Post #188417

2026-01-30 19:13 UTC

https://fosstodon.org/@adafruit/115979205855927539 Now, I'm going to be charitable here and assume that @adafruit@fosstodon.org has a genuine interest in monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide. I'm a chemist by education, a physical scientist, and that means there's only one general approach to addressing the question of atmospheric carbon dioxide and how to measure it that makes sense to me: direct physical estimation, doing real actual #chemistry. adafruit is doing here might be suitable to the goal of making a marketable toy that displays nice flashy digital numbers and you can capture the data with a computer and make charts of it and all that...and I wouldn't trust the actual numbers so far as I could throw them, because there's no *verification* anywhere. There's no *standardization*. All of one's trust in the device boils down to how much trust you can put in the commercially available bits and pieces from which this CO2-estimating toy has been constructed.

Replies (1)

@alyx_woodward@universeodon.com 2026-01-30 19:17

What @adafruit@fosstodon.org is doing, in my somewhat bilious opinion, is very typical of a #technology culture in which genuine understanding of #science has leaked almost completely away, replaced by a sort of naïve faith in #computing and programming and automation and bits and pieces ordered overnight through Amazon dot com or wherever. There's no genuine application of science or engineering going on here, just the stringing together of prefab bits, as if building a carbon dioxide meter were like building a Meccano kit or a fancy Lego model. And if the folks putting this toy together don't actually have a solid grasp of science or engineering, if they're merely bolting corporate bits together, than how much LESS understanding is being cultivated in the audiences and #market for such technical toys?

Open ##188444