bobfromhuddle (u/bobfromhuddle)

bobfromhuddle commented on Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere helsinki.fi/en/news/innov... · Posted by u/lrasinen

jiehong · a month ago

Could something like this be used to make cement?

Imagine capturing CO2 to turn it into cement, used for constructions.

Pardon my ignorance, though.

bobfromhuddle · a month ago

We don't use CO2 to make cement, we use limestone, and CO2 is the byproduct of heating the limestone to make reactive calcium.

bobfromhuddle commented on Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find techxplore.com/news/2025-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

fulafel · a year ago

Aren't there also carbon neutral ways to make cement/concrete?

bobfromhuddle · a year ago

Not at any scale that counts. There are a whole bunch of companies _trying_ to make zero carbon cement, but it's all very early stuff.

The lifetime of a cement plant is 30-50 years, and they cost 100-200M Euros to build, so even if there were a process that was ready to scale today, producing a cement that passed regulatory standards, we'd still be making some Portland cement into the 2070s.

Ergo, producers would like to stick a carbon-capture plant onto their kilns.

bobfromhuddle commented on Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find techxplore.com/news/2025-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

chris_va · a year ago

Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too.

You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.

bobfromhuddle · a year ago

Yes! Likewise for grinding: offload excess power to industrial plants so they can grind rocks when it's windy. If you look at the problem in the right way, a silo full of ground rock is just a battery.

bobfromhuddle commented on Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find techxplore.com/news/2025-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

chris_va · a year ago

(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)

Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy.

Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.

This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.

bobfromhuddle · a year ago

I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card".

I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative.

The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.

bobfromhuddle commented on Cement recycling method could help solve one of the big climate challenges cam.ac.uk/stories/cement-... · Posted by u/timthorn

seventyone · 2 years ago

How does this address the emissions of concrete's curing process? There's no way you can have "zero emission concrete". I've seen proposed additives that will reduce the emissions during the curing process but that chemical reaction is going to have to happen regardless.

bobfromhuddle · 2 years ago

Concrete absorbs co2 while curing. It's the calcination process, where we heat limestone up until the co2 burns off, that has unavoidable emissions. Since this concrete is recycled, that's already happened.

bobfromhuddle commented on Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history theweathernetwork.com/en/... · Posted by u/GeoAtreides

lucianbr · 2 years ago

> they didn't have the guts, being voted in again was more important

Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? Isn't it, as a general rule, preferable that politicians fear being voted out, and so do the things that the voters want, so they get reelected? The alternative seems to me for a politician to say one thing in the campaign - what the people want to hear, and then do something else when elected - what he thinks is best. Some do that, but they're not loved for it.

I am pretty sure that even when or if politicians do not care about the voters, they still do not do the right thing, but some other wrong thing, like enriching themselves.

What you are in fact complaining about is that politicians elected by other people did what those people wanted, instead of what you wanted. While not laying the same complaint on those you voted for - greens. They obviously did right to listen to their voters - you and people you agree with.

It's not about the guts of a chosen few. It's about humanity overall. If we do not care about the environment, billions of us, a handful who care will not, can not change much.

bobfromhuddle · 2 years ago

Billions of people do care https://www.carbonbrief.org/interview-why-global-support-for...

bobfromhuddle commented on Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history theweathernetwork.com/en/... · Posted by u/GeoAtreides

sunday_serif · 2 years ago

I try to be an optimist, but the constant stream of record breaking abnormal weather really steers me toward climate doomerism.

Do others here feel similarly? Do you think these trends are reversible? Is technology the solution? Something else?

I guess my real question is: how do you incorporate all of this change into your worldview and outlook?

bobfromhuddle · 2 years ago

The emissions trend is slowing. We have the technology we need in order to change course, we're just not deploying it fast enough.

The worst projections, at least, are off the table: we're not headed for 6 degrees of warming, we're on track for 3, and I strongly suspect we'll end up closer to 2 degrees of warming.

That is going to be terrible. People will die, wars will be fought, and we'll see the largest migrations in human history with all the attendant political upheaval and barbarity, but we'll still be here. Humans as a species are going to make it.

For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate. So long as I wasn't actively working to solve the problem, I was driven mad by the knowledge that we were heading for disaster.

bobfromhuddle commented on Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern (2004) martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/Tomte

TheAlchemist · 2 years ago

It's a very good article. I wish I knew how to find this at the time when it was written.

I remember when I first discovered the pattern, at a job I took 10 years after this article. The codebase seemed so clean, easy to evolve and test, even for a newbie and 'half programmer' as me - my mind was blown. I was thinking - what kind of black magic is this ?!

Say you're new to programming. What's the best place today to learn about design patterns (with python examples, since it's the most used language for beginners) in an easy and accessible way ?

bobfromhuddle · 2 years ago

If you're new to programming, steer clear of design patterns. If you're a working python programmer who's curious about how other ecosystems use design patterns, try https://www.cosmicpython.com/

bobfromhuddle commented on Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on? · Posted by u/sremani

dragostudor · 3 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on.

- Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising documents and extracting failure reasons / equipment names / spare parts / processes involved and making associations between them for pareto analysis, better search or process improvement recommendations

- Recommending the next steps to fix something / remote intervention / do something etc. Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.

- Enabling operators to become data scientists by enabling to train AI models via their day to day activities / analysis. Building better UX in general and providing simple tools that even a toddler could use.

- Autonomous factory use-cases / supply chain automation.

Would love to discuss with people who find these things exciting

bobfromhuddle · 3 years ago

I'm starting a new job doing exactly these things in order to reduce the carbon intensiveness of heavy industry, specifically cement production. I'm hyped because I think the technical challenges aren't too daunting, and the prize is huge.

bobfromhuddle commented on 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service theverge.com/2019/8/5/207... · Posted by u/gregmac

hokumguru · 7 years ago

Indeed, but speech itself is is. I think OP's point was that free-speech is as fundamental a "air" and that everybody everywhere depends on it.

bobfromhuddle · 7 years ago

And they're free to continue their speech elsewhere. Cloudflare and Voxility are within their rights to refuse service to a client on the basis that the client is persistently associated with terrorism and kiddy porn.

Why is that a remotely controversial statement? Nobody is suggesting that chan-tards should be rounded up for unamerican activities, and I'd be the first to speak against that, but CF don't need to tarnish their brand with 8chans bullshit.

They're free to withhold their support and so express an opinion.