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

Open Source Low Tech

opensourcelowtech.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 143 posts

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#61

Post by WillAdams »

nchmy wrote: post #20
bloqs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering

In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc... There's no meani…

The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.

https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#62

Post by WillAdams »

elias1233 wrote: post #43

It would be interesting to see if an air conditioner or refrigerator can be made in this manner

Air conditioning: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/no-ac...

Refrigerator would be a traditional root cellar such as my uncle had --- he was also fortunate to have a spring on his property which he encapsulated in a rock structure which was a wonderful place to be on a hot summer day/evening.

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#63

Post by Palomides »

xmprt wrote: post #3

I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency. It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That wa…

it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#64

Post by ErroneousBosh »

xmprt wrote: post #3

I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency. It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That wa…

> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.

Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#65

Post by ErroneousBosh »

benj111 wrote: post #33
nchmy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be different about a bike designed for Africa than one designed for anywhere else? What parts that require specialized tools should be redesigned to use standard tools?

Well I'm not African so I don't know. I'm thinking that in the west we either have very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use, and more expensive bikes tend to use fancier parts. Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you…

> Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).

So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#66

Post by ahana_537 »

what is most interesting to me is gap between ai engineering and software engineering, a lot of challenges are testing , performance , architecture and user experience, good engineering still seems to be differentiator.

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#67

Post by functionmouse »

Max536752 wrote: post #54

I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.

Any part of the process we hand over goes away forever. This way, society becomes dependent, and M$, OpenAI and Apple see RoI.

Any usage, even minor, is at too great a cost.

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#68

Post by nchmy »

ForHackernews wrote: post #39
nchmy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc... There's no meani…

The Carter Center has nearly eliminated the Guinea Worm: https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/ I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.

The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation

Re: Open Source Low Tech

#69

Post by nchmy »

Palomides wrote: post #63
xmprt wrote: post #3

I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency. It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That wa…

it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system

It's extremely expensive to ship bikes around - even old unused ones.
Post reply on HN