I have to say cool idea, but realistically if you are not using a apple or other locked down device you device will function without internet, and somebody will be able to create mesh nets or sneaker nets, and those will replace the internet (or are actually already in use right now) and those are so redundant, that as long as there isn't a solar storm that hard that it literally short circuits all technology, even in some in that case not good enough faradray cages, we will be able to recover pretty fast after the initial panic
One of the side effects that I think might happen is that we could have local internet be more important than it was before since they would have to build the mesh networks within a community and with various standards which I think would be a good thing in the long run.
Should you at the very least not have the energy difference between something like 20°C and whatever the max is (100°C for water, as you put). All the energy down to 0K will not be possible to extract. This should favour sand even more.
But I would argue its harder to put extra heat into sand that has already 2000K, and also bigger heat loss. But I don't know anything about how it works, just some common sense.
From the math I looked at, that doesn't seem to be the case. What we're actually doing is fighting radiative and convective heat loss, basically requiring more energy per second to compensate for increasing heat losses per second. An adequately insulted sand battery would negate a lot of that.
Source: I've been an embedded sw engineer for 10+ years
This seems like a pretty decent resource generally speaking. I'll add this caveat though.
If your threat model includes anyone with large state level resources, you should stay very far away from anything with a radio in it. Wifi, Bluetooth, NFC, whatever, it doesn't matter. It is possible for it to be compromised at a silicon level, which means you can never be sure it is fully secure.
You have to assume that anything transmitted via RF of any type is capable of being collected and compromised.
All that said, if your concern actually does include people with black helicopters, you already know this, and if it doesn't, just remember that these technologies are getting cheaper and more ubiquitous all the time (see stingray), so be careful.
Renault EV hacked with OVMS and mostly running on locally produced electricity. Runs 80 km/h, seats two and always finds a parking spot.
Kon-Tiki Oven to produce bio charcoal which we use a lot to make our soil somewhat less compact.
Small Solar Power Roofs to keep the rain or the sun away when sitting on the bench (one can be seen behind the car).
Total of about 50 kWp Solar, which we enjoy a lot - produces reasonable energy even during the Winter. Unfortunately, when the grid goes down, our own solar will go down also. People often underestimate the effort and investment needed to make a large solar system workable off-grid.
New facade with about 25 cm of insulation made from wood fibre. All materials locally sourced, mostly from our own grounds. Keeps the building cool in summer and warm in winter.
OpenWB EV charging of EV only when we have excess solar production.
Rain water is not sent into the city collection system but kept on the grounds and further down is collected in a little lake.
Cheap Solar Lights with motion detectors. Help a lot to not tip over during the night - even works reasonable during winter when the days are very short.
Home-grown power management system: In winter we use excess energy to heat up the workshop ensuring it does not freeze during the night (if that's not enough, and it cools down below 1 C we automatically use grid power to keep it from freezing.
The fridge for the drinks is only run on excess power.
Well insulated workshop build beside the house, providing additional insulation to the living quarters.
Reactivated the old well, added a manual frost resistant water pump
We are looking into using solar power to fill the reservoir from the well on demand. But this will need some trench digging.
AirPods Pro or any other good noise-cancelling equipment to avoid getting def and dumb by roaring farm machinery.
We have a shepherd's wagon without any electricity. Basic services like warmth, light, coffee and pizza can be provided by fossil means.
We have something like a tiny house completely running on off-grid on solar: electric stove, baking oven, warm water, floor heating, etc. Works very well for 10 years now.
Holy shit, username checks out! You're absolutely mad (in the best possible way) 😅. Thanks for sharing this extensive list. A lot of neat projects you've got going on, am quite jelous 😊
The subject deserves a better treatment than this relatively shallow pop-scifi video. This has been a question in science-fiction for more than a century. No, it did not start with Star Trek, Asimov dates it as far back as 1818 Frankenstein. If you are bold you can see this theme in the 2000 years old story of Talos, the bronze colossus that wanted immortality (ancient Greece was surprisingly full of automatons, Rhodes was known for them).
The question is what does imbue humans with what makes us see them as humans? Please don't use the word "soul". It is meaningless and religious, does not refer to any observable thing.
And don't use "intelligence" as an interchangeable word with that undefined property, that most sci-fi authors have took to call "sentience". That word is not human-centric and they typically apply sentience or the question of sentience to aliens or machines.
We have a hard time seeing as sentient something that has zero sense of ego. You can make an extremely intelligent machine with no ego, no sense of self. This is what you have in LLMs.
Giving them a sense of self and ego is probably feasible, but it is both useless and a huge responsibility. Maybe will happen first as an art project, but then you have to question the morality of creating something that does not want to die (or at least expresses it) but is not recognized as a person.
It also interrogates our notion of the linearity of the self. If such a sentient being can be forked, suspended, copied, have memories wiped out, fake memories implanted, personality changed, willingly or unwillingly, that opens a lot of philosophical questions.
I wish the community would embrace them, but so far all we have had are extremely superficial debates over "true" intelligence, usually defined as the difference between what humans can do and machines can do, an ever-shrinking territory.
For me the first Ghost in the Shell movie (the anime, obviously) is the standard when it comes to these questions (though it's of course not the first).
The best media I've seen for this concept is "Robots" and anyone interested in this subject for some reason should definitely give it a look. There's also "I, Robot" and "Blade Runner".
is shallow, because is introduction to topic hehe. is meant to spark curiousity in approach ble way. posting literary essays onn ai would probably not fit so well here hehe >w<
I have a pocket-sized solar panel I bought intending to charge my phone on the go. When it arrived and I tried it out I remembered that I live in bloody Auckland, New Zealand, where we've never actually seen the sun, so that was a bust.
I started messing about with Linux/Raspberry Pi, Arduino, LoRa/Meshtastic in the past couple of months due to being (further) breadpilled with podcasts about open source, greenhouse automation, autonomous text-based communication and such.
I'm not a tech person so I'm literally doing kid-level electronics tutorials on the Arduino ("Congratulations! You've made your first circuit!") and still get a kick out of running sudo apt-get update/upgrade and seeing the lines of text scrolling by.
But I really like the concept of appropriate tech in conjunction with open source "stuff" and, since I'm in a position of being able to listen to ~6.5 hours of podcasts during my workday, I might as well learn something. I hope to get comfortable with electronics for DIY solar eventually, too
Glad to hear about this! Everone has to start somewhere :) I am upost interested in these podcasts you mention, am an avid podcast enjoyer myself, so if you wouldnt mind sharing which ones you listen to?
Less radical podcasts I listen to are some of the maker-type folks like Simple Electronics and the (now discontinued?) Make: Magazine podcast.
That just about covers it, other than some of the solarpunk podcasts I listen to, but I kinda feel they - while informative and entertaining - aren't as...hands on (?)... as some of the links I shared above.
Thanks for sharing all those. Since you mentioned arduino, I thought of sharing something that came to my attention quite recently, and admittedly I found it very disturbing. Before reading that I was an arduino fan, I'm not anymore. Anyways here it is:
Solar powered battery banks which keep a few things up and running in my office (glass sliding doors, so I get plenty of light. Also use them to charge my phone and such.
My bike, which I used to ride to the bus to get into work until I went full remote. Has a small solar kit for my lights to stay charged on long rides. It's been a bit due to some joint issues, getting back into it now, but used to do centuries every weekend. Didn't need to it charge to full, whatever trickle worked just to extend it past the 4 or so hours it would do from full, then charge on the battery banks.
Gardening and associated sensors. Working on moving those over to lorawan, right now the updates are a bit spotty even at once every 4 hours updating due to distance.
I've got a bunch of stuff that's running on lightweight chips, like esp8266's and ESP32s, to do things like Bluetooth beaconing, lights (wled), etc.
It'll be a bit, but we are going to need to move to something with a bit more space, so other plans (solar + battery for the whole home, indirect solar water heating, etc) will be on hold for a bit.
Concrete is something like a tenth of humanity's total CO2 emissions, so if this is something that lets us use less concrete then that's actually great
The process of making it involves cooking limestone until the carbon dioxide comes out, basically. Limestone is CaCO3 (one calcium, one carbon, three oxygen). Cement requires lime, which is CaO (one calcium, one oxygen). That leaves a C and two O, which stick together on the way out
I haven't been on that train for a while but I thought the entire line was electrified, the three stations and parts of the line definitely are. Either way it doesn't make sense to me to build up hydrogen infrastructure instead of electrifying the sections of rail that aren't yet. Can't be that much in Germany. In parts where it just isn't possible for whatever reasons why not install a few batteries?
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