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Discussion (90 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This isn't satire and it doesn't have to be dismissed. While I don't find increasing the definition and perceived uniqueness of one's personality and identity is necessarily a positive social thing, it's pretty much the most common thing in today's world - so we shouldn't be judgemental of anyone for doing it, even if "their unique terms and identification process" don't match our own.
From a project perspective, I find this to be SO creative and VERY HELPFUL energy in terms of truly starting from a primitives/first principles perspective and shows how having a specific ethos and concept allows for development of new forms.
Like it or not, it's easy to find out the date that oil (petroleum) will run out. It's easy to see the writing on the wall for anyone who cares to see - a high tech utopia Earth will not be. So enjoying the process of pre-emptively creating new tools, new techniques, and flexible terminology - all of this will BE OF AID to all people who must live through this century together.
For example, I had a reaction to their ethical objection:
> During our initial experiments with porcelain, we were immediately aware that the higher temperatures, and therefore electric consumption, were not compatible with our standards for ethical hardware.
If an ATMega IC is in bounds, would solar-sourced electricity be in bounds? Maybe accumulated in rust batteries if lithium is out for supply chain reasons? If you’re seeking to avoid electricity in general, would technologies like bellows and charcoal-making get you where you needed to be?
Of course—as they demonstrated—why do all that, when the local clay and stick fire work just fine! In that sense, my pre-conceived requirements would have gotten in the way of my learning what they learned.
So often we’re stuck so far down the road of “the way things are done” we forget how many of those technology choices reflect path dependence along the road to maturity, rather than the One True Technique… good on the authors for developing within different, human-scale production constraints.
This of course is not scalable. But hacker technology, in its original definition, is not about scalability, but about creative use of existing things.
At scale, solar electricity of course would work better, and likely standard PCB processes would even have a smaller environmental impact. But it's not the point.
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like.
Try google:
The fact that we do not know what the future will look like, means we should make our best efforts to understand certain likely scenarios, and adjust our own behavior and actions accordingly in order to be a part of designing a future that is attainable and practicable given the current conditions/inertia at all socio-economical levels.Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.
Is that assuming a large fraction of the supply will be synthetic fuels created by electrolysis?
I would like to see the napkin. I wasn't aware synthetic fuels were on that kind of a trajectory.
Press X to doubt.
We will be fine, we will build a high tech utopia or die trying. Anything else is defeatist nonsense.
All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what they were hoping for
What's really interesting, is the boundary they are crossing given this "tech-artistry", which clearly HN is pretty far removed from. It's quite interesting for someone who's seen plenty of this before to observe the polarized response from a different slice of society.
“FEMINIST HACKING: BUILDING CIRCUITS AS AN ARTISTIC PRACTICE – an international art-based research project financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)”
Doesn’t that kind of invite the worst type of trolls? They seem to imply that feminist = artistically produced, as opposed to professionally produced PCBs. So masculine = professional? But clearly that wasn’t their intention?
Feminism is originally about gender (power-) equality (and so is orthogonal to femininity and masculinity), but has been extended to other forms of power equality. I think that in this context it's about concern for certain things that established practices don't show concern for. Such concern could perhaps translate to certain power dynamics.
[1]: One of the feminist icons in recent popular culture is Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, who is also an icon of butch masculinity. I don't know if he would have loved or hated this. On the one hand, the description sounds hippy, which he would have hated; on the other hand, it's about do-it-yourself, non-industrial craftsmenship, which he would have loved.
> She advocates for political organizing based on "affinity"—conscious coalitions and political choices—rather than essentialist identities based on biology or shared oppression.
Also, it appears that >99% of feminism researchers are publishing their scientific papers with a feminine name. I can easily understand why the general public might confuse the 2 groups with each other.
Which brings me back to the question: what do you think the authors hope to gain by invoking this association? Especially now that we have established that their word choice is highly likely to be misunderstood?
That idea that you think these things are unnatural or an odd match is probably why it's a good idea they did it.
If it was a bee keeper group talking about Bee Keeper Hacking: Clay PCB would you be asking them to hide their identity?
You start with this:
>I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.
To which I say - why not? Is this the problem?
Because it creates weird, presumably unintentional implications. One such implication:
> They seem to imply that feminist = artistically produced, as opposed to professionally produced PCBs. So masculine = professional? But clearly that wasn’t their intention?
https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Ethical_issues
Instead of just trying to make a rather obtuse guess, you could have instead tried looking around the website. It took me like half a second to find that link, even with the more free form UX.
The term "feminism" as an actual technical definition outside of just like "female empowerment vibes" it might be used for in the everyday language.
And I’m not really clear why this doesn’t extend further into basically all of human suffering in any society. Or perhaps extended upwards and encapsulate systems-thinking and any graph-relationship whatsoever
The term "feminism" as an actual technical definition seems to be quite loose; this strikes me as a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon definition
The fact you think that when I said nothing of the sort should ring alarm bells in your head...
Consider how calling yourself "atheist" or "rationalist" comes with some broad commitments and political tendencies, but not necessarily. We say we are an "atheist" to indicate a particular belief but also perhaps a broad attitude to culture as it stands, but not one thing or the other. Its like the same thing here!
I like it a lot. For example, it's obvious that if the NSA wanted to come into a feminist open source phone baseband for an open telephone and say "We men will tell you who you can and can't call" it will be rightly called out as patriarchal nonsense. Yet that's the world we live in today. Just the other day Zoom gave me a password of "OPSexr" on a business meeting (I created the Zoom call myself). Obviously this was a hack by NSA and not a first-party chosen by Zoom (which is professional meeting software) or random (the word doesn't have the entropy of passwords).
Actually now that I think about it you could just make pine rosin (pine resin + alcohol) as your adhesive. For the copper laminate this might be harder without steel rollers or a way to cut.
I’ve not tried this, but it sounds like a good way to get fast turnaround for very simple circuits:
https://bsky.app/profile/castpixel.bsky.social/post/3mf52azn...
For about two seconds before I cut the power.
Or, you know: If the neighbors take up a serious hobby-scale effort of wood-fired pottery projects with local clay that they mined themselves, then... Perhaps we could be supportive of their effort, eh? Isn't that part of what being neighborly involves?
I'm guessing that the issue here might have been that copper as a metal is kind of difficult to trace the source to ethically?
Also, with this method each 3D print is a new instance of using plastic, where with clay you only use plastic once
https://www.bstceramicpcb.com/ceramic-pcb/thick-film-ceramic...
Likely not if you factor in the energy expenditure of gathering some firewood vs. energy expenditure of putting up a power grid.
inb4 "but it's already there" lmao
But there are many clean ways to generate electricity and electric kilns are quite efficient compared to heating over an open flame.
I like the artistic element of this exercise, just thought that line of reasoning was a bit off.
It's a fun dit/artistic project but the political discourse used to describe it is absurd
The way she writes like this is serious research is throwing me.
https://mitxela.com/projects/soldering_wlcsp
You can dead bug an LQFP if you absolutely have to…
Point to point is easily as functional or better than this.
Instead of looking for flaws, try looking for the insight. I’m reminded of this blog post that was on hn recently https://scottlawsonbc.com/post/shooting-down-ideas
"We had the privilege of spending two days with this skilled craftsman, learning how to identify and collect the clay, and how to model and fire it using old, dry branches collected from the forest ground."
But I think the point of this project is to do small-scale production, not develop new techniques for mass manufacturing
If you’re not familiar with it, the author posts about making everything from olive oil soap to solar cells from scratch.
https://simplifier.neocities.org/
Better than a greenwashed alternative is to avoid using msterial that is not necessary. Yet one also had to consider the whole lifetime of a product: ten throwaway circuits versus one very durable one etc.