[hardwaregeek]

Aw, that's nice of pg to want something better for his friend. As cynical as we are about technology, new developments can be so fantastic for accessibility and better quality of life.

[forgetfreeman]

And if that were where the story ended we'd have an honest feel-good going. New developments -could- be fantastic for accessibility and QoL, but without exception they just end up getting sucked into a marketing surveillance suite.

[frenchman99]

Unfortunately we use all that technology on devices that are built with metals mined by kids in Congo and similar states. Talk about quality of life.

[lotsofpulp]

Those are unrelated topics. Not developing the technology is not going to help those kids’ quality of life.

[frenchman99]

But building it as we currently are is directly putting them at risk of poisoning, dying buried alive when their cobalt mining tunnels collapse, etc.

[CyberDildonics]

This has nothing to do with anything and it isn't even true.

You are talking about cobalt and that is only used in lithium ion batteries. You can avoid cobalt by using lithium iron phosphate batteries.

There are active efforts to develop new lithium ion chemistries to avoid cobalt and there are even commercial sodium ion batteries now.

You bring this in to a completely irrelevant conversation, what have you done to help solve it?

[frenchman99]

Lithium extraction is also very bad for the environment. Requires insane amounts of water, requires often times destroying forests or other natural areas that are on top of lithium, etc.

Sure I use lithium ion batteries too, in the developed country I live in, I can't go and live in a cave. But I won't buy a SUV that weighs 2 tons to sit alone in it most of the time and have it parked 95% of the time in a garage.

The "what have you done" attack is a bit too easy and, really, this is not about me.

We should strive to be sober, to buy repairable goods whenever possible, to educate ourselves on environmental impact of things, and perhaps more importantly to teach this to our children.

[CyberDildonics]

This thread is about eye tracking. You went from talking about the congo for some reason to now shifting to "lithium takes a lot of water".

But I won't buy a SUV that weighs 2 tons to sit alone in it most of the time and have it parked 95% of the time in a garage.

What are you even talking about? This whole thread is about eye tracking.

We should strive to be sober, to buy repairable goods whenever possible, to educate ourselves on environmental impact of things, and perhaps more importantly to teach this to our children

Are you doing that?

[frenchman99]

It's all related. High tech has a lot of negative impacts which are rarely if ever evaluated and more importantly compensated. The reason is they bring in money.

The entire supply chain and lifecycle of a product should be evaluated to understand if it is a net positive or a net negative. Not only the finished product: "wow eye tracking how cool let's deploy everywhere regardless of how the materials for that tech are mined and how the device will be recycled once obsolete".

[CyberDildonics]

To be clear, in your mind when someone talks about wanting to fund certain types of software, it is someone's duty to talk about lithium batteries using lots of water?