. More precisely, it is the design of cheap lighter controllers that made all of this possible (a good controller will require a fast-ish microcontroller on board)

Kind of a niche subject but happy to see it here!

Ban ads and close source.

If you ban smartphones, make sur to make it in a way that would not prevent us to reinvent them in the way they should have existed in the first place.

As someone who was extremely vocal of “the cloud” when it arrived and enthusiastic about AI (especially the non generative uses) I am sad and a bit angry that people only NOW realize that servers do not exist on an etheral plane but do have physical requirements.

The article is about lithium and copper. AI does not use lithium. It is a very small user of copper.

“Our ancestors were miners,” says Ramos. They were the ones who discovered the copper in the first place. The problem, she says, is the scale.

And I’ll add a complementary take: the problem is not the tech, it is the capitalist economy that decides to centralize megamining projects in the places where they are worst (read: cheapest) to implement due to poor environmental and social regulations. Most mineral resources are pretty well distributed in the world, we choose to mine them only in the poorest countries for a reason, which is unregulated trade.

The question is not “is the damage done worth the final benefit?” but rather “is the environmental and social damage worth a 20% decrease in consumer prices?”

Nowadays with JIT #1 and #2 are very close. There was less than a x2 performance gap when I compared a direct simple task in C and javascript.

About #3 no one does that.

#3 and #4 will be on the same scale, every token generated is roughly the same amount of CPU.

It surely sounds like it. Which is annoying if they are crying out wolf, because China can and probably will (or did) put backdoors in its equipment.

Batteries pack with radio is weird. But really I don’t understand why we don’t have technical details.

Yes, well, from what sources do you gather that?

(I hate it when a technical take makes me side with authoritarian propaganda, but well…)

There is zero technical information in that article, yet plenty of people jumping to politically-loaded conclusions. Reminds me of the time when there was a (totally legitimate imho) scare about Huawei backdoors but zero technical details about what was actually found.

So from what I understand, some inverters “phone home”. A despicable habit of too many hardware in the industry, but the phrasing suggests without even confirming that it may be more nefarious than “mere” telemetry that plagues any connected device out there.

“Rogue device” suggests that it is additional hardware. They imply that the add connectivity channels that were not present in the device. Are we talking offline devices that were stealthily loaded with a 5G simcard or a Lora device waiting for a bricking code? It is implied but not stated, which makes me extremely suspicious.

If Chinese authorities can remotely brick solar inverters, it is a matter of national security to disclose the models and the modus operandi asap. It is irresponsible to not help us mitigate the potential of attack. Also, if there are “rogue devices” designed to sabotage your grid, that’s international sabotage, that’s state terrorism. It is important to state it if it is the case, instead of implying it.

“This is a serious issue that the industry needs to address, and it’s even more reason for Congress to maintain tax credits that are onshoring the production of inverters and the entire solar supply chain in the United States."

I suspect that this is the core reason actually. Don’t get me wrong, manufacturing crucial equipment locally is definitely a good idea, but I suspect strongly that these accusation are just a way of dodging the embrassement that Chinese companies’ market share is annoyingly high in a market that westerners were too slow to recognize as critical.

Ah yes. I think their main subject is identifying plants and navigation. Tools can easily be changed. From pushing down weeds below the surface to delivering a micro-dose of aimed weedkillers, there are many ways.

It is probably lighter than a human and probably a more distributed mass.

Thanks! I did mess up!

I fixed the post link. And here is the link to the software and hardware:

https://docs.romi-project.eu/Rover/

Frankly I don’t think this is an accounting tool anymore. I feel like having something in scope 4 does not happen by accident. If I am emitting CO2 when running a bikes manufacturing company, that’s like a cost (I think the correct term is an externality) that I can measure and try to minimize, balance it with the profitability of the business, etc. Ultimately it is a goal to make my activity carbon neutral.

Of I have scope 4 emission it means that I am doing something, like improving the efficiency of fuel refining for instance. It is the activity itself that causes the problem in an unfixable way. The only way out of it is to stop the activity.

I struggle to find an example of an activity with scope 4 emissions that would still provide a the same function to society if it put that scope 4 at zero?

The problem of that scope is that I don’t see a good way to turn it into a hard number of tons of CO2. At least with kWh or kg-km of transport you can approximate, but how do you translate a scope 4 action into tons of CO2?

Yes, some studies are trying very hard, but it is difficult to make EVs looks worse than thermal cases almost in every case and every country. What drives me crazy is that the main criticism geared towards this technology would disappear if they were built in a different location with a renewable electricity mix (like Norway). It is not the product we ought to criticize, but the production ecosystem!

Scope 4 is pretty niche isn’t it? I would argue that scope 1 2 and 3 have a use to lower one’s impact on emissions. I would assume that a company involved in scope 4 activities probably do not care much about these anyway. Actually I struggle to find an example that would not be related to oil industry or oil lobbyism?