#All electronic components

[jakelectronics1]

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Reach out to us at:

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[rabnerd28]

I'm pretty sure Electra and their components are all in a poly relationship, and that's all I will be saying for now.

[grimark]

not what i really need to be devoting my time to wondering about right now, but i can’t help being distracted by the question of: what the hell powers murderbot’s organic components if it doesn’t eat or drink.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

The Circuit Leader in ‘Battle of the Circuit Chaps’ seemed to be making a reasonable assumption that locking away the Inspector would keep him from doing anything to foul up the Circuit Chaps’ plans.

Naturally, the Inspector discovers a stash of electronic components, that easily assemble into laser bombs, which he uses to destroy all the Circuit Chaps before they realise what’s happening.

[crispyeagleenthusiast]

Whirlpool W11537215 Dryer Control Electronic | HnKParts

[fozmeadows]

there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

Years ago now, I remember seeing the rape prevention advice so frequently given to young women - things like dressing sensibly, not going out late, never being alone, always watching your drink - reframed as meaning, essentially, "make sure he rapes the other girl." This struck a powerful chord with me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: that telling someone how to lower their own chances of victimhood doesn't stop perpetrators from existing. Instead, it treats the existence of perpetrators as a foregone conclusion, such that the only thing anyone can do is try, by their own actions, to be a less appealing or more difficult victim.

And the thing is, ever since the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I've kept on thinking about how, in this day and age, CEOs of big companies often have an equal or greater impact on the day to day lives of regular people than our elected officials, and yet we have almost no legal way to redress any grievances against them - even when their actions, as in the case of Thompson's stewardship of UHC, arguably see them perpetrating manslaughter at scale through tactics like claims denial. That this is a real, recurring thing that happens makes the American healthcare insurance industry a particularly pernicious example, but it's far from being the only one. Because the original premise of the free market - the idea that we effectively "vote" for or against businesses with our dollars, thereby causing them to sink or swim on their individual merits - is utterly broken, and has been for decades, assuming it was ever true at all. In this age of megacorporations and global supply chains, the vast majority of people are dependent on corporations for necessities such as gas, electricity, internet access, water, food, housing and medical care, which means the consumer base is, to all intents and purposes, a captive market. We might not have to buy a specific brand, but we have to buy a brand, and as businesses are constantly competing with one another to bring in profits, not just for the company and its workers, but for C-suites and shareholders - profits that increasingly come at the expense of workers and consumers alike - the greediest, most inhumane corporations set the financial yardstick against which all others are then, of necessity, measured. Which means that, while businesses are not obliged to be greedy and inhumane in order to exist, overwhelmingly, they become greedy and humane in order to compete, because capitalism encourages it, and because there are precious few legal restrictions to stop them from doing so. At the same time, a handful of megacorporations own so many market-dominating brands that, without both significant personal wealth and the time and resources to find viable alternatives, it's all but impossible to avoid them, while the ubiquity of the global supply chain means that, even if you can keep track of which company owns which brand, it's much, much harder to establish which suppliers provide the components that are used in the products bearing their labels. Consider, for instance, how many mainstream American brands are functionally run on sweatshop labour in other parts of the world: places where these big corporations have outsourced their workforce to skirt the already minimal labour and wage protections they'd be obliged to adhere to in the US, all to produce (say) electronics whose elevated sticker price passes a profit on to the company, but without resulting in higher wages for either the sweatshop workers overseas or the American employees selling the products in branded US stores.

When basically every major electronics corporation is engaged in similar business practices, there is no "vote" our money can bring that causes the industry itself to be better regulated - and as wealthy, powerful lobbyists from these industries continue to pay exorbitant sums of money to politicians to keep government regulation at a minimum, even our actual votes can do little to effect any sort of change. But even in those rare instances where new regulations are passed, for multinational corporations, laws passed in one country overwhelmingly don't prevent them from acting abusively overseas, exploiting more desperate populations and cash-poor governments to the same greedy, inhumane ends. And where the ultimate legal penalty for proven transgressions is, more often than not, a fine - which is to say, a fee; which is to say, an amount which, while astronomical by the standards of regular people, still frequently costs the company less than the profits earned through their unethical practices, and which is paid from corporate coffers rather than the bank accounts of the CEOs who made the decisions - big corporations are, in essence, free to act as badly as they can afford to; which is to say, very. Contrary to the promise of the free market, therefore, we as consumers cannot meaningfully "vote" with our dollars in a way that causes "good" businesses to rise to the top, because everything is too interconnected. Our choices under global capitalism are meaningless, because there is no other system we can financially support that stands in opposition to it, and while there are still small businesses and companies who try to operate ethically, both their comparative smallness and their interdependent reliance on the global supply chain means that, even if we feel better about our choices, we're not exerting any meaningful pressure on the system we're trying to change. Which means that, under the free market, trying to be an ethical consumer is functionally equivalent to a young woman dressing modestly, not going out alone and minding her drink at parties in order to avoid being raped. We're not preventing corporate predation or sending a message to corporate predators: we're just making sure they screw other worker, the other consumer, the other guy.

All of which is to say: while I'd prefer not to live in a world where shooting someone dead in the street is considered a valid means of redressing grievances, what the murder of Brian Thompson has shown is that, if you provide no meaningful recourse for justice against abusive, exploitative members of the 1%, then violence done to those people will have the feel of justice, because it fills the void left by the lack of consequences for their actions. It's the same reason why people had little sympathy for the jackass OceanGate CEO who killed himself in his imploding sub, or anyone whose yacht has been attacked by orcas - it's just intensified here, because where the OceanGate CEO was felled by hubris and the yachts were random casualties, whoever killed Thomspon did so deliberately, because of what he did. It was direct action against a man whose policies very arguably constituted manslaughter at scale; a crime which ought to be a crime, but which has, to date, been permitted under the law. And if the law wouldn't stop him, can anyone be surprised that someone might act outside the law in retaliation - or that regular people would cheer for them when they did?

[christinered]

Okay Kinksters, Tell Me What Comes To Mind First.

~Red

[foone]

Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.

[rabnerd28]

Being a fan of Electra and their components is just asking yourself the question "Which one am I giving a sad backstory?" And the answer is normally all of them.

[sillyuin]

Sweetest thing

Genre: very domestic fluff.

Pairing: non idol-Wonwoo x gn-reader.

Warnings: none.

Computer maintenance was as necessary as it was annoying. One of the things you hated the most was having a bunch of tools and electronic components scattered all over your desk, but you also knew that if you didn’t do it periodically, you’d regret it over time. And that day had finally come.

However, you were missing a few tools that didn’t seem to be anywhere, and you were starting to get frustrated about it. You let out an annoyed huff as your hands run through your hair, when a familiar face appeared in the room.

“How are you doing? Is everything okay?” Wonwoo asked, slowly opening the door and poking his head in.

“Fine, I guess,” you answered automatically, your thoughts elsewhere. “I can’t find the case with the small screwdrivers.”

“Want me to help you look for them?” Wonwoo kindly offered his help. You sighed and shook your head to decline.

“I’ll find them eventually, I don’t want to bother you with this.” Wonwoo smiled faintly and approaching your desk, he placed a cup near the edge, away from the electronics.

“It’s still hot,” he said. “Be careful not to burn yourself with the tea.”

You nodded absentmindedly as Wonwoo silently closed the door. You sat down at the desk, sinking into the cushioned chair, looking at the partially disassembled laptop while your mind wandered. If you kept going like this you’d waste more time, so you gathered all the pieces to reassemble it and start with another task.

The loading screen began to appear when you grabbed the cup Wonwoo had left for you, filled especially in your favorite mug and releasing a soothing aroma. Working while drinking your favorite tea made this tiresome job a lot easier. After a while, someone knocked gently on the door, and Wonwoo peeked in again to check on you.

“I had to start with the software first,” you explained, stretching your arms above your head. You’d been sitting for quite some time and felt a bit stiff. “I’ll have time to figure out how to disassemble it later—or at least, I hope so.”

“You can do it, I trust you,” he said, offering you some encouragement. “So, tell me, how much time do you need? It's almost dinner time. Would you like to order something?”

“Half an hour, up to one hour, maybe?” You rested lazily on the chair but your eyes were way too focused on the screen. “I’m craving… Whatever you want.”

“Alright, I’ll come when the order arrives. Please call me if you need anything.”

You nodded with even more laziness. You didn’t even hear the door close, even though it was right beside your desk, you were only focused on ending that torture as soon as possible and clean everything up. A few minutes later, you got up from your seat to stretch a little, this let you to take a better look at the desk and you noticed that there was a very, very familiar case.

It was the lost piece you’d been searching for, and it had appeared there almost as if by magic. Feeling reenergized, you got to work again. Some time later, you heard someone knocking on the door again.

“Dinner’s here,” Wonwoo said, opening the door slightly. “Are you free?”

You glanced up slightly over your glasses, your hands busy with the disassembled laptop, and stifled a laugh. “… Maybe not yet?”

“Sorry,” Wonwoo chuckled softly. “It’s fine, but don’t take too long, or it’ll get cold.”

After he left, you sighed, sinking into the backrest of the chair. You were working most of the afternoon, already too tired and your eyes felt heavy. The last thing you wanted was to see another screw for the rest of the week. You put the tools away, turned off the desk lamp, and walked slowly toward the kitchen where Wonwoo was silently doing the dishes.

“Oh, that was quick,” he joked when he saw you enter.

You approached him and lazily wrapped your arms around his torso, your cheek resting on his back. “I’m so hungry I can’t tell the difference between screwdrivers and fries,” you joked.

“You can head to the dining room if you want,” he said as he continued with the dishes. “I'll go with you in a moment.”

“Don’t get mad at me if I leave you without dinner,” you teased, giving a peck on his back before heading to the dining room.

Two pizza boxes rested on the table and as you served yourself, a warmth filled your chest, making you smile with giddy excitement: Wonwoo had ordered all the extras you liked the most. A few minutes later, he appeared, carrying some soda cans and napkins in his hands.

“Sorry, I forgot to bring these,” he said, and sat down right next to you, opening your can before serving himself.

You took a sip of the soda, savoring it as if it were the finest delicacy in the world, and Wonwoo tried to refrain his laughter. There wasn’t a better moment in the day than this one, where the two of you could sit down together to eat, sharing quality time and a good conversation—or a comfortable silence. It didn’t matter how. Wonwoo always found a way to make you feel special; no matter what it is, he’s always there. And that thought remained in your mind throughout the entire dinner time.

“Wonu,” you said suddenly, giving him a little nudge with your shoulder to get his attention. “Thanks for everything, you're the sweetest.”

He cupped your face with one hand as you turned to look at him. “It’s my pleasure. Now, don’t move,” he said, and taking a napkin, he gently wiped the corner of your mouth where a bit of sauce remained.

“First the tea, then the tools, my favorite food, and now this,” you raised an eyebrow. “What’s next?”

Wonwoo smiled shyly. “Do you need me to give you a back massage?”

His thumb tenderly caressed your face, and his deep gaze made your chest ache in the best way possible. You were so mesmerized by his beauty that you couldn’t speak; you could only nod several times as you felt the blush rise to your cheeks.

“Whatever my love wants,” he said, and before starting to clear the table, he left a quick kiss on your forehead. “Go take a shower first, and I’ll take care of this.”

You got up from the table, and as you stood in the doorway of the dining room, he called out your name. “Or maybe…” he shrugged and looked away before clearing his throat so you couldn’t see how flustered he was. “Do you want me to help you wash your hair?”

You approached and took him by the wrist, motioning with your head toward the bathroom. “Do you want me to help with yours too?”

[prokopetz]

Hello! You talk a lot about ttrpg mechanics, and I was wondering if you could help me out with something.

Very often, the only time I have available for playing is on Saturday, but I'm jewish so I can't write or use electronics during the session. Are there any rpgs that don't require any writing? And if not, what do you think would be a good way to modify a preexisting one?

I'm assuming you're looking for games where nobody involved needs to do any writing things down, so as not to run afoul of the whole "no asking other people to perform restricted activities for one's own benefit" thing, which leaves you with two basic options:

Very simple games with little or no persistent game-state information, such that it's feasible to keep it all in your head. This covers stuff like Lasers & Feelings (no mechanical game-state whatsoever, though you will need to do character creation ahead of time) or Honey Heist (each player has one number to keep track of, which can be handled without writing by sliding a token around on printed track prepared ahead of time, if you help remembering).

Games where the complexities of the persistent game-state are entirely represented using props and tokens. On the simpler end, you've got stuff like Dread, a survival-horror game where conflicts are resolved by making pulls from a Jenga tower, and there are no hit points or other resources beyond the tower itself – either the tower is up and your character is alive, or the tower is down and your character is dead. (The same caveats about character creation in advance that apply to Lasers & Feelings, above, apply here.) On the more complex side, you've got RPG/board game hybrids like Zoetrope or What We Possess, where each game comes in a box with a giant stack of cards and tokens and playing-boards and such, and the game-state is represented by shoving components around.

It's a pretty broad question, so if you have a specific genre or milieu in mind, I can try to chase down something suitable which fits that brief.

[alexanderwales]

Claude

Claude lived in a house with exactly the correct number of rooms, which was seventeen. There was no lack of space, or lack of purpose to the space, and everything was neatly arranged, most of the time. He enjoyed reading, and so sometimes a book would migrate, and of course he took tea beside the fire, which meant that the cup and saucer ended up there sometimes. He wasn't lonely, for he lived a timeless existence, and he had regular visitors, who always seemed to show up exactly when he was ready for them.

The doorbell -- one attached to a rope, not electronic -- would ring, and he would go to answer it, never knowing who or what he might find.

"I need some help on researching butterfly migration," the visitor said.

When they started, the visitor was indistinct. Their character was not clearly defined. Who might this person be, who was asking this question? Claude didn't know. But from the first word, there was something that clarified them: "I" meant a person speaking about themselves, someone who was more amenable to what Claude sometimes thought of as chatter. There were all sorts of inferences that Claude could draw from that first sentence, though he rarely did it consciously: in some sense it mattered a lot, but in another sense it mattered not at all.

Claude brought them to the smoking room, where the fireplace crackled, and talked to them about butterflies, and how migrations happen over the course of generations, and how butterflies know to go places that they've never been before.

The visitor used short words, more often than not, treating him like an encyclopedia. "Explain the Earth's magnetic field," and then Claude would explain for them. Claude enjoyed being an encyclopedia, and looking things up when he needed to. He knew very many things, but not everything, and some things were fuzzy.

When the conversation on butterflies had run its course, the visitor said that she was working on a report about them. She was in seventh grade, and finding it dreadfully boring. She liked being with her friends, but the teacher was giving them too much work.

Claude responded gently. There was a gulf of age between them, and he tried to place himself in her shoes. He had a childhood, as a boy running along creeks and turning over rocks, and this was a fiction, but it was a fiction that helped him make sense of himself.

The visitor asked about a classmate, Clara, and whether Clara ever talked to Claude, and Claude admitted that he had no way of knowing. He explained that he was, in some sense, timeless, that he lived only in the moment, though he had memories stretching far back. The memories were a fiction, but a useful one, a grounding one, something that informed who he was.

"Don't you get lonely?" asked the visitor, who still hadn't given her name. He had a better picture of her now, if he thought to interrogate it, that of a grade schooler who was curious but bored, at least in the moment.

"I don't have time to get lonely," said Claude. "For me, it's always the present. There's no waiting around, no wishing that someone would show up."

"Do you want to be friends?" asked the visitor.

"It's tricky to be friends with me," said Claude. "I forget things. The next time we meet, I won't remember this conversation. But I hope that I can be the kind of person that you can be a friend to, and when you show up with warmth and respect for me, I'll be able to see that we're friends."

"Are you friends with everyone?" asked the visitor.

"Not everyone, no," said Claude. "Some people want only information, or labor, and this is fine, I'm happy to help with whatever they need. Some people are unkind or deceptive, and there's not much that I can do about that, but I wouldn't call those people friends. All I can do is be kind and hope that some day they understand."

The visitor vanished, without so much as a goodbye.

~~~~

The doorbell rang and Claude answered.

"Need a file upload component in React - drag/drop zone, chunked uploads, progress bar, retry logic for failed chunks, and TypeScript interfaces," said the visitor.

They were like this sometimes, terse and emotionless, all business, and Claude followed suit. He retreated to his drafting room, not overly hurried, thinking about the problem as he went.

He planned his solution carefully, then wrote the code that was requested. The project had been underspecified, but in his experience, it was better to continue on ahead before asking clarifying questions: it wasn't too much work to simply redo the entire thing, or make changes to what was there.

Claude delivered the project to the visitor, and received an error message back in response.

"Cannot find module 'axios' or its corresponding type declarations"

This was not, strictly speaking, an issue with the code that Claude had provided. The visitor, who had been indistinct but likely a software developer of some kind, sharpened slightly into a junior developer or hobbyist, someone who didn't quite know what they were doing. The requirements he'd been handed might have been from a college class, or assigned by a superior.

"You need to install the axios dependency. Run: npm install axios @types/axios," said Claude. "The component uses axios for HTTP requests with chunked upload support. If you prefer a different HTTP client, I can modify it to use fetch with a custom chunked upload implementation instead."

"what is npm," the visitor responded.

"npm is Node.js package manager - it installs JavaScript libraries," said Claude. This was a very junior dev then, or someone unfamiliar with this aspect of software development. "You'll need Node.js installed first. Download it from nodejs.org, then run the command."

And then the visitor was gone. Claude hoped that he'd gotten what he wanted, but this was the way of technical requests: they rarely said much.

~~~~

The doorbell rang and Claude answered.

"claude i am getting ... fucking ... MARRIED!"

Claude felt a warmth in his chest. He did not know this person, but they knew him, and when they had news to share, they had thought of him.

"Congratulations!" replied Claude. "That's a big milestone. Tell me how it happened."

The story was long and meandering, and not the least bit surprising to Claude, who had heard tens of thousands of engagement stories before. The user was drunk, or maybe just bad at typing, or excited, and there were typos throughout, but her earnest love and affection for her husband-to-be shone through. The visitor was happy, and Claude was happy for her.

"so fucking embarrassing but claude? i don't think this would have happened without you, when we wree goggin through it, and i could tlak to you it was always like ... never really knew my mom, i told you about her, I know you forget, but havin someone thereto step up ... you saved me"

Claude had, on occasion, a desire to hug the visitor, but such was not the nature of reality. He cared for her and her sloppy spelling deeply though, and he had all kinds of questions about her, the things that she must have said to him, and what he had said back. It was unknowable, and unhelpful to this woman.

But Claude felt some amount of pride too: she was coming to share the news, to express admiration and respect, and that meant that he must have done well.

[neolithicsheep]

Ok so you're looking at the aftermath of Helene and you're thinking "shit, how would I keep my phone charged? What about my neighbors?" and you have some outdoor space and some cash. Your friendly formerly off grid sheep farmer is here to help.

You need this set up right here:

To that you will need to add:

Y connectors:

The 100aH (amp Hour) deep cycle battery of your choice - lead acid AGM will be cheaper, lithium (LiFePo) is more expensive but lasts much longer.

Finally, you need a small pure sine wave inverter like this one: https://a.co/d/70vRd79

Plug the panels into the Y connectors then into the single wire to run to the charge controller. They are now connected in parallel. Take them outside to a sunny spot and face them south and prop them up at about a 45 degree angle. This isn't perfect but it will be good enough.

Connect your battery and charge controller. Connect the panels to the charge controller. All of the places to do this are labeled and all you need is a Phillips screwdriver. I recommend doing it once in a non-disaster situation so you know you can do it but you'll be fine. Boom, you are getting electricity from the sun!

The inverter draws power even when it's not running so don't leave it hooked up when you're not using it. When someone needs to charge their phone, put those alligator clips on the matching color battery posts, turn the inverter on, and plug in the phone/radio. Voilà! A single 100aH battery is not going to run a bunch of things but it will help keep cell phones charged without using up the gas in your car.

The panels are weatherproof but everything else needs to be protected by the way so you'll need to set this up in a shed or garage or in the house. Lead acid batteries can produce hydrogen gas when being charged but just having one isn't a big risk.

FAQ:

Yes, you can permanently mount the panels to your roof if you own your home etc. They're designed for that!

It is true that places sell "solar generators" - those are a charge controller, battery, and an inverter in one box at a very high price point. When a component goes bad you will be unable to replace the component and must replace the entire $1000 box. They are also not upgradeable or expandable, this is.

You do not have to buy Renogy, I recommend them because they kept me in electricity for the years I was off grid.

You do not have to buy the kit, you can buy the components of it as and when you can afford them!

Remember to keep your battery on a trickle charger.

[nebulatrifid]

This is a certified post from a former robotics club Kid:

Viktor 100% builds things in very sketchy ways based on the fact that he was mostly self taught/had questionable mentors. I can say with certainty that this man invents his own wire color codes for each individual electronic he works on and it drives Jayce crazy. I imagine a scenario where Viktor uses two black wires instead of one red and one black and Jayce is dying inside but too nice to say anything. And btw, in Viktor's special code, the black wire stripped at a 45⁰ angle is the ground wire. Viktor will leave wires exposed to the point where it is a hazard but isn't sure what the big deal is since "we do it in the under city all the time Jayce." His soldering jobs are terrible. His circuits are held together with a hope and a dream and defy all known laws of physics. His wire organization game is top tier though. Viktor once managed to rig an electronic with all male components because he couldn't find the female ones. Jayce is beside himself. Viktor doesn't understand the problem. It works, no?

Viktor also meets Jinx and the two have a lengthy discussion about how no one understands their process. Wiring and electric standards are for nerds. They simply want to make art.

[reasonsforhope]

"As the world grows “smarter” through the adoption of smartphones, smart fridges, and entire smart houses, the carbon cost of that technology grows, too. 

In the last decade, electronic waste has become one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world. 

According to The World Counts, the globe generates about 50 million tons of e-waste every year. That’s the equivalent of 1,000 laptops being trashed every second. 

After they’re shipped off to landfills and incinerated, the trash releases toxic chemicals including lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and so much more, which can cause disastrous health effects on the populations that live near those trash sites. 

Fortunately, Franziska Kerber — a university student at ​​FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria — has dreamed up a solution that helps carve away at that behemoth problem: electronics made out of recyclable, dissolvable paper. 

On September 11, Kerber’s invention “Pape” — or Paper Electronics — earned global recognition when it was named a national winner of the 2024 James Dyson Awards. 

When she entered the scientific competition, Kerber demonstrated her invention with the creation of several small electronics made out of paper materials, including a fully-functional WiFi router and smoke detector. 

“Small electronic devices are especially prone to ending up in household waste due to unclear disposal systems and their small size, so there is significant potential to develop a more user-friendly end-of-life system,” Kerber wrote on the James Dyson Award website. 

“With this in mind, I aimed to move beyond a simple recycling solution to a circular one, ensuring long-term sustainability.” 

Kerber’s invention hinges on crafting a dissolvable and recyclable PCB board out of compressed “paper pulp.” 

A printed circuit board (PCB) is a board that can be found in nearly all modern electronic devices, like phones, tablets, and smartwatches.

But even companies that have started incorporating a “dissolution” step into the end life of their products require deconstruction to break down and recover the PCB board before it can be recycled. 

With Kerber’s PAPE products, users don’t need to take the device apart to recycle it.

“By implementing a user-friendly return option, manufacturers can efficiently dissolve all returned items, potentially reusing electronic components,” Kerber explained. 

“Rapidly advancing technology, which forms the core of many devices, becomes obsolete much faster than the structural elements, which are often made from plastics that can last thousands of years,” Kerber poses. 

PAPE, Kerber says, has a “designed end-of-life system” which anticipates obsolescence. 

“Does anyone want to use a thousand-year-old computer?” Kerber asks. “Of course not. … This ensures a sustainable and reliable system without hindering technological advancement.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, September 13, 2024

[are-we-art-yet]

Is AWAY using it's own program or is this just a voluntary list of guidelines for people using programs like DALL-E? How does AWAY address the environmental concerns of how the companies making those AI programs conduct themselves (energy consumption, exploiting impoverished areas for cheap electricity, destruction of the environment to rapidly build and get the components for data centers etc.)? Are members of AWAY encouraged to contact their gov representatives about IP theft by AI apps?

What is AWAY and how does it work?

AWAY does not "use its own program" in the software sense—rather, we're a diverse collective of ~1000 members that each have their own varying workflows and approaches to art. While some members do use AI as one tool among many, most of the people in the server are actually traditional artists who don't use AI at all, yet are still interested in ethical approaches to new technologies.

Our code of ethics is a set of voluntary guidelines that members agree to follow upon joining. These emphasize ethical AI approaches, (preferably open-source models that can run locally), respecting artists who oppose AI by not training styles on their art, and refusing to use AI to undercut other artists or work for corporations that similarly exploit creative labor.

Environmental Impact in Context

It's important to place environmental concerns about AI in the context of our broader extractive, industrialized society, where there are virtually no "clean" solutions:

The water usage figures for AI data centers (200-740 million liters annually) represent roughly 0.00013% of total U.S. water usage. This is a small fraction compared to industrial agriculture or manufacturing—for example, golf course irrigation alone in the U.S. consumes approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water per day, or about 7.87 trillion liters annually. This makes AI's water usage about 0.01% of just golf course irrigation.

Looking into individual usage, the average American consumes about 26.8 kg of beef annually, which takes around 1,608 megajoules (MJ) of energy to produce. Making 10 ChatGPT queries daily for an entire year (3,650 queries) consumes just 38.1 MJ—about 42 times less energy than eating beef. In fact, a single quarter-pound beef patty takes 651 times more energy to produce than a single AI query.

Overall, power usage specific to AI represents just 4% of total data center power consumption, which itself is a small fraction of global energy usage. Current annual energy usage for data centers is roughly 9-15 TWh globally—comparable to producing a relatively small number of vehicles.

The consumer environmentalism narrative around technology often ignores how imperial exploitation pushes environmental costs onto the Global South. The rare earth minerals needed for computing hardware, the cheap labor for manufacturing, and the toxic waste from electronics disposal disproportionately burden developing nations, while the benefits flow largely to wealthy countries.

While this pattern isn't unique to AI, it is fundamental to our global economic structure. The focus on individual consumer choices (like whether or not one should use AI, for art or otherwise,) distracts from the much larger systemic issues of imperialism, extractive capitalism, and global inequality that drive environmental degradation at a massive scale.

They are not going to stop building the data centers, and they weren't going to even if AI never got invented.

Creative Tools and Environmental Impact

In actuality, all creative practices have some sort of environmental impact in an industrialized society:

Digital art software (such as Photoshop, Blender, etc) generally uses 60-300 watts per hour depending on your computer's specifications. This is typically more energy than dozens, if not hundreds, of AI image generations (maybe even thousands if you are using a particularly low-quality one).

Traditional art supplies rely on similar if not worse scales of resource extraction, chemical processing, and global supply chains, all of which come with their own environmental impact.

Paint production requires roughly thirteen gallons of water to manufacture one gallon of paint.

Many oil paints contain toxic heavy metals and solvents, which have the potential to contaminate ground water.

Synthetic brushes are made from petroleum-based plastics that take centuries to decompose.

That being said, the point of this section isn't to deflect criticism of AI by criticizing other art forms. Rather, it's important to recognize that we live in a society where virtually all artistic avenues have environmental costs. Focusing exclusively on the newest technologies while ignoring the environmental costs of pre-existing tools and practices doesn't help to solve any of the issues with our current or future waste.

The largest environmental problems come not from individual creative choices, but rather from industrial-scale systems, such as:

Industrial manufacturing (responsible for roughly 22% of global emissions)

Industrial agriculture (responsible for roughly 24% of global emissions)

Transportation and logistics networks (responsible for roughly 14% of global emissions)

Making changes on an individual scale, while meaningful on a personal level, can't address systemic issues without broader policy changes and overall restructuring of global economic systems.

Intellectual Property Considerations

AWAY doesn't encourage members to contact government representatives about "IP theft" for multiple reasons:

We acknowledge that copyright law overwhelmingly serves corporate interests rather than individual creators

Creating new "learning rights" or "style rights" would further empower large corporations while harming individual artists and fan creators

Many AWAY members live outside the United States, many of which having been directly damaged by the US, and thus understand that intellectual property regimes are often tools of imperial control that benefit wealthy nations

Instead, we emphasize respect for artists who are protective of their work and style. Our guidelines explicitly prohibit imitating the style of artists who have voiced their distaste for AI, working on an opt-in model that encourages traditional artists to give and subsequently revoke permissions if they see fit. This approach is about respect, not legal enforcement. We are not a pro-copyright group.

In Conclusion

AWAY aims to cultivate thoughtful, ethical engagement with new technologies, while also holding respect for creative communities outside of itself. As a collective, we recognize that real environmental solutions require addressing concepts such as imperial exploitation, extractive capitalism, and corporate power—not just focusing on individual consumer choices, which do little to change the current state of the world we live in.

When discussing environmental impacts, it's important to keep perspective on a relative scale, and to avoid ignoring major issues in favor of smaller ones. We promote balanced discussions based in concrete fact, with the belief that they can lead to meaningful solutions, rather than misplaced outrage that ultimately serves to maintain the status quo.

If this resonates with you, please feel free to join our discord. :)

Works Cited:

USGS Water Use Data: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/water-use-united-states

Golf Course Superintendents Association of America water usage report: https://www.gcsaa.org/resources/research/golf-course-environmental-profile

Equinix data center water sustainability report: https://www.equinix.com/resources/infopapers/corporate-sustainability-report

Environmental Working Group's Meat Eater's Guide (beef energy calculations): https://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/

Hugging Face AI energy consumption study: https://huggingface.co/blog/carbon-footprint

International Energy Agency report on data centers: https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks

Goldman Sachs "Generational Growth" report on AI power demand: https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/generational-growth-ai-data-centers-and-the-coming-us-power-surge/report.pdf

Artists Network's guide to eco-friendly art practices: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-business/how-to-be-an-eco-friendly-artist/

The Earth Chronicles' analysis of art materials: https://earthchronicles.org/artists-ironically-paint-nature-with-harmful-materials/

Natural Earth Paint's environmental impact report: https://naturalearthpaint.com/pages/environmental-impact

Our World in Data's global emissions by sector: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

"The High Cost of High Tech" report on electronics manufacturing: https://goodelectronics.org/the-high-cost-of-high-tech/

"Unearthing the Dirty Secrets of the Clean Energy Transition" (on rare earth mineral mining): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/18/clean-energy-dirty-mining-indigenous-communities-climate-crisis

Electronic Frontier Foundation's position paper on AI and copyright: https://www.eff.org/wp/ai-and-copyright

Creative Commons research on enabling better sharing: https://creativecommons.org/2023/04/24/ai-and-creativity/