The Democratic Republic of Congo holds between 60-80% of the world’s coltan reserves, a key input to capacitors and other discrete electronics. UN investigators have identified systematic rape and sexual violence as a strategy of armed groups controlling regions containing these minerals, over 113k individual instances in 2023 alone. Phones keep getting made.

To me, this project is arguing that we don’t necessarily need to tolerate systemic rape, exploitation, economic inequality, and other forms of violence to have our little circuits.

The materials they are hoping to replace are some of the least accessible, extracted with some of the most caustic industrial processes. What are you even talking about?

They talk about conflict materials but this is replacing FR4, which is pretty cheap. It's basically glass and glue.

They’re investigating “can circuits be produced from”, not asserting “this is a better medium for this exact circuit”. It is a tutorial on creating clay PCBs at all, a demo of the technique.

Yes. And thus using a circuit that has the complexity of a circuit one would put onto a circuit board would be a good demonstration. E.g. showcasing vias and other circuit board technologies.

Understandably the first step is to start simple, but that is the essence of my criticism: Too many of these projects become viral hits that stop making any progress after the first symbolic success. Cynics would say these projects all too often stop exactly at the point where the actual challenges start.

And as someone who cares about the environment, I am not sure how I feel about a hundred symbolic projects that go nowhere. Are the substrates of PCBs really the problem? What if people have to throw entire devices with mud PCBs into the bin after a year because the mud PCB couldn't handle the vibration and humidity? Is that environmentally sound?

I'd love to someone really explore alternative PCB materials. But that means living in reality and compsring the whole lifecycle of the result to existing technologies. A automotive tire made of mud is also environmentally sound. It is just that it falls apart after half a block.

> Too many of these projects become viral hits that stop making any progress after the first symbolic success. Cynics would say these projects all too often stop exactly at the point where the actual challenges start.

What can you do to ensure the "real work" can actually be done, more precise paid for? Well, you could demo early in hope to attract coins. Maybe that is happening here.

You’re bringing so much weird baggage to this. A viral hit? This is a ~2,300 word piece, equivalent to an article in The Atlantic introducing a 30 page PDF tutorial and code repo which is ran as a workshop in hacker spaces and at conferences. It isn’t a proposal for a new scale industrial process seeking VC funding.

You’re critiquing it for not being something you value, but it isn’t trying to be that thing. They’re not doing the thing you think they are badly, they’re doing something you haven’t bothered to understand.

Honestly, I think the only way one could look at this and bring that critique is if they both didn’t look at shit but the pictures and saw the word “feminist” used and began to intellectually infantilize the authors.

I am a feminist myself so why would that be reason to critique anybody over it?

The "weird baggage" I bring to this is thst I run an electronics lab at the university level. Of course this means I have seen a lot. My criticism by the way doesn't have a lot to do with these projects themselves, more with how a specific type of writing is treating these projects and how readers with insufficient background knowledge would then misunderstand it.

A comparable thing is when scientific writers talk about how a promising first material test is likely the battery technology of the future. How do you feel after reading decades of these articles?

And don't get me wrong: I do believe that these efforts can ultimately lead to actual change. We just need to be transparent what it is and how long it takes to introduce actual change.

Dope. Reminds me of the https://highlowtech.org/ research group at MIT Media Lab early 2010s, specifically kit-of-no-parts from Hannah Perner-Wilson and Leah Buechley. They were doing copper electroplated clay dead-bug circuits and other wild shit.

Meant to be a fun thing to do/experience/learn and not produced on an industrial scale. One small fire pit to harden some clay isn't going to make a material impact on total human CO2 emissions.

The JCPOA was working fine. We discarded it for vanity and to create an opportunity for more war. That is obviously immoral.

If it was working “fine” then why was Iran able to reach 60% enriched uranium and enough for 10 nuclear weapons if they were able to enrich further?

That enrichment occurred after Trump voluntarily exited the JCPOA. The IAEA reported no enrichment over the 3.67% threshold through 2018, then reported over 400kg at 60% in 2025, all created in the period after Trump pulled out. You are describing a consequence of ending the JCPOA.

This is simply untrue. Rupert Murdoch has never had an ownership stake in The Onion. It is currently held privately by Twilio cofounder and former CEO Jeff Lawson and former NBC News reporter Ben Collins.

Was this a mistake, something you mis-remembered?

Or perhaps obvious parody content, such as the type The Onion might publish.

C’mon. Making this argument doesn’t even respect yourself, let alone anyone else.

It’s not that you’re willfully ignorant of the critique, you already know what it is. It’s TDS. Case closed.

Pre-sorting all criticism as reflexive and not necessarily justified is a rationalization for you not trying to understand other perspectives.

Edit: it seems like my message was ambiguous. Fuck Donald Trump, I’ve got a bottle to pop when he dies and I’ll never let you fuckers live down what you’ve done.

Well said, although there are legitimate critiques of the admin to be had even from the well-adjusted, especially recently.

"TDS" is not a thing. It's a made-up term that people accuse others of, because they can't cover up a felonious president's many failings, lies, graft, and corruption. You use it to try to discredit a person who is rightly criticizing criminality, but you only discredit yourself when you use "TDS".

I, the person you replied to, was mocking the concept of TDS. I apologize if my intent was unclear to you, I’ll try harder in the future.

The link in this post is to a website NASA is using to try to hire engineers.

Your comment is about how much you hate Trump.

TDS is a phenomenon where people have to bring up how much they hate Trump in every conversation, even when it is unrelated to the topic at hand.

Hysterical nonsense like this just lends credence to TDS

I did not know that. That is extremely convenient. Thank you.

Tapping it 5 (6? 7? 20?) times works better while panicked, though.

A person might use it to stop someone getting into your computer through certain types of physical coercion, forcing your finger to the reader, or (much less likely but I’m sure security services know how) a copy of your fingerprint.

But it isn’t a why, it is a what. That what is a tool that lets you quickly disable Touch ID for whatever reason you want to.