Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 616 posts

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#371

Post by cycomanic »

safety1st wrote: post #356
titanomachy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And earlier they say “$120 upfront might as well be a million when you’re making $2/day”. The whole article reads like it was vomited up by an LLM trained exclusively on LinkedIn posts. The math errors are consistent with that.

Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it. AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.

It's getting boring how every. single. article. has comments how the article is AI generated. The funny thing is the article writing styles are completely different, but every one has apparently "tell-tale" signs of "AI slop". It just gets tiring.

For what it's worth I pasted the first couple of paragraphs into several AI detectors and 4/5 said it's clean, while one said mixed (partly AI generated partly human). So either all these AI generation tools are crap, or the text is not so "obviously" AI generated. Not saying either way, but it seems to at least not be so obvious.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#372

Post by MrsPeaches »

This revolution also has a dark side:

People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.

This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.

It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.

More details for the interested here: https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Re...

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#374

Post by stogot »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

Sounds like an opportunity to do a buyback and sell to a refurb provider.

But also to fix their junk. 250 million?!

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#375

Post by jgilias »

mothballed wrote: post #258
_ea1k wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What law governs this? I'm familiar with a lot of restrictions on grid-tie systems, but I've never heard of it being this strict for something that could (presumably) be done without a back feed. I mean, are you saying that someone sticking up a few panels+batteries to run an electric fence, gate, and camera system has to have permits? This all seems strange.

For example, here is the one that to install certain PV you need permit with roof and building plan, which is impossible on my house because I have none (literally built my roof off the cuff after thumbing IRC). https://www.azleg.gov/ars/11/00323.htm

Just dropping by to say that I appreciate your approach to life lol

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#376

Post by whatshisface »

narrator wrote: post #288

All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological har…

Rare earth refining isn't a specific industrial process. The cheapest possible method is a specific industrial process, and is very dirty. In a "survivalist solarpunk world" it would probably be done less cheaply.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#377

Post by [deleted] »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

[deleted]

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#378

Post by adrianN »

chithanh wrote: post #365
w10-1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades Hat tip also to China's ideological commitment to independence from external oil supplies, as nicely coupled to reducing pollution and greenwashing their image. It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.

> It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough. No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere. https://www.economist.com/business/2023/02/20/global-firms-a... (Archive link: https://archive.fo/tdhXJ ) China is also the only major economy where wages have increased at the same…

Solar panel construction is very easy to automate, I don’t think labor is a big driver of cost.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#379

Post by jimnotgym »

Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article?

I want to hear from the people affected.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#380

Post by Version467 »

cycomanic wrote: post #371
safety1st wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it. AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.

It's getting boring how every. single. article. has comments how the article is AI generated. The funny thing is the article writing styles are completely different, but every one has apparently "tell-tale" signs of "AI slop". It just gets tiring. For what it's worth I pasted the first couple of paragraphs into several AI detectors and 4/5 said it's clean, while one said mixed (partly AI generated partly human). So e…

All of those tools are garbage. There is no reliable automated way to detect ai generated text. In 2023 OpenAI had a tool for this as well and they eventually took it down because it wasn't accurate enough. The major AI labs are probably best positioned to make such a tool work. If even they can't, then some random company with access to a fraction of a data and a fraction of the compute almost certainly also cannot.
Post reply on HN