New generations have new language and are attempting to define themselves through their usage of certain terminology and re-framing of words (Arduino -> Arduina).
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.
I share your supportive and generally charitable attitude here. I don’t have to understand the constraints they choose for themselves in order to admire that they’re working within them.
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.
What date is that? Petrochemicals aren't all stored in a big tank somewhere. My model is that there are many marginal sources which are not cost-effective to exploit, but which could be exploited with better technology or at a higher cost. I do not think we will ever extract all of these; instead, the cost of extraction will increase gradually, shifting incentives towards other energy sources.
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like.
At what approximate date will all known reserves of petroleum be exhausted, providing that the global rate of consumption and increase in consumption remains steady, and provided that all available resources can be extracted, even if we do not currently have the technology to do so yet?
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.
The language bit is dual purpose. For one it's clearly tongue in cheek. Furthermore, it's a way to scare off people who would get set off from a little bit of language play. It's a way to make an online space free of people they don't want without actually putting up hard borders or moving it to a less public space. (Personally I think it's a wonderful strategy)
All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what they were hoping for
While I appreciate your perspective, I'll note that for a certain group of people that I know personally, this language is NOT tongue and cheek. Though I find myself to be neither a woman nor an artist, I know people who are both - and this language is becoming more and more common as people reach for a way to set themselves apart from a social precedent and past language that they feel is neither inclusive nor representative of their own ambitions or experience.
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.
I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.
“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 not femininity and so is not to be contrasted with masculinity [1].
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 probably 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.
Yes, that's exactly the focus of modern feminist studies. Figures like Donna Haraway have pushed for a field of study that goes beyond identities of womanhood.
> She advocates for political organizing based on "affinity"—conscious coalitions and political choices—rather than essentialist identities based on biology or shared oppression.
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?
And it's taxpayer funded, to boot. I definitely wouldn't be happy as an Austrian if I knew my taxes were going to something like this (meanwhile hobbyists elsewhere do projects like this on their own dime).
Governments have long funded artistic projects. I'm sure some people oppose government funding for the arts, but there's nothing unusual about it. Obviously, not all artists get government funding, but such funding is an established process.
Why? This is a creative endeavour, which is exactly how tech progresses. The fact that you're not able to understand the links between "tech stuff" and "societal stuff" should ring alarm bells in your head...
The name of the site and I think the group itself is "feminist hacking", the entire point of the research group appears to be examining the ethics of technology and hacking through a feminist lens.
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.
I mean, the technical definition provided “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression'” is expanded quite rapidly into including racism and then labor practices (which I’m
very much struggling with the jump; the link appears to be that both involve power relationships?).
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 opposite of feminist is not masculine. You are conflating feminist with feminine which does indicate why your are maybe confused here. Feminism is not about being partisan like this, and you are operating through a strawman of so-called "second wave feminism" which is like over half a century old and defunct to everyone but guys who get angry at stuff like this.
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 truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.
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).
Well if you were a creative/researcher-type of person, the mere fact that you don't understand what she hopes to gain would push you to read about it. You'd discover the very real links between tech and gender inequalities (or the reinforcement of other minority inequalities) and you'd have learn something
For me the next step should explore how to cut out the firing part of the process altogether, pottery looks cool but the process requires a lot of energy. Perhaps it could be done on a piece of wood planed by hand? You can get those fairly flat. Then use copper tape (or laminate your own copper really) with some homemade adhesive?
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.
They're not great for anything that might produce heat. Seeing a MOSFET slowly starting to imitate the Tower of Pisa after dissipating a measly 1 W for a few moments was a sight to behold.
CO2 emissions from burning wood (and charcoal) can considered net-zero by some (I'm not really interested in arguing one way or the other) because all of the CO2 being released was initially trapped out of the air by the plant, not releasing "new" carbon that was initially trapped underground
There’s more to pollution than CO2. You’re polluting the neighborhood with smoke, which is bad for lungs. Maybe okay in a rural area if neighbors are far away.
Ceramics are already used a lot in electronics. Ceramic capacitors are the most well known. But you can find it in resistors, inductors and even PCBs. See for example:
The article acknowledges this, and says they chose clay over ceramics for electricity consumption. Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power
This is the way that artists speak when describing a new technique or process they have come up with. It’s also something I haven’t seen done before, so it’s legit research to me.
An empty head is not the same as an open mind. There is no idea to shoot down here.
You invoked BGA to criticize point-to-point.
Invoking BGA in this context is invalid unless you can explain how this art project process could ever handle BGA. Which you have yet to do.
You suggest that shooting down ideas isn't productive.
What an interesting argument to present, while not only "shooting down" an idea yourself, but shooting it down as unworkable after it has actually already worked for decades, generations, for jobs of the same complexity as this post.
I am wondering what of this could be used in high-volume industrial processes.
"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."
I think the entire point of the project and potentially the research group is looking at manufacturing while explicitly/intentionally steering away from high volume and industrial processes.
As an electonics labs person I applaude all efforts to mske our practise more renewable. However this is a circuit that I would have wired without PCB at all, directly point to point, wire to pin.
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.
Honestly, the language isn't super off or abnormal in other circles, maybe it's a lot more telling that when posted on a tech-oriented site it's seen as ridiculous
New generations have new language and are attempting to define themselves through their usage of certain terminology and re-framing of words (Arduino -> Arduina).
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.
I share your supportive and generally charitable attitude here. I don’t have to understand the constraints they choose for themselves in order to admire that they’re working within them.
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.
What date is that? Petrochemicals aren't all stored in a big tank somewhere. My model is that there are many marginal sources which are not cost-effective to exploit, but which could be exploited with better technology or at a higher cost. I do not think we will ever extract all of these; instead, the cost of extraction will increase gradually, shifting incentives towards other energy sources.
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like.
2072. This date hasn't changed from 4 years ago.
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.Some napkin math suggests July 11, 2478 AD assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch.
Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.
The language bit is dual purpose. For one it's clearly tongue in cheek. Furthermore, it's a way to scare off people who would get set off from a little bit of language play. It's a way to make an online space free of people they don't want without actually putting up hard borders or moving it to a less public space. (Personally I think it's a wonderful strategy)
All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what they were hoping for
While I appreciate your perspective, I'll note that for a certain group of people that I know personally, this language is NOT tongue and cheek. Though I find myself to be neither a woman nor an artist, I know people who are both - and this language is becoming more and more common as people reach for a way to set themselves apart from a social precedent and past language that they feel is neither inclusive nor representative of their own ambitions or experience.
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.
It depends which language you're talking about I guess. The "Arduina" bit is clearly a joke
I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.
“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 not femininity and so is not to be contrasted with masculinity [1].
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 probably 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.
Yes, that's exactly the focus of modern feminist studies. Figures like Donna Haraway have pushed for a field of study that goes beyond identities of womanhood.
> She advocates for political organizing based on "affinity"—conscious coalitions and political choices—rather than essentialist identities based on biology or shared oppression.
This is going to really confuse future archaeologists.
What are you asking about exactly? About classifying the project as feminist or the perceived feminist = artistic implication?
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?
> To which I say - why not?
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?
And it's taxpayer funded, to boot. I definitely wouldn't be happy as an Austrian if I knew my taxes were going to something like this (meanwhile hobbyists elsewhere do projects like this on their own dime).
Governments have long funded artistic projects. I'm sure some people oppose government funding for the arts, but there's nothing unusual about it. Obviously, not all artists get government funding, but such funding is an established process.
Probably not, generally Western Europe has a very different opinion compared to the US when it comes to funding the arts.
Where do you see taxpayer funding? It looks like the hack space has gov funding - but i didn’t see any acknowledgement of grants for this project.
Why? This is a creative endeavour, which is exactly how tech progresses. The fact that you're not able to understand the links between "tech stuff" and "societal stuff" should ring alarm bells in your head...
>The fact that you're not able to understand the links between "tech stuff" and "societal stuff" should ring alarm bells in your head...
The fact you think that when I said nothing of the sort should ring alarm bells in your head...
I think "feminist" here means "socially conscious," not "small-batch/artistic."
Except "free-range feminist eggs" is sort of a weird sentence.
The group clearly has a strong sense of humor that the typical HN crowd is struggling to pick up on
The name of the site and I think the group itself is "feminist hacking", the entire point of the research group appears to be examining the ethics of technology and hacking through a feminist lens.
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.
You would hope that people who visit hacker news would be willing to spend a few minutes doing some research, but I guess that does get engagement.
I mean, the technical definition provided “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression'” is expanded quite rapidly into including racism and then labor practices (which I’m very much struggling with the jump; the link appears to be that both involve power relationships?).
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 opposite of feminist is not masculine. You are conflating feminist with feminine which does indicate why your are maybe confused here. Feminism is not about being partisan like this, and you are operating through a strawman of so-called "second wave feminism" which is like over half a century old and defunct to everyone but guys who get angry at stuff like this.
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 truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.
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).
Well if you were a creative/researcher-type of person, the mere fact that you don't understand what she hopes to gain would push you to read about it. You'd discover the very real links between tech and gender inequalities (or the reinforcement of other minority inequalities) and you'd have learn something
I think parent comment is probably aware of gender inequalities in tech.
For me the next step should explore how to cut out the firing part of the process altogether, pottery looks cool but the process requires a lot of energy. Perhaps it could be done on a piece of wood planed by hand? You can get those fairly flat. Then use copper tape (or laminate your own copper really) with some homemade adhesive?
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.
Interesting experiment, but on the other hand, maybe 3D printing would have less emissions than an open fire?
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...
They're not great for anything that might produce heat. Seeing a MOSFET slowly starting to imitate the Tower of Pisa after dissipating a measly 1 W for a few moments was a sight to behold.
For about two seconds before I cut the power.
CO2 emissions from burning wood (and charcoal) can considered net-zero by some (I'm not really interested in arguing one way or the other) because all of the CO2 being released was initially trapped out of the air by the plant, not releasing "new" carbon that was initially trapped underground
There’s more to pollution than CO2. You’re polluting the neighborhood with smoke, which is bad for lungs. Maybe okay in a rural area if neighbors are far away.
That's a cool project, I've actually considered something somewhere but never put the energy into actually doing the work.
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
Wood fired are CO2 neutral (but a problem of pollution with fine particulate at scale in poorly ventilated valleys).
It's an art project
That link sounds interesting but I can't open it :(
Seems temporary, try again.
Works, thanks.
Ceramics are already used a lot in electronics. Ceramic capacitors are the most well known. But you can find it in resistors, inductors and even PCBs. See for example:
https://www.bstceramicpcb.com/ceramic-pcb/thick-film-ceramic...
The article acknowledges this, and says they chose clay over ceramics for electricity consumption. Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power
>Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power
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
Well, the atmega fab was already there and that isn’t quite clean either :)
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.
The chips were pulled from dead arduinos, not bought fresh off the production line
I know. We live in a society where both the power grid and atmegas already exist, and our individual actions are marginal in impact.
You need a grid infrastructure to build and ship the rest of the electronics as well as to use the board.
It's a fun dit/artistic project but the political discourse used to describe it is absurd
Most political discourse you consider normal today (e.g. "fun") was considered absurd some years ago. Fewer than you imagine.
"We are investigating alternative hardware..."
The way she writes like this is serious research is throwing me.
This is the way that artists speak when describing a new technique or process they have come up with. It’s also something I haven’t seen done before, so it’s legit research to me.
Serious research always start by looking like play. Read Feynmann if you want to know more
This would fit in some ways with the Simplifier site.
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/
I feel like foregoing the whole PCB would be better, and just wirewrap, or "free-air" solder.
How would you handle LQFP or BGA packages?
What do you think the minimum pad clearance is for the clay?
You can dead bug an LQFP if you absolutely have to…
How does this idiotic ash tray of clay and paint handle bga?
Point to point is easily as functional or better than this.
How well did Albert Hanson’s flat foil board handle BGAs?
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
An empty head is not the same as an open mind. There is no idea to shoot down here.
You invoked BGA to criticize point-to-point.
Invoking BGA in this context is invalid unless you can explain how this art project process could ever handle BGA. Which you have yet to do.
You suggest that shooting down ideas isn't productive.
What an interesting argument to present, while not only "shooting down" an idea yourself, but shooting it down as unworkable after it has actually already worked for decades, generations, for jobs of the same complexity as this post.
Not looking for flaws. Looking for solutions!
I am wondering what of this could be used in high-volume industrial processes.
"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."
I think the entire point of the project and potentially the research group is looking at manufacturing while explicitly/intentionally steering away from high volume and industrial processes.
You can buy clay industrially, if you don’t care where it’s from.
But I think the point of this project is to do small-scale production, not develop new techniques for mass manufacturing
Truly stonepunk
Stoned punks for sure.
As an electonics labs person I applaude all efforts to mske our practise more renewable. However this is a circuit that I would have wired without PCB at all, directly point to point, wire to pin.
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.
I'm thinking of finer grained applications. Would CNC before firing work? Perhaps finer grained printed stamp plus air-drying clay?
i don’t think air dry clay would work very well - it has none of the thermal properties that real clay has, and would probably burn up on soldering?
Interesting project but I can't tell, is the language used supposed to be satire?
The "Arduina" comment definitely made me think it might be at least a little satirical in nature
It's not, the entire site appears to be a serious examination of technology and hacking ethics through a feminist lens
Honestly, the language isn't super off or abnormal in other circles, maybe it's a lot more telling that when posted on a tech-oriented site it's seen as ridiculous