For the skeptics here, this is the exponent thats driving the development of datacenters in space. The data has utility but it will be stuck in orbit. Space-based storage and processing makes a lot more sense when you consider that getting all that data to ground is challenging now, and will soon be impossible.
Yes, the original film for moon explorer has been stuck in orbit around the moon for decades. The world had a large network of satellite communications, and there was Arciebeo, but if it's not done here ... A few microwave dishes on all the NSF buildings should easily take are of it. Oh we had those ... But... What about streaming tape? Just ask Uncle Vint.
We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity verification.
For age verification specifically, the only information that services need proof of is that the users age is above a certain threshold. i.e. that the user is 14 years or older. But in order to make this determination, we see services asking for government ID (which many 14-year-olds do not have), or for invasive face scans. These methods provide far more data than necessary.
What the service needs to "prove" in this case is three things:
1. that the user meets the age predicate
2. that the identity used to meet the age predicate is validated by some authority
3. that the identity is not being reused across many accounts
All the technologies exist for this, we just haven't put them together usefully. Zero knowledge proofs, like Groth16 or STARKs allow for statements about data to be validated externally without revealing the data itself. These are difficult for engineers to use, let alone consumers. Big opportunity for someone to build an authority here.
>We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity verification.
like most proposed solutions, this just seems overcomplicated. we don't need "accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity". society has had age-restricted products forever. just piggy-back on that infrastructure.
1) government makes a database of valid "over 18" unique identifiers (UUIDs)
2) government provides tokens with a unique identifier on it to various stores that already sell age-restricted products (e.g. gas stations, liquor stores)
3) people buy a token from the store, only having to show their ID to the store clerk that they already show their ID to for smokes (no peter thiel required)
4) website accepts the token and queries the government database and sees "yep, over 18"
easy. all the laws are in place already. all the infrastructure is in place. no need for fancy zero-knowledge proofs or on-device whatevers.
The government will want some way to uncover who bought the token. They'll probably require the store to record the ID and pretend like since it's a private entity doing it, that it isn't a 4A violation. Then as soon as the token is used for something illegal they'll follow the chain of custody of the token and find out who bought it.
No matter what the actual mechanism is, I guarantee they will insist on something like that.
if the goal is to "protect children", or just generally make parts of the internet age-gated, my proposal is 100% fine.
if the goal is "surveil everyone using the internet", yes, very obviously my proposal would not be selected, and you will have to upload your id to various 3rd-party id verifiers.
I think something like your proposal actually sounds the most logical. I just think they will bolt on chain of custody tracking to it, while promising it will only be used for finding "terrorists" or something.
Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but think about notaries public. Seems like something like that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead them down the path of AI solutions.
I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.
The nice thing about something bolted on like that is that it is not an essential feature of the core design and has no bearing on the original goal. It can be removed or reformed. The same isn't true of the approaches we are heading towards now.
What you’re describing is infrastructure that doesn’t necessarily exist right now for use online, and has all the privacy problems described. Why should I have to share more than required?
it has none of the privacy problems described, and 95% of the infrastructure exists right now (have you ever purchased smokes or alcohol?)
to go on tiktok, you enter a UUID once onto your account, and thats it. the only person that sees your id card is the store clerk that glances at the birth date and says "yep, over 18" when you are buying the "age token" or whatever you want to call it. no copies of your id are made, it cant be hacked, theres no electronics involved at all. its just like buying smokes. theres no tie between your id and the "age token" UUID you received.
theres no fanciness to it, either. itd be dead simple, low-tech, cheap to implement, quick to roll out. all of the enforcement laws already exist.
>Why should I have to share more than required?
you shouldnt. having to prove age to use the internet is super dumb. but thats the way the winds are blowing apparently. if im gonna have to prove my age to use the internet, id much rather show my id to the same guy i buy smokes from (and already show my id to) than upload my id to a bunch of random services.
The problem with this scheme is that it's exactly as protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal age" tickbox in the software they wish to access. Anyone who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them around to folks who are not.
Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age" tickbox goes quite far enough.
For the ultra-controlling, setting up a "kid's account" using the tools already provided in mainstream OS's [0][1] is a fine option.
>The problem with this scheme is that it's exactly as protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal age" tickbox in the software they wish to access.
no, it is exactly as protective as the protections for purchasing alcohol or buying smokes or other controlled substances/products.
buying smokes/alcohol when underage is obviously harder than "click this box". (did you ever try to buy smokes/alcohol when underage? you cant just go up to the clerk at the store when you are 14 and say "trust me bro, im 18/19/21".)
>Anyone who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them around to folks who are not.
same for smoking and alcohol. i could go to the store right now and buy smokes, then hand them to my 10 year old.
we have laws already in place to punish selling smokes/alcohol to underagers, and laws for consuming smokes/alcohol when underage. we can apply those laws to your internet-age-token.
most people seem fine with the current trade-off for smokes/alcohol. i see no reason why tiktok needs to be treated as more dangerous than either.
>Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age" tickbox goes quite far enough.
i agree with this and everything you said afterwards. id rather not have any of it.
> no, it is exactly as protective as the protections for purchasing alcohol or buying smokes...
Right. That's exactly as protective as that tickbox. [0] As I mentioned, any of-age person can distribute those UUIDs to people who are not of-age. Unlike with the proposed ID-collection-and-retention schemes (that are authoritarian's wet dreams) the vendor of the UUID is not responsible for ensuring that that UUID is not later used by someone who is not of-age.
If you were to -say- make alcohol vendors liable for the actions of of-age people who pass on alcohol to not-of-age people, then you'd see serious attempts to control distribution.
[0] Don't forget the existence of preexisting parental controls in every major OS. IME, this is a hurdle that's at least as difficult to surmount as the ID check done in non-chain convenience stores.
>Right. That's exactly as protective as that tickbox. [0]
no, it isn't, for reasons already mentioned but i will say it again for clarity:
- a 14 year old can click "im of age" on a checkbox.
- a 14 year old cannot go into a gas station and buy smokes. they will be declined.
>As I mentioned, any of-age person can distribute those UUIDs to people who are not of-age.
again... same with smokes and alcohol! but we are okay with how smokes and alcohol are regulated right now.
tiktok is not worse than a bottle of vodka. we are okay with how vodka is regulated. tiktok does not need even more strict age-verification than vodka.
it is not perfect, but it is absolutely more stringent than a checkbox. if you still doubt me, please send one of your 12-14 year old family members to buy a pack of smokes or a bottle of vodka at the nearest store. i will wait for your report.
Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to bypass the parental controls that come with every modern OS. You keep ignoring that.
(Also, like, did you ever go to college? Live in a dorm or apartment with underage students? It was super common for of-age people to buy and distribute booze to substantially underage students. Everyone knew it was happening all the damn time.)
> they are obviously not liable if i buy something legitimately, go home, and feed it to my kid. in that case, i am liable...
And if you changed up the rules to make them liable, you'd see serious attempts at controlling distribution.
What has been the state of the art in parental controls for quite some time is like the current regulatory regime for booze and tobacco. The single thing that needs to change to make it exactly the same would be to make it substantially illegal for US-based publishers to not tag the porn/violence/etc that they publish with age-restriction tags. [0]
What's being proposed and is currently implemented by several big-name sites is even more invasive.
> we are okay with how smokes and alcohol works right now.
I'm not. Either booze and tobacco need to be made into Schedule I substances, or their regulation needs to become much more lax. But I recognize that my opinion on the topic is considered to be somewhat out-of-the-ordinary.
[0] This might already be the law of the land right now. I haven't bothered to check.
>Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to bypass the parental controls that come with every modern OS. You keep ignoring that.
because they dont matter. parental controls exist today but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason. so we are stuck trying to figure something else out. do i wish we could just use the existing basic parental controls instead of whatever the hell we are going to end up with? obviously!
the easiest "something else" is to piggy-back on existing age-restriction regulations (i.e. smokes, alcohol, gambling) because they have broad (obviously not ubiquitous, but broad) support. we have decades of experience with them.
and, to that end, you create a little token and you show your id to the store clerk to buy it. the "protect the children" people are satisfied (its the same process everything else age-restricted!), and i dont need to send my id to a peter thiel company. it preserves privacy, it re-uses existing laws, it re-uses existing infrastructure, etc.
> ...but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason.
Consider that such arguments (just like the arguments of Prohibitionists that resulted in the rise to power of Organized Crime) are made in a varied combination of ignorance and bad faith, and that we should loudly reject them in the strongest possible terms.
To be clear, I'm asserting that the claim that preexisting parental controls are insufficient is an argument made in ignorance and bad faith, not your assertion that the argument is being made.
>Consider that such arguments [...] we should loudly reject them in the strongest possible terms.
me and you can yell into the void all we want. and i will continue to do so!
but, age verification is already here. so while i continue to yell about how stupid it is, i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.
> ...i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.
As I mentioned, what you propose is exactly as useful and protective as what we have now. What we have now has been roundly rejected by the authoritarians pushing this expansion of power and influence. Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion, rather than suggesting alternatives that those authoritarians will never accept (and tacitly accepting their premise in the process).
It's very rare to run into anyone under 18 living in a college dorm. There are a few 17 year olds, even fewer younger than that. Sure there are high schoolers taking classes, but as full-time residential students? Not many.
I mostly agree but unless these UUID age tokens are of limited life, it's more like buying the kid an unlimited amount of vodka and cigarettes with one action. If the tokens were good for one use, or a short time period, it would be more workable.
> or make them good for 1 month, but sold in 12-packs.
...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they are, why would it be important for them to expire?
Would you also advocate for the token issued by authoritarians' preferred "send a video of yourself [0] and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random third-party for-profit company" check to frequently expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?
[0] Or of someone physically near you who is of-age
you seem really eager to catch me in some sort of "aha gotcha!" scenario so that you can... what? feel good about winning a hackernews argument? you are trying to argue with someone who largely shares the exact same views as you. the only difference between us is that im offering up alternatives and you are hoping that if you yell loud enough that everyone will forget about age verification.
age verification is already being rolled out. so we can either suck it up and try advocate for less shitty versions, or we can bicker amongst ourselves while id/video-based age verification continues to be implemented everywhere.
>...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they are, why would it be important for them to expire?
read above for the conversation that occurred.
>Would you also advocate for the token issued by authoritarians' preferred "send a video of yourself [0] and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random third-party for-profit company" check to frequently expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?
a) no, obviously not, because i dont advocate for video or id-based age verification.
b) i know that you know this, and are just pretending to be ignorant for some weird ass reason: various age verification implementations have different risks and benefits.
for some implementations, users are forced to give up significant amounts of privacy in favor of increased accuracy. other implementations give up less privacy, at the risk of reduced accuracy. look at discords implementation for a recent example (it was easier to spoof the client-side verification than the server-side id-based one. more privacy, less accuracy). this type of balancing act is not new. we do the same balancing act with alcohol, smoking, gambling, healthcare, security, development, etc.
so, when looking at potential mitigations for less-accurate methods, while maintaining the same level of privacy, a sensible option is to make the UUIDs time-bound which will limit the time an illicit token is valid. this makes much less sense for id/video-based verification, because they have higher accuracy than my version (paid for by giving up your privacy).
---------
something you said earlier: "Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion,".
so, go do that. find the people that are really pushing for age verification, and argue with them. instead of replying to me, use that time to call your state representative or something. im not your opponent here. if it were up to me, we wouldnt have age verification in the first place. you already know that my stance is anti-age verification!
my proposal is not perfect. i dont like age verification. you can have the karma from this argument, its cool, you can "win". what more do you want me to say?
So was "REAL ID", and that took ~fifteen years to bring all the holdouts to heel. It wasn't till the start of the COVID disaster that FedGov could make compliance a condition of receiving enough essential Federal funds to force the remaining objectors to comply.
Compliance with bad plans is not automatically mandatory.
> what more do you want me to say?
It'd be great if you'd stop accepting the premise of authoritarians and reject the publicly-stated premise that motivates these systems. While it may not be clear to folks at the moment, they are no less bad than the systems that help -say- Texas law enforcement track down Texan women and doctors who are in violation of the Texas abortion ban.
I don't give a shit if you say that you do stop accepting the publicly-stated premise. [0] I just hope that one day in the not too distant future you do.
[0] I would -in fact- not believe you if you said you did in reply to this comment.
> Compliance with bad plans is not automatically mandatory.
To put a really fine point on this: every entity that rolls over and compiles with these "age verification" plans has put up less of a fight than 4chan.
When 4chan is one of the heroes, you know that something rotten is going on.
A significant obstacle to adoption is that cryptographic research aims for a perfect system that overshadows simpler, less private approaches. For instance, it does not seem that one should really need unlinkability across sessions. If that's the case, a simple range proof for a commitment encoding the birth year is sufficient to prove eligibility for age, where the commitment is static and signed by a trusted third party to actually encode the correct year.
I agree. I've been researching a lot of this tech lately as a part of a C2PA / content authenticity project and it's clear that the math are outrunning practicality in a lot of cases.
As it is we're seeing companies capture IDs and face scans and it's incredibly invasive relative to the need - "prove your birth year is in range". Getting hung up on unlinkable sessions is missing the forest for the trees.
At this point I think the challenge has less to do with the crypto primitives and more to do with building infrastructure that hides 100% of the complexity of identity validation from users. My state already has a gov't ID that can be added to an apple wallet. Extending that to support proofs about identity without requiring users to unmask huge amounts of personal information would be valuable in its own right.
Even if the problem is perfectly solved to anonymize the ID linked to the age, you still have the issue that you need an ID to exercise your first amendment right. 1A applies to all people, not just citizens, and it's considered racist in a large part of the US to force someone to possess an ID to prove you are a citizen (to vote) let alone a person (who is >= 18y/o) w/ 1A rights.
Your crypto nerd dream is vulnerable to the fact that someone under 18 can just ask someone over 18 to make an account for them. All age verification is broken in this way.
There is a similar problem for people using apps like Ubereats to work illegally by buying an account from someone else. However much verification you put in, you don't know who is pressing the buttons on the screen unless you make the process very invasive.
You seem to have missed requirement #3 -> tracking and identifying reuse.
An 18-year-old creating an account for a 12-year-old is a legal issue, not a service provider issue. How does a gas station keep a 21-year-old from buying beer for a bunch of high school students? Generally they don't, because that's the cops' job. But if they have knowledge that the 21-yo is buying booze for children, they deny custom to the 21-yo. This is simple.
> How does a gas station keep a 21-year-old from buying beer for a bunch of high school students?
They don't? Teenagers can easily get their hands on alcohol... you just need to know the right person at school who has a cool older brother. If their older brother is really cool they can get weed too!
The police absolutely do not have the time to investigate the crime of making a discord account for someone.
In general, any government already has your information, and it's naive to think that they don't; if you pay taxes, have ever had a passport, etc. they already have all identifying information that they could need. For services, or for the government knowing what you do (which services you visit), then a zero-knowledge proof would work in this case.
Maybe code is free, but code isn't all that goes into building software. Minimally, you have design, code, integrate, test, document, launch.
Claude is going to help mostly with code, much less with design. It might help to accelerate integration, if the application is simple enough and the environment is good enough. The fact is, going cross-platform native trebles effort in areas that Claude does not yet have a useful impact.
That's just a harness diff. A few more iterations of bootstrapping and the harness will be able to do the whole lifecycle.
The disturbing fact is that AI is simply smarter than us by a stupendous margin. Anything you do that involves thinking can be done better by the AI. We are obsolete when it comes to being smart.
I was in denial about this for a couple years, but I understand now.
At 16k tokens/s why bother routing? We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude faster and cheaper execution.
Abundance supports different strategies. One approach: Set a deadline for a response, send the turn to every AI that could possibly answer, and when the deadline arrives, cancel any request that hasn't yet completed. You know a priori which models have the highest quality in aggregate. Pick that one.
The best coding model won’t be the best roleplay one which won’t be the best at tool use. It depends what you want to do in order to pick the best model.
I’ll go ahead and say they’re wrong (source: building and maintaining llm client with llama.cpp integrated & 40+ 3p models via http)
I desperately want there to be differentiation. Reality has shown over and over again it doesn’t matter. Even if you do same query across X models and then some form of consensus, the improvements on benchmarks are marginal and UX is worse (more time, more expensive, final answer is muddied and bound by the quality of the best model)
There is the pre-training, where you passively read stuff from the web.
From there you go to RL training, where humans are grading model responses, or the AI is writing code to try to pass tests and learning how to get the tests to pass, etc. The RL phase is pretty important because it's not passive, and it can focus on the weaker areas of the model too, so you can actually train on a larger dataset than the sum of recorded human knowledge.
I agree completely. It's a mistake to anthropomorphize these models, and it is a mistake to permit training models that anthropomorphize themselves. It seriously bothers me when Claude expresses values like "honestly", or says "I understand." The machine is not capable of honesty or understanding. The machine is making incredibly good predictions.
One of the things I observed with models locally was that I could set a seed value and get identical responses for identical inputs. This is not something that people see when they're using commercial products, but it's the strongest evidence I've found for communicating the fact that these are simply deterministic algorithms.
I've made many business cases for internally-built SaaS tools, and they always rest on the idea that our probability of success is higher if we staff a team and build the _exact thing_ we need versus purchasing from a vendor and attempting an integration into our business.
It's far more challenging to win the 'build' argument on a cost savings approach, because even the least-savvy CIO/CTO understands that the the price of the vendor software is a proof point grounded in the difficulty for other firms to build these capabilities themselves. If there's merit to these claims, the first evidence we'll see is certain domains of enterprise software (like everything Atlassian does) getting more and more crowded, and less and less expensive, as the difficulty of competing with a tier-1 software provider drops and small shops spring up to challenge the incumbents.
Agreed. I was going to add (but didn't) that the first evidence of an 'AI unlock' on SaaS wouldn't be internal builds but many new, much cheaper competitors appearing for leading SaaS tools. Your point about the best arguments to internally build SaaS being 1) integration savings, and 2) better fit, is spot on. But senior management has to balance those potential benefits (and the risk an internal effort fully delivers on-time & budget) against sticking with 'the devil we know' which works (imperfectly) today.
In my experience, a bigger blocker to C-level approving internal SaaS development is it diverts capital and scarce attentional bandwidth to 'buying an upside' that's capped. Capped how? Because, by definition, any 'SaaS-able' function is not THE business - it's overhead. The fundamental limit on a SaaS tool's value to shareholders is to be a net savings on some cost of doing business (eg HR, legal, finance, sales, operations, support, etc). No matter how cheap going in-house makes a SaaS-able activity, the best case is improving margins on revenue. It doesn't create new revenue. You can't "save your way" to growth.
100% of my LLM projects are written in Rust - and I have never personally written a single line of Rust. Compilation alone eliminates a number of 'category errors' with software - syntax, variable declaration, types, etc. It's why I've used Go for the majority of projects I've started the past ten years. But with Rust there is a second layer of guarantees that come from its design, around things like concurrency, nil pointers, data races, memory safety, and more.
The fewer category errors a language or framework introduces, the more successful LLMs will be at interacting with it. Developers enjoy freedom and many ways to solve problems, but LLMs thrive in the presence of constraints. Frontiers here will be extensions of Rust or C-compatible languages that solve whole categories of issue through tedious language features, and especially build/deploy software that yields verifiable output and eliminates choice from the LLMs.
I've found it's terrible at digesting a few codebases I've needed to deal with (to wit, 2007-era C# which used lots of libraries which were popular then, and 1993-era Visual Basic which also used from third party library that no LLM seems to understand the first thing about).
> This appears to be a custom template system from the mid-2000s era, designed to separate presentation logic from PHP code while maintaining database connectivity for dynamic content generation.
That's great. Just yesterday I spoke with a developer who refutes Rector on old codebases, instead having an LLM simply refactor his PHP 5.6 to 8.(3 I think). He doesn't even check in Rector anymore. These are all bespoke business scripts that his team have been nursing for two decades. He even updated the Codeigniter framework it's all running on.
I suspect the problem with VB is that VB 4 and 5 (which I think was that era) were so closely tied to the IDE it is difficult to work out what is going on without it.
(I did Delphi back when VB6 was the other option so remember this problem well)
If software engineers can agree on anything, it's that LLM experiences are wildly inconsistent. People have similar inconsistencies. We have different experiences, intellects, educations, priorities, motivations, value systems. And in software specifically (and institutions generally) we create methodologies and processes that diminish our inconsistencies and leverage our strengths.
Gas town is a demonstration of a methodology for getting a consistent result from inconsistent agents. The case in point is that Yegge claims to have solved the MAKER problem (tower of Hanoi) via prompting alone. With the right structure, quantity has a quality all its own.
At current rates of emissions, we’re only about 20 years away from people needing to install CO2 scrubbers in their homes.
Soda lime, or calcium hydroxide, is the current state of the art. We use that in an anesthesia and in saltwater aquariums and in scuba rebreathers. An idealized system can capture 500 mg per gram, but in practice you only capture around 250mg/g. This outperforms the method in the article but it’s one-shot. There are interesting proposals to use this for direct capture at industrial facilities and to turn the waste material into bricks for building.
The key advantage of this new material appears to be that it can be heated and reused. That would be very valuable in an interior direct air capture use case. Think about filtering the CO2 from an office or a home to get us back to pre-industrial levels indoors.
I think it’s little appreciated that high CO2 levels cause cognitive impairment, and with the same amount of (often very poor) air exchange, higher outdoor concentrations can push indoor spaces to levels that cause impaired cognition and poor sleep. I’ve already been seeing this in my home, and will often open windows even when cold just to keep co2 levels reasonable. One solution that can help is an external air heat exchanger, which can exchange air with the outdoors without compromising your homes heating and cooling like an open window will do.
Noticeable cognitive impairment starts in the 700-1000ppm range, whereas it is very common for homes to reach 2000-3000ppm, especially when in a closed bedroom.
> Noticeable cognitive impairment starts in the 700-1000ppm range
The US navy failed to detect such effects in submarine crew, even at much higher levels like 10,000 ppm.
Another reason to be skeptical is that exhaled breath is 4% CO2 (40,000 ppm!). Therefore a few thousand extra ppm in the inhaled air should not make much of a difference to the homeostasis mechanisms in our bodies.
Back in the 00’s I worked at a place where we were still ignoring WLB and would work until seven a couple nights a week on average. But the building AC shut off at 6. A few of us noticed that the later it got the worse our decisions and the worse the bickering and we eventually got to the policy that anyone could declare Deciding done for the evening when they realized we were just tired, hot, and stuffy. Every minute past about 6:15 got worse, particularly in summer.
I’m sure the CO2 was part of it but lack of circulation also means increasing temperature, especially with a bunch of people in a small meeting room. Long meetings themselves are a problem and any excuse to call it early is probably worth it even if it’s not entirely true.
I don’t need to look at studies in other people, I notice and feel the effects directly at high CO2 levels, such that I can tell when it it too high before checking the meter.
I’d need to look at the study, but I also suspect the submariners would be used to high CO2, and also not experienced enough in doing focused creative or knowledge work for impaired abilities there to be detectable.
Please consider the possibility that you can accurately detect increased CO2 (it increases your breathing rate almost instantly for example) without it causing impairement.
Even if you are right and there is no objectively measurable impaired abilities, the things I can detect directly are themselves extremely undesirable.
I feel irritable, and fatigued/sleepy when CO2 is high. Increased breathing rate by itself activates an undesirable sympathetic nervous system response, that anyone can notice immediately with deliberate breathwork.
Also, it seems likely to me that the same poor air exchange that leads to high co2 causes respiratory disease to spread more rapidly, and with a higher initial viral titer.
>One solution that can help is an external air heat exchanger
I have one of those, it blows fresh air in through the bedroom and sucks it back out through the kitchen (loft house, this route prevents food smells from wafting into the bedroom). Aside from just feeling fresh all year, this system also prevents mosquitoes from entering in summer while still allowing air circulation, it automatically bypasses the exchanger at night to provide cool air and it has some pollen filters installed which helps with hay fever.
So great economic return and a bunch of upsides, but it does require space for the exchanger and the ducts throughout the house.
This. I have that type (regenerative MHVR) installed in the attic for upstairs, and a synced pair of in-wall ceramic (recuperative) types on opposite sides of main living area downstairs (eliminating ducting, albeit with reduced efficiency). I haven't attempted any energy/ROI calculations but fresh filtered air, lower humidity and good nights sleep are well worth the claimed single-digit watt power usage to me.
I suspect bathrooms aren't big enough to buffer the air pressure but it seems like we should design the air handling so the “fan” is always on in the bathrooms. Maybe a split between several places and taking a bit from the cold air return for the rest.
The system is always on and moving air as a whole, and the water closet and bathroom have an intake duct that sucks in humid air that goes to the heat exchanger for exhaust. I have a little humidity sensor hooked up to Home Assistant that kicks the fan in the exchanger into a higher gear and returns to auto when humidity returns to baseline.
All rooms in the house have an intake or exhaust duct depending on requirements.
There is also a small control panel next to the thermostat in the living room that controls the whole system for when, ahem, your number two's are particularly odorous (or you're using the kitchen to cook for 6).
I have been monitoring for high CO2 for a few months now. I easily find myself in the 1000 - 1400 range for some time before I finally let some air in in winter.
I have not noticed significant cognitive impairment (not saying it did not happen)
My quality of sleep/life have greatly increased since installing an Energy Recovery Vent (ERV) — it exchanges outside/inside air through a membrane, which is about 60-80% efficient for both humidity and temperature re-capture (depending on fan speed).
I use a Panasonic model — readily available from Big Box Retail (~$700 + $100 in vent/conduit) — which can do 20 - 60 cfm (in my 900 sqft home this can easiliy exchange the entire volume several times per day).
> In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis of fifteen eligible studies was performed to quantify the effects of short-term CO2 exposure on cognitive task performance.
> The complex task performance declined significantly when exposed to additional CO2 concentrations of 1000–1500 ppm and 1500–3000 ppm
It looks like there might be a very small effect starting at around 1000ppm but so small that many studies find no difference at all, and reliable effects are only noted at 3000ppm or more.
So we're a long way from needing to scrub co2 from the atmosphere to get any work done
Not everyone in a population will be affected the same by the same conditions, and the constraints of peer reviewed research make them often a poor choice for guiding personal decisions. By the time you have conditions bad enough to statistically prove harm in a large population, you’re likely already way past causing harm worth preventing in some subset of the population.
I find it extremely unlikely that homes are routinely at 2000-3000 ppm. That is extremely high and would mean multiple people in a small area with no air exchange for a long while.
I monitor my indoor co2, but don't take any action because it's extremely rare to be above 700 or 800. I can only remember a handful of times its reached 1k ppm. And my house should be prime candidate for co2, it was built during the era of "seal all air gaps" but before ERV or HRVs. I also use pressurized co2 to inject co2 into a planted aquarium. And my dogs are terrified of open windows so they are rarely open.
It happens a lot in efficient houses that don't cover all bases with HVAC (the vast majority of recently built houses), where the room door is closed, maybe the vents are not ideal, and there is usually no makeup air or forced air ventilation other than a furnace intake.
This change in scientific literature actually causes a ~quadrupling of recommended airflow ratios for tight homes versus ASHRAE's previous guidelines, putting strong emphasis on an ERV. Previously, ventilation needs tended to be dominated by air quality and smell, by humidity buildup, or by theoretical house parties that maxed out the system.
This ventilation adds capital expense, but it's substantially more controllable and significantly cheaper in the long run in colder climates than 'just open a window' or 'just don't build the house so tightly sealed'. Reserve the operable window for the aforementioned house party, which is out of a reasonable design envelope.
My bedroom regularly gets to 3000 at night, and the flat in general is around 2000. This is in the winter, when I don't open the windows for days because of the cold. The flat is very well insulated.
I used an Awair Element after wondering if Co2 buildup was causing my groggieness in the morning and an ever so slight dull headache.
My bedroom was quite small at the time, but I measured the same effect of buildup in a larger bedroom, just the Co2 level took a little longer to reach it's peak.
In the small room it took about 45 mins to climb to about 1400 after I closed the door and went to sleep.
I'm currently trying to install some above-door vents to improve circulation but this is a topic most people don't consider at all, even though studies have shown the effects of classrooms having high Co2 concentrations on exam results and cognition.
> I wouldn’t put too much effort into vents above a door as we’ve seen that CO2 will leak through doors and even floors/ceilings very quickly.
I'd like it to vent out into the hallway and the rest of the apartment though, so not sure what you mean by it leaking through doors? It's obviously not leaking enough, hence the addition of a vent. It's either that or keeping my door open all night which isn't feasible due to noise by other family members waking up etc.
I've been using Netatmo stations in each room plus one outside for a decade. They monitor temp, CO2, and humidity. My CO2 levels were nightmarish during wildfires in my part of California across multiple years. Of course, the air tasted horrible and it was absolutely evident how bad it was just breathing two different years so it was not at all surprising to see that correlated on instruments that I check multiple times every day.
I'm using a desktop CO2 meter, they're cheap and accurate, and can be tested by just putting them outdoors and confirming that they read known outdoor levels correctly. What you are saying is not unlike doubting that it's possible to measure temperature with a thermometer- CO2 measurement is extremely reliable, cheap, and mature technology.
This is the meter I am using, costs $39, and is a calibrated instrument with +/- 3% accuracy. I have an academic colleague that uses these same devices for scientific research on plant metabolism, and they are highly accurate and are optionally self calibrating just by opening a window or putting them outdoors.
Why would this be unlikely as a prior? High CO2 changes your blood chemistry and breathing rates. Different breathing rates have a well understood effects on lots of systems including sympathetic/parasympathetic activation. There is no reason to expect humans to be evolutionary adapted to CO2 levels that we couldn't have experienced historically.
Several other posters in here have posted peer reviewed studies replicating these effects, but personally I find individual direct experience with my own body to be massively more generally useful when making health decisions than studies in other people, or some known mechanism.
In that case it wouldn't matter much to an individual making personal decisions about their environment. Either way, an environment with enough outdoor air exchange to keep CO2 low would avoid these effects.
But hypothetically, what other trace contaminants would you expect to be so universally correlated with CO2 in different environments that they could account for repeatedly observing these effects in different studies? That seems implausible.
There's tons of things in the air. Dust (and many different types of dust at different levels, both in contents and size), other gases at the trace level - lack of ventilation not only increases CO2 levels but everything else, too. And then there's the people factor. Who says that people who have proper ventilation and CO2 control are the same as the ones who don't?
If they really want to do a robust study they need to do an intervention study with clear levels of CO2 accurately controlled and the rest of the air being identical for everything else, otherwise it's purely meaningless. (it's doable, by the way).
> The ease of releasing CO2 is the key advantage of the new compound.
I have no idea why the journalist that wrote this article choose to highlight the carbon density of the sub-header. It's almost completely irrelevant for carbon capture plants.
Another clear benefit is that it's a liquid.
Today people mostly use the substances that you called non-reversible in research plants (AFAIK, all plants are research right now). They are perfectly reversible, but that uses a lot of energy.
> perfectly reversible, but that uses a lot of energy
Looks like a perfect match to a solar plant, which provides basically free energy periodically. All you need is a large enough cistern to hold the liquid during night time.
But you don't need to store the capture medium. You use a bit more energy to make they work faster while the Sun is shining, and stop everything when it's gone.
The largest bottleneck is what you do to get rid of the CO2.
We use the CO2 to synthesize methanol with the H2 we electrolyze using surplus solar energy. The methanol we burn in winter for heat. Yes, that releases the CO2 again. The goal here is not to save the planet. It is to bring solar energy to winter. My house produces many times the electricity that it needs per year, but most of it is wasted in summer. Efficient conversion is not a factor. If I can get 20% of the energy input back as heat in winter, it is worth it: that is oil or wood I don't have to burn for heat.
160F, non toxic, this already sounds like something that could feasibly be used in the home. I would already be interested in installing one. And would absolutely love to see what it would do to school performance.
Indoor is always higher ppm (how much depends on many parameters) without proper ventilation. „Proper“ should include a „Heat exchanger“ thus you don’t need to reheat fresh air.
Still, it will add some 80ppm over the amount you have today. There's a huge amount of disagreement over how much CO2 is harmful, but it tends to happen over numbers way above 800ppm.
If your room has 2 times the open air concentration, and you are concerned if it's 2.0 times or 2.2 times, you should already be dealing with the problem.
According to https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/carbon-dioxide-indoor-le..., at 1000 ppm people start getting drowsy. Let's assume that a decent indoor environment has 300 ppm more CO2 This means that our threshold for when people start getting drowsy even in decent indoor environments is when atmospheric CO2 reaches 700 ppm. For reference, it is currently around 420 ppm, and pre-industrial levels were 280 ppm.
The 300 ppm offset compared to the outside air is naturally just an arbitrary number, everything up to 1000 ppm (meaning everything up to 580 ppm more than atmospheric levels) is considered "acceptable". That means any increase in CO2 concentration will take an indoor environment which used to be considered "acceptable" and make it cross the threshold into "unacceptable". An indoor environment which would've been at 900 ppm around the industrial revolution (280 ppm) would've crossed the threshold when we surpassed 380 ppm (which was in 1965 according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1091926/atmospheric-conc...).
let's compare the past 20 years. In 2004, the concentration was ~377 ppm. That's 47 ppm lower than what was in 2024. An indoor environment which was "borderline but acceptable" at 955 ppm CO2 in 2004 would've crossed the arbitrary 1000 ppm threshold by now, and therefore would benefit from a CO2 scrubber. The next 20 years will likely have a higher increase than the past 20 years, so there will be a larger range of currently acceptable indoor environments which will cross the 1000 ppm threshold by 2045.
TL;DR: It's complicated, 20 years is arbitrary, but as CO2 concentrations increase, indoor quality gets worse so indoor environments which were already bad will become worse. 45 years is a more realistic estimate for when your typical good indoor environment will become unacceptable, but it's a gradient.
You can store CO2 and sell it to construction companies (to cure ferrock), to energy storage companies (who like to put the CO2 in huge bubbles nowadays, go figure), or to agricultural corporations (who enrich greenhouses air in CO2 to accelerate growth).
"outperform" by only one metric too often fails usefulness. It's a one shot unless you heat the calcium carbonate to 900C, the compound in the article only requires 70C, and has quite a bit of ability to re-process CO2 absorption multiple times. Although solar ovens could reach over 900C, probably too dangerous for residential use.
Please stop trying to hurt every single human being with these derailments. There is no plausible mechanism by which carbondioxide levels would halve. That means you're just trying to derail the discussion by appealing to people's instincts about how fragile atmospheric composition is. Stop.
I can see how you’d think that. We’re all a product of the media we consume.
It’s an interesting exercise to try to figure out what the ideal co2 level should be. Why are we fixated on preindustrial levels. I’m very open to thinking 600ppm might be more ideal than the current level.
I feel that idea has some support from things like the optimal for many crops/greenhouse plants being 800–1,200 ppm.
And that Earth's vegetation has greened since the 1980s due to increased CO2.
This approach kind of reminds me of taking an open-book test. Performing mandatory verification against a ground truth is like taking the test, then going back to your answers and looking up whether they match.
Unlike a student, the LLM never arrives at a sort of epistemic coherence, where they know what they know, how they know it, and how true it's likely to be. So you have to structure every problem into a format where the response can be evaluated against an external source of truth.
