What level of materials recycling would be required for you to not consider it green washing?
It’s a genuine question, since I don’t like Apple and agree that we buy tons of stuff we don’t really need. That said, our bicycles can’t be insured anymore, but having AirTags at least alleviates some of the angst over leaving them in public places.
Recycled plastics actually produce microplastics more than virgin plastics do. Some studies on recycled polyester garments found that they dump an additional 50% more or so into the environment than non-recycled polyester fabrics. And those non-recycled fabrics already release enormous quantities over their lifespan into the water supply and open air (via your dryer exhaust) already.
Dumb example for the sake of discussion, you could understand why recycled plutonium would not be a healthy thing to weave a sweater out of. It's less about the recycling and more about the material itself.
I’m aware, which is why we don’t buy products with recycled synthetics fabrics for our baby. Ironic, since so many brands are hellbent on promoting the recycled fiber as more sustainable.
But: the AirTag is made of hard plastic (polypropylene?) through injection moulding. I’m not sure it leaks even a tenth of what fiber would. Just a thought :)
Recycled polyester is crap, just like virgin polyester. It's just a way for brands to make it seem like they're hip and sustainable, when you're basically wearing crude oil on your body.
If you believe Hank Green (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325HdQe4WM4), a lot of recycled plastics aren't recycled the way I used to think they were (by shredding them, melting them down, and extruding them into new shapes). Rather, they're chemically decomposed into what's essentially raw feedstock, purified, and then re-synthesized into new polymers.
That's pretty energy intensive, to the point that it may be better to just use new feedstock (which is produced as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction). There are obviously higher-order effects to think about, but for me, plastic recycling isn't an obvious win for the environment.
I think we’ve more or less debunked plastic recycling, as nothing more but a way to make consumers feel good about purchasing things made of plastic.
We have to recycle plastic where we live — and do so happily —, but I often joke with my partner about where the plastic will end up, since she insists on first washing the plastic.
This is a good example of how easy it is to fool people if they don’t have their own understanding of how things work.
Highlighting this has been a priority in my parenting. My child is having a great time trying to scare friends about the dangers of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in a surprisingly large number of manufactured foods.
Nobody said it was. But it's not bad because of chemicals, because all bread is created with chemicals.
As for natural versus artificial - that's also bullshit. There's many natural ingredients that are poison, and many artificial ones that are good for you.
I mean, if I eat home made fried chicken everyday, you can bet your ass I'm not gonna live very long.
But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.
Is it really pedantic? Everything is ultimately a chemical compound. H2O is a chemical. Where do you draw the line between "chemicals" and "not chemicals"? Is it more about what you can find in nature? You can find acetone in nature.
yeah, this is kind of a definitional example of pedantry. you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals" but instead of engaging with the actual conversation, you spin off a metanarrative to pick apart the word choice as if that's directly relevant to the point they're trying to discuss.
not trying to pick on you specifically, because sure everything's a chemical, and i don't really care to fight about that, but you asked :)
"Chemical" is just a really, really vague and poor word choice. I honestly don't understand what people are trying to say when they use it. Food and chemistry are inextricably intertwined. You can't even talk about food without talking about all of the various components food is made up of. Not a single food item out there isn't made up of chemicals. Some found in nature, some created in a lab or factory process. Some healthy, some not. Some with long names, some with short names. Some have effects on food taste, longevity, appearance. Some are inert. It's really a meaningless word to use in the context of one's food.
>I honestly don't understand what people are trying to say when they use it
Like, banana-flavoured milk product vs banana yogurt - seed oil and potato starch compound with artificial flavorings vs REAL milk yoghurt with REAL banana.
It tastes different, it has different nutritional value and overall "chemical" product feels scammy because it tries to mimic proper one.
This is all about words, like, why do we use "Artificial" in Artificial Intelligence?
What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?
Chemical is just a bad word choice. Artificial, or ultra processed get closer to the issue. They still are vague with a lot of grey area. If you cook at home, you're also highly processing your food. The fruit in winter is likely also artificial, in some sense: Grown against the will of god/nature with pesticides, in a tent, in a climate that doesn't naturally feature them, devoid of flavour because they were artificially bred for yield, color and size, etc.
>What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?
This is arbitrary subjective qualifier, goes somewhere between "isoamyl acetate" flavoring chemical and organic wild forest bananas. I would subjectively say that any grown bananas is REAL while isoamyl acetate made by rectification of amyl acetate is not REAL banana.
> you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals"
My understanding is that when someone complains about "chemicals" in their food, it's because they've seen something they don't understand on the ingredient list and are scared of it.
I think it's actually a great example of very very important non-pedantry. The entire crux of their argument/issue is dependent on their definition of "chemicals". I would even go so far as to say it's just the nature fallacy in disguise.
With the nature fallacy, the definition (or more like the lack of) of what is natural is the entire crux of it. In both cases (natural and "non-chemical") it's the very non-defined-ness that reveals the problem with it: You cannot create a sensible definition.
For nature, what's the definition that puts "rape" and "artificial insulin" on the morally correct side?
For chemical, what's the definition that puts "fortification with iodine, flouride, or whatevers in flour" and "arsenic" on the right side?
OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.
For some of them, like cherry or coconuts, the artificial flavor tastes nothing like the natural flavor.
To my knowledge benzaldehyde is the most common cherry flavor, and I agree it doesn't taste much like cherries. It's also a naturally occurring compound we produce from cassia oil, and it's naturally contained in almonds, apricots, apples and cherries.
As for coconut there's Lactones, which - you guessed it - occur naturally.
> OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.
It’s never possible for things to be good with people like you. It’s not 100% recycled, which would be better. But surely, this is better than 0% recycled??
Ironically, it's worse. I just wrote another comment about this. Recycled plastics carry more toxic load and shed more (and more fragmented) microplastics into the environment. Recycled plastics only win out on carbon emissions.
Moral of the story: plastic is just not good. Avoid buying things made out of ANY kind plastic if you are going to regularly wash and mechanically agitate them. You won't eliminate 100% of washed plastic in your life, but it's surprisingly easy to get rid of 80% of it without sacrificing quality of life.
That's good to know. My understanding though is that they don't use 100% recycled plastic to prevent that? I thought the ~20% non recycled plastic was kinda "stabilizing" the whole thing but maybe that's not true
I have bought an Android phone and I couldn’t even change the font used or use an ad blocker on the browser it comes with. It comes with advertisements on the home screen and if I disable them half of the system functions stop working. Seems it’s not open at all. Sent it back the next week. </rant>
Weak is relative. All humans are weak compared to an elephant and strong compared to a mouse. If strength stops being a competitive advantage in humans then weakness isn't a signal that determines outcomes.
The single core performance is roughly in the middle between Pi4 Cortex-A72 and Pi5 Cortex-A76.
It's slightly faster than a 3GHz Core 2 Dua in scalar single threaded performance, but it has 8 cores instead of two and more SIMD performance. There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator.
The geekbench score is a bit lower than it should be, because at least three benchmarks are still missing SIMD acceleration on RISC-V (File Compression, Asset Compression, Ray Tracer), and the HTML5 browser test is also missing optimizations.
I'd estimate it should be able to get to the 500 range with comparable optimization to other architectures.
The Milk-V Titan mention in the original post is actually slightly faster in scalar performance, but has no RISC-V Vector support at all, which causes it's geekbench score to be way lower.
The problem is that you can't migrate threads between cores with different vector length.
The current ubuntu 26.04 image, that is installed, lists 16 cores in htop, but you can only run applications on the first 8 (e.g. taskset -c 10 fails).
If you query whats running on the A100 cores you see things like a "kworker" processes.
I suspect that it should be possible to write a custom kernel module that runs on the A100s with the current kernel, but I'm not sure.
I expect it will definitely be possible to boot a OS only one the 8 A100 cores.
Well have to see if they manage to figure out how to add support for explicitly pinning user mode processes to the cores.
The ideal configuration would be to have everything run only on the X100s, but with an opt-in mechanism to run a program only on an A100 core.
Something is odd here, the Core 2 Duo only has up to SSE 4.1, while the RVA23 instruction set is analogous to x64-v3. I find it hard to believe that the SpacemiT K3 matched a Core 2 duo single core score while leveraging those new instructions.
To wit the Geekbench 6.5.0 RISC-V preview has 3 files, 'geekbench6', 'geekbench_riscv64', and 'geekbench_rv64gcv', which are presumably the executables for the benchmark in addition to their supported instruction sets. This makes the score an unreliable narrator of performance, as someone could have run the other benchmarks and the posted score would not be genuine. And that's on top of a perennial remark that even the benchmark(s) could just not be optimized for RISC-V.
If it's anything like the k1, I wouldn't be surprised if Core 2 performance was on the table. The released specs are are ~Sandybridge-Haswell like, but those were architectures made by (at the time) the top CPU manufacturer and were carefully balanced architectures to maximize performance while minimizing transistors. SpaceMIT is playing on easy mode (they are making a chip on a ~2-4x smaller process node and aren't pioneering bleeding edge techniques), but balancing an out of order CPU is still tough, and it's totally possible to lose 50% of theoretical ipc if you don't have the memory bandwith, cache hierarchy, scheuling etc.
Cache issues add another layer here, if it's not the whole issue. Device tree patches for the K3 have 2 clusters of 4 cores with shared 4MB L2 cache per cluster. Core 2 Duo P8400 has 3MB L2 shared between 2 cores, and Sandybridge-Haswell have per core L2 and shared L3.
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