The linked repo has a pretty good rundown of possible reasons:
> If non-square screens on Macbook Pros make your blood boil with rage
> If you can't afford or don't want to pay for a Macbook Pro (smart choice)
> If you have ergonomics concerns with shrinking laptops and one size fits all keyboards
> If you like your systems to be repairable and modular rather than comprised of proprietary parts shoehorned in to a closed source design available only from a single vendor for a limited time
> If you are blind (and don't want to carry a screen around)
> If you want to use AR instead of a screen and therefore prefer to be untethered
> If you are on a sailing ship, submarine, mobile home, campervan, paraglider, recumbent touring bicycle, or otherwise off-grid
> If you want a capable unix system to power a mobile mechatronic system
I'd add in not having to deal with a Macbook in clamshell mode doing stupid crap like forcing you to double-tap the touchID button sometimes, refusing to connect to external keyboards and mice on wake, and some of the other annoyances I have dealt with.
Also, a Mac Mini is small, and a MacBook is not, at least as a function of "desk area" vs "area consumed".
> If non-square screens on Macbook Pros make your blood boil with rage
> If you are blind (and don't want to carry a screen around)
> If you want to use AR instead of a screen and therefore prefer to be untethered
You can just remove the screen! My M1 Air works just fine at least. (I’ve broken the screen, but if you just don’t need screen at all, you can sell the top half assembly and save some money.)
MB Air ($1100+ / >1.8x) is only available 15" which is IMHO too small for long term comfortable use.
MB Pro ($2300+ / >3.8x) is 16" which is IMHO still a bad ergonomic experience. I'd sooner buy a mini, trash it, buy another one 4 times. Especially given they are improving annually.
1. cheaper 2. different form factor 3. more choice of battery/kb/mouse/screen/camera 4. not landfill when you have to replace battery/kb/mouse/screen/camera 5. doesn't have an annoying chunk out of the screen 6. doesn't have a video camera pointed at you all the time 7. keyboard that suits large hands 8. keyboard in preferred layout 9. not subject to apple tax on most components/upgrades
Might it not be possible to "harvest" carbon from sources on e.g. the moon [1], thereby requiring less effort to launch those resources into orbit? Feel free to point out if I'm talking (thinking) nonsense here...
Entire fields are based upon the existence of crispr now, it demonstrated its impact. It has been 2? 3? years, people who were making papers anyway have implemented AlphaFold, it hasn't exactly spawned a new area.
My two cents having formerly worked in perovskites trying to upscale the process:
Perovskites are exciting (or were exciting) because they have a high theoretical efficiency, are relatively simple to prepare, and the "worst" component in them is lead (an incredibly abundant material). The big problem with them is that they are famously horrifically unstable in ambient conditions.
Roll-to-roll processing means that you can fabricate them in mass scale. Ambient means that they claim to have solved issues like working in glovebox conditions.
Even if the price of solar panels has come down below labor, the fact that they are produced from rare earth minerals goes (in my opinion) underreported.
Consider the relationship between perovskites and multi-junction solar cells similar to the comparison between sodium and lithium ion batteries. Lithium will always have a higher capacity, but sodium is so abundant that for many applications it just doesn't matter anymore.
Solar panels "produced from rare earth minerals" is "under-reported" because they are not made from rare earth minerals, and further: the minor metals they are dependent upon are byproducts of refining base metals, ie there isn't much additional impact from using them; we already make them.
I'm not really sure how someone who supposedly worked in solar panel research would think rare earth metals are used in solar panel construction.
Solar panels have decades-long lifespans (their rated lifespan is based on when they drop below 80% efficiency, not when they become useless), there's a growing recycling chain to sell complete aged panels to other markets (typically underdeveloped nations where daily equivalent hours of solar are very high and land is plentiful so efficiency doesn't matter), and the panels themselves are highly recyclable for the materials to make new panels.
Ever notice how the people 'concerned' about the environmental impact of mining rare earth minerals, which go into durable goods that are highly recyclable/recoverable, don't seem to have a problem with oil drilling, fracking, coal strip mining, etc - for something that is usable once, maybe twice?
This is true: i.e. they use rare metals not rare earth metals.
On HN, I hope we can share a correction like that respectfully: after all, they gave good info, except for a one-word slip of the tongue.
The critique seems to extend beyond correcting that error, becoming confrontational, questioning motivation and honesty with phrases like "supposedly worked in." and the long bit defending lifespan and enviromental impact against people who "don't seem to have a problem with oil drilling, fracking, coal strip mining, etc" - they didn't even touch on that subject.
Which rare metals do they use? Silver for contact wires? If silver supplies were inadequate (they're not) these could be substituted for with copper, if a barrier layer was included between it and the silicon.
Maybe indium in ITO for those fancy transparent front contacts. Or tellurium in CdTe, supposedly still costeffective compared to “thick” Si cells. I would still give GGP a break it can be tricky to venture even small steps outside ones specialty these days
And, maybe in the future, gallium as a dopant in silicon cells, since it doesn't experience nearly as much light induced degradation as boron does. But dopants are used in very small amounts.
I think some power electronics uses europium silicide (or was that erbium?) as a gate material, so maybe in inverters? Again, the quantities would be small.
Tin based perovskites have been studied for almost as long as the lead based ones but they have been less efficient and much less stable. Work continues to increase their efficiency and stability, e.g.:
"Efficient tin-based perovskite solar cells with trans-isomeric fulleropyrrolidine additives" (2024-01-29)
A simple search of the 'net will answer the question far better than this attack on Shellenberger. It will show that rare earth minerals can be used in PV panels as doping elements. Interestingly enough it is especially Perovskite PV cells which seem to benefit from the use of these additives [1,2]:
(1) Recently, use of rare earth (RE) ions doped nanomaterials in PSCs, has been identified as an effective means to address the aforementioned issues by expanding the range of absorption spectra minimizing the non-absorption loss of solar photons, enhancing light scattering and improving operational stability.
(2) Rare earth ion doped nanomaterials can be used in perovskite solar cell to expand the range of absorption spectra and improve the stability due to its up conversion and down conversion effect. This article reviews recently progress in using rare earth ion doped nanomaterials in mesoporous electrodes, perovskite active layers, and as an external function layer of perovskite solar cell.
That's just in the lab. If you buy PV modules right now the cells will not be doped with rare earth elements. And almost everything demonstrated in the lab doesn't progress beyond there (which is fine; that's how technology R&D works.)
I think the closest one could come to making the "REE in solar" claim make sense would be decoloring agents for the glass. Cerium could be used for this, but I think manganese is cheaper.
They produce 60-80 milligram of calcium carbonate 'per fiber', per 30 hours. I'm interested to know how they keep the bacteria alive over time, through the concrete curing process (high temperatures, high level of carbon dioxide, making any liquids in the vicinity highly acidic), and how the bacteria remain viable over time. Concrete we consider to last over decades, or a century?
Can you elaborate about what you define as "used against you" even if it is entirely inaccurate? What is the use case of inaccurate data with which you are concerned?
> Can you elaborate about what you define as "used against you" even if it is entirely inaccurate?
Hypothetical: $company you're trying to use needs to "verify" you using $inaccurateData from $vendor.
You're absolutely screwed if the verification questions you're asked are relying on the "polluted" answers
Similar vein: if the "polluted" data indicates you might be gay or replublican or musilim or into some seriously unhealthy lifestyle choices like smoking and $someCompany decides that you're a smoker and therefore your too risky to insure.
Serious question: Who is using browser data for verification?! It's alarming to me that this is even a hypothetical scenario. All identity verification systems I have ever used in the US have been through a credit agency or something similar. I can't imagine any use case that would use your browser history or ad data for these purposes. Do you have a real-world example?
Or, if state level actors are looking at your data they are buying from companies, the appearance of intentionally corrupted data could invite more scrutiny.
If state-level actors are looking into your data with any amount of individual scrutiny you are already fucked, this is a ridiculous reason to not use ad nauseum.
Imagine being in China where they tend to watch you and make profiles on you. Then suddenly the profile of who you are goes completely random. Is it possible this gets the attention of state-level actors where you had none before?
Poisoned data would be useful in the fight but yeah, "garbage data looks like someone else's" is certainly superior to "garbage data looks like it's yours".
I guess in the long term it depends how good the profile builders get at anomaly detection, and at which scale we're talking about.
While many states in the US have laws against it now, for awhile there companies were basing if they would hire you based on your social media profile. Having no profile at all may exclude you from getting a job. Or, when I went to get credit for my the first time in my later 30's. I had always been a cash buyer before then, and proof of my existence beyond my ID was sparse, the guy on the other end of the line was like "Did you even exist before yesterday?"
Another example that I think captures the spirit of autoexec’s point is credit fraud.
Are you the one taking out credit cards and potentially tanking your credit score? No.
Does it still negatively impact your life? Yes, because the information landlords/banks receive from credit unions only shows the low credit score.
Do the banks/landlords care about the fact that it’s fraud? No.
It’s ultimately YOU who has to do all the leg work to report the fraud, make sure that your credit history is fixed, and that your credit is frozen as a deterrent to for future fraud issues.
Beautiful. We are in a golden era of citizen science, where access to knowledge, tools to connect, tools to process data, and the ability to communicate this is at an all time high. The kind of stuff you see on Youtube is amazing: people like AppliedScience achieving incredibly things in the garage, or recently NileRed took a nature paper [0] 1 step further and published it on youtube [1]).
From a chemist/material scientist perspective: Whether the results of the Riff trial may ever have a p value suitable for nature/science, likely not. When it comes to the human body and our biology, a mass trial like this may even be more useful than traditional studies, where pre-existing biases in data collection may weed out the most useful 'Riff'. Better than that, the information collected by mold_time is regularly released and discussed, in the open, on twitter/x [2].
>Whether the results of the Riff trial may ever have a p value suitable for nature/science, likely not. When it comes to the human body and our biology, a mass trial like this may even be more useful than traditional studies
Can you explain this further? I'm curious about it, because at face value it seems like it is somewhat contradictory. On one hand, you're saying it won't likely be demonstrably significant enough to generalize, but then you say it will be more valuable. Are you saying it's value is in it's non-generalizability? I.e., each person finds what 'riff' works for them? I thought the point of publishing results was, in part, to separate the wheat from the chaff so we don't all have to run a ton of self-experiments.
p values are meant to relate whether or not 'some' hypothesis is statistically relevant versus a control study. For something like biology, human nature, dieting, weight loss, in a world where you can't really control how stressed someone is, how far they walk to work, among 100 other things... if you're trying to find out how 'the potato' works, safe citizen science (a Riff trial) may be far more effective than 'traditional' proofs to get to the bottom of something that works, and then someone can do a controlled study.
>if you're trying to find out how 'the potato' works, safe citizen science (a Riff trial) may be far more effective than 'traditional' proofs to get to the bottom of something that works
I don't know that I agree. Because the world has an infinite number of variants to "the potato" but an individual has a finite amount of time to try them. So while I agree that there are a lot of confounding factors in biology, we still need some way to triage our efforts. Analyzing the results of controlled studies seems like the best way to do so, even if it's not guaranteed to work for a specific individual.
What I suspect will happen is that people will end up wasting too much time on endless "potato" variants that don't work, and they would have had better results on focusing on those controlled studies that show promise.* For every person that finds a diamond in the 'riff', there's probably countless people that found nothing (or worse, detrimental effects). We also have other tools, like meta-analysis, to help. That seems more effective that "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks".
* you can see this in the supplement space. There are people who are constantly spending money searching for the secret new supplement hack when they'd be better off focusing on the things that science has shown to consistently work. They end up majoring in the minors, as it were
You're correct on all accounts, save for my optimism. Maybe the Riff can only work for something of this style when data feedback losing 10 lbs is large, compared to supplements, and the confines of the experiment are relatively limited (30 days). In hindsight, my comment was supposed to be 'its exciting that random people can get together and try to figure something out', and less about the difficulties of biology in science.
It's been more than a year since I alerted them of the multiple falsehoods in A Chemical Hunger, repeatedly, and they haven't done anything about them.
