Not “technically” discontinued, but almost
Buying products and owning them.
Buying products and getting full repair manuals and electrical schematics
Cathode ray tubes
Overbuilt refrigerators and washing machines
Clothes that last and are repairable
Houses built with full bricks and iron with actual straight walls and unbroken woodwork
Literally the 2nd post on !tech@programming.dev is about mega corporations financials. Many other posts are about legal cases of megacorporations.
It seems to be less about technology, and more about the market and software drama/politics.
At least no musk spam.
Well it is literally not going as fast.
The rate of “technology” (most people mean electronics) advancement was because there was a ton of really big innovations at in a small time: cheap PCBs, video games, internet, applicable fiber optics, wireless tech, bio-sensing, etc…
Now, all of the breakthrough inventions in electronics have been done (except chemical sensing without needing refillable buffer or reactive materials), Moore’s law is completely non-relevant, and there are a ton of very very small incremental updates.
Electronics advancements have largely stagnated. MCUs used 10 years ago are still viable today, which was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, as an example. Pretty much everything involving silicon is this way. Even quantum computing and supercooled computing advancements have slowed way down.
The open source software and hardware space has made giant leaps in the past 5 years as people now are trying to get out from the thumb of corporate profits. Smart homes have come a very long way in the last 5 years, but that is very niche. Sodium ion batteries also got released which will have a massive, mostly invisible effect in the next decade.
Just send the energy directly back to the power executives houses with a high power laser. They want the energy for free so badly to pad their profits and buy a 5th yacht, give it to them 😉
Only partially true. The solar panels almost all inject power back into the grid. Power companies started complaining about their profits when they had to actually pay the users for their power that they generated so now home power generating houses get paid pennies on the dollar for delivering power and reducing the power capacity needed by the power companies and of course the power companies didn’t lower prices at all, so they are just sucking up the difference in pure profit.
Ugh, I wish I was in a good place financially to donate to everything I use… There are so many great KDE projects, and non-kde FOSS projects too! One day…
Okular, KDE connect, plasma, krita, freecad, libre office, KiCAD, local send, antennapod, gadgetbridge, immich, paperless, bookstack, home assistant & esphome, leantime… The list goes on, but even if I only gave 5€ per month to each, that would be more than 75€ per month and that is way above my budget with our renovation costs.
Not even to mention the good YouTube creators too! Maybe if I get a bonus at the end of this year I can spare 150€ or so.
Actually, the AI assistant fad isn’t all bad.
HomeAssistant has an open souce assistant pipeline that integrates into the most flexible smart home software around. It is completely local and doesn’t rely on the cloud at all. Essentially it could make Alexa’s and google homes (that literally spy on you and send key phrases back to your built data collection profile) obsolete. That is a way not to have to rely on corporate bullshit privacy invasion to have a good smart home.
Indeed transcribing and translating (and preserving dying languages and being able to re-teach them) are 2 of the best consumer uses for AI. Then there is accelerating disease and climate research.
If these were the use cases that were pushed instead of fucking conversational assistants, replacements for customer support that only direct to existing incomplete docs, taking away artists’ jobs, and creating 1984 “you can’t trust your own eyes and ears” in real time, then AI would actually be very worthwhile.
What?
He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.
Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.
And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.
There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.
Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.
Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.
Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)
Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.
Still doesn’t seem to work.
Tribalism + fearmongering propaganda + times of financial hardships is more effective than education.
See: afd popularity in germany
Well the entire multiplatform astroturfing campaign from people who call themselves leftists worked! Democrats stayed home instead of voting.
Now Palestine will be completely flattened with 0 resistance at all, and redoubled support and bombs for Israel! Way to go! You really showed your support for Palestine by helping this happen!
They will probably come back saying “it wasn’t our fault, we just pointed out the truth” while they shouted that a vote for Harris was a vote for genocide [so don’t vote for harris] from every platform that they used.
You said it right there in your comment.
Sleep mode, (and other effectively off modes) where it is functionally useless, it can do.
MSP430 can do 140uA/MHz. That is ~7 times the power that this application supplies, and that is not counting any single other chip quiescent current or chip that actively provides useful data. You would have to have a battery anyway or a big cap to provide the needed current for on-states. Or you could run it extremely low frequencies like you said, but those tend to not scale linearly at all with per MHz power ratings. Quiescent currents tend to catch up fast at that scale. I would be extremely doubtful that 150kHz would scale perfectly and wouldn’t have already exponentially decayed to around its lowest possible on-state consumption for the chip. I would definitely have to see tests on that.
The smallest of batteries like the VARTA tiny cells in TWS’s are infinitely more useful and practical and it would take this application months to fill a single cell, discounting all losses.
I don’t think people realize how extremely little 50uW is.
For a standard 3.3V microcontroller assuming a 95% efficient voltage regulator will be a current of 14.4uA. Just having the HSI master clock enabled on one of the low power STML0 chips is 15uA. This will literally only the clock. That is 0 sensors, 0 communication, 0 IO, nothing useful at all. For reference, reading SPO2 with a very efficient maxm86161 takes 10uA by itself in ultra low power mode with low accuracy and not counting the max leakage current of 1uA. For full operation, you need about 1000x-10000x that amount for short bursts.
“Oh but it can cHaRgE tHe BaTtErY”
Let’s say the device has a standard 100mAh battery (apple watch had a 228mAh or more). At 100% efficiency with absolutely not one millijoule being used by any other electronics (which would never ever happen, it would at the very least need a boost converter), it would take around 277 days to charge up that tiny tiny battery.
Let’s take another example of an even smaller battery. To charge one side of the airpods 3rd gen (0.133Wh battery), it would take 110 days per ear
This is one of those free “energy harvesting” fad BS based in nothing but wishing and marketing. It is an interesting learning project for wireless antenna beginners, but that is the extent.
With electronics, that is only the tip of the iceburg before you get into trinocular microscopes which the absolute cheapest are almost 300€ nowadays 😉 then assembled PCB prototypes where every iteration can be 200-500€ depending on size. Or you could get into spending hundreds on hotplates and reflow ovens to do it yourself.
But wouldn’t it be faster and cheaper in the long run to be able to fabricate the simple PCBs yourself? There goes 1000€ on a small CNC 😂 rabbit hole goes deeeeep.
Electronics projects mostly.
Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:
I also have tons of new project ideas that I don’t have time for.
My other hobbies
weightlifting, again completely dropped off due to every free moment renovating
Running a home server with replacement services for everything I need
Running (my motivation has been 0 recently…)
cooking. I try to do a few new recipes per month
gardening. With the renovation, I just grew a few courgettes, tomatoes, and squash this year
video games (more of a de-stresser nowadays than a hobby, most recently casual rocket league with friends is fun, hadn’t played since 2018 or so)
This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.
That being said, I am happy about it. I got my company to use it and finally got my girlfriend to use it and just recommended it to her brother. Would hate to have to try to find something else
Really? My girlfriend’s A52 doesn’t have this feature. That is part of why I bought my Xperia 5ii. Is it a new feature?
(After 3 years the battery is at 70% on mine because apparently Sony uses shitty as hell batteries and software drain glitches, while my girlfriend’s A52 always charging to 100% lasts a day and a half with 3x the use, would not recommend)
What would I want to do?
Cut down the 2 larger trees and 10 mini trees (originally hedges) that we marked for removal
deep clean the house
climb in the crawlspace and drill the pipe brackets I need to
finally go weightlifting after months of no time or willpower
play saxophone
meditate
go for a long run
play with my dog and go adventuring for an hour or 2
cook a new meal I haven’t tried before
watch a movie with my girlfriend
take an edible
play some games with the boys
What would I likely do?
sleep
mow the grass and rake leaves
play rimworld
watch Castle with my girlfriend
eat leftovers
It’s interesting the difference in what people think a collapsed civilization will look like.
Some people think we will “return to monke” where wilderness survival skills will be essential and people who have them will be the “main characters.” That would probably be the easier and better future.
The more likely option will be technofeudalism where rich people have small, brutal armies and control localized power grids, farming operations, and politics with tech as mass migrations happen and wildlife becomes all but extinct outside of human cultivation. Survival skills won’t matter when all land and food scarcity is controlled by a rich few with absolute control. The average survivalist will be wiped out with the first natural disaster or by the feudal lords with drones. Return to nature might only come after 50 years when chip supplies and power grids have dried up and fallen apart, but it would just as likely be mad-max as oil could likely still be used.
Who knows. Fascism might take over with how it is going now and solve the climate crisis with mass genocide and forcing green energy for all we know.
https://www.securityweek.com/law-enforcement-read-criminals-messages-after-hacking-matrix-service/
https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/13/228
I think this is what they are referring to.
I saw a Lemmy thread about it, but the main takeaway is that it was a completely different program than what we know and love. It just happened to be named the same IIRC.
Edit: https://lemmy.world/post/22758570