Headworx

Sustainability discussions have become mainstream now. And the theme is very broad, touching essentially every aspect of our lives. Cars have however always occupied the center stage, especially now as electric vehicles (EVs) take over traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) based - mostly in China and Europe. Feeling a bit guilty here - as an owner of a 20+ years old Subaru Forester, I did some math (seeking some absolution). I don't drive much with this car though, maybe a bit over 5000km per year, so the initial feeling was that my contribution to the global carbon footprint would not be super high. For comparison I took the additional footprint of flying intercontinental in business class vs economy (more floor space, heavier seat etc., and all those bottles of champagne on board) and the global reduction impact of the lighting control software my company makes. So here is my math: The car: 5000km is about 600 liters of fuel. Burning 1 liter produces roughly 2.3kg of CO2. ...

The energy crisis was the leading theme throughout the 2025 COSM conference. And people were really crying rivers about it. With the two most severe loses articulated: We will not be able to scale the AI infrastructure sufficiently enough China will overtake us Both are - I would say - purely "American" worries. First of all, nobody knows if AI progress is really limited by energy. Dwarkesh Patel has recently discussed this with Ilya Sutskever - and the headline is "We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research". Returns from scaling out the AI infrastructure have been diminishing. Ilya argues we need to do other things than just building more capacity. And I could not agree more. The existing LLMs have already swallowed all that was ever written. And probably more. And they still remain language models, increasingly more sophisticated statistical engines, not having a clue what they are talking about. I'm not saying that LLMs are totally usel...

The IES Annual conference has always been the temple of light. Stunning designs, beautifully illuminated spaces, and the role of light in human wellbeing. In 2025 this has changed. The Gala and the Awards were still about illumination, but the technical sessions started to boldly drift away, to discuss - surprise, surprise - heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. All with connection to light of course. Or - to be precise - to occupancy sensors brought to buildings en masse thanks to lighting. HVAC is shaping up to be the first significant beyond-lighting application. Forget wayfinding beacons. Forget asset tracking. Forget space utilization heatmaps. It is still all about energy savings. The lighting folks realized the HVAC crowd was unable to pull it on their own. So have come to offer the helping hand: the Lighting-HVAC Integration. As I cried almost 10 years ago - for the connected products to get really connected, we need cross-domain industry experts. And this has been happ...

Utilities move slowly. But ultimately they do. Half a year ago I installed the Home Assistant multi-channel energy meter which has  clearly shown the energy usage patterns. I had known before my addiction to hot bath every day cost me dearly. And it was really the lowest hanging fruit. Water boiler is the most efficient and available energy storage . After seeing the usage patterns, I was planning to switch to variable energy pricing plan. But filling the related paperwork was tedious enough to procrastinate. Until the utility offered the helping hand: switch to energy pricing with just a single "yes" click on their web site. No paperwork, no nothing.  A couple of days later the confirmation of the switch arrived. Plus I have online access to the formal energy meter readings. No Home Assistant integration yet, but the patterns and values match with what I have, which is reassuring. I need to get used to this a bit (although the main patterns have already been preprogrammed)....

Tesla discussions have always brought very polarized opinion. Either trash and going bankrupt or the absolute leader in AI about to deliver autonomous driving (Full Self Driving - FSD) through a simple software update. My point today is really not about Tesla but about the value of FSD in general. I wrote about this many times, with the Tyranny of Convenience being the most popular post. Today the theme is similar. It is about the concept of "enough" which is one of the key enemies of capitalism. Prospering capitalist economies (the USA being the prime example here) absolutely depend on creating and expanding consumers' desires. People must want more for the wheels to spin. And the vision of consumers even remotely calling "we have enough" is the most feared. "Enough" must be eliminated. In many ways I am a person who has enough of many things. Sometimes I even feel that my level of "enough" is definitely too high. I try not to chase new car...

Economy (as indicated by the GDP) goes hand in hand with energy consumption. The better developed economies consume more and the less developed - well - consume less. And this ratio has been pretty stable over many years, with countries like the United States increasing the GDP and decreasing the energy use slightly. Now with cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, this is probably falling a lot. Both technologies - crypto and AI consume outrageous amounts of energy and contribute very little (if anything) to the GDP. It seems the most progress in AI is in generating noise and misinformation. The Register has reported recently that As The Register opined in 2022 and reported in January this year, search quality has declined because search engines index low-quality AI-generated content and present it in search results. This remains an ongoing area of concern. And this is (unfortunately) in line with my own expectations and experience . I wonder if we are...

Despite all the progress in all categories where technology is involved, we have not moved much on the energy production front. Surprisingly, it is still the bad old coal and oil, which we burn to propel things, make living comfortable (HVAC) and light our nights. Widespread nuclear, not to mention small scale fusion, is still the thing of a distant future. And it will probably keep getting worse before it starts getting better. But production is not the biggest energy issue we are facing. The real issue is distribution - or - to be precise - the power transmission grid. It is already saturated today. And the reason is: electrification of everything. Total electrification, pushed as the center of the politically correct "green" agenda means we need to triple the electricity capacity. TRIPLE. See the recent discussion between Lex Fridman and Elon Musk : So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity, one third transport, one third heati...

Europe - in general - does a good job in taming the entrepreneurial gallop to satisfy consumers' desires. I remember the times when every mobile phone had a replaceable battery. It was practical to the extent that the battery could be removed as a last problem solving resort. But then came the iPhone and in the race for ever thinner and cooler looking devices the battery eventually got sealed inside a case which cannot be opened (even by most service shops, including the official Apple). To have the battery replaced the entire device must be sent to the factory. Apple actually has mastered the replacement program and basically you can have a device swapped for another one with a new battery. And yes, the new device you get is a different device. Which means all the hassles of migrating data . Wouldn't it be great if we could just swap the old battery with a new one? So the EU has come now with a set of new regulations mandating replaceable batteries in all kinds of electronic ...

I wrote on noise pollution before: https://headworx.slupik.com/2021/07/noise-pollution.html . The situation has not gone materially better since then. In particular, as travel has resumed after COVID, I've noticed North America is generally more noisy compared to Europe. Remember touching down a couple of weeks ago in Washington DC and despite very mild outside temperature (it was mis-May), the bus to the rental car center had rumbling air conditioning running at full power. Truck and bus engines in America also seem to be noisier. Wonder if the EU is just voluntarily more sensitive to the noise problem or are there any stricter regulations behind? And do we really prefer super-stabilized cold temperatures over a  quiet environment? Not to mention all these AC units are responsible for very significant energy consumption nationwide . Another annoying source of noise are the little combustion engines in lawn mowers and similar gardening equipment. Surprisingly they are also res...

I still fly a lot (and this starts building some guilt inside me... you know, all that carbon footprint - but that is for a separate blog post). So I still fly a lot and having a window seat is one of the biggest rewards I could imagine for being a frequent flyer. Forget the upgrades and the lounges and fast security tracks. Dear airline, let me just select a window seat. There is so much going on out there. Flying itself is fascinating - sipping wine while sitting in an armchair cruising at almost the speed of sound in the clouds. And the things outside the window are equally fascinating - the clouds, the occasionally met planes and the Earth from above. I always carry a camera - the Nikon Z50 with the plastic telephoto lens has proven to be a perfect balance for casual window seat aerial photography. And keep collecting the photos - see in my Window Seat album . But interestingly many people don't care about window seats. So often I see them taking the seat and immediately shutt...

There are many emotions around electric vehicles (EVs), historically started and mostly fueled by Tesla in North America and now also in Europe the EU Commission's ban of new registrations of internal combustion engine (ICE) - based cars since 2035. What is troubling though is the fully "linear" projection of the legacy car ownership model. I strongly believe most people will not own personal cars in 2035 anymore. Especially people living in modern cities. Public transport, micro mobility (electric scooters) and app-based car sharing should take care of this. If it does not, it means we have failed as societies. Cars are generally very heavy for personal budgets, for the environment and for the quality of life in general. In cities they occupy vast amount of public spaces. Mostly sitting on streets or in parking lots. Personal cars do nothing for most of their lifetime. Yet they are a huge ballast for owners. You need to insure them, service, have a place to park, only to...

As briefly mentioned in the Nov 6 post , it was time to replace the dying battery in my iPad. Apple does not do that. I mean, they do, but instead of replacing the battery they sell you a new iPad (the same model and configuration) and you give them the old one. This is clearly because of the super low "repairability" score mostly due to the "Gobs of adhesive hold most everything in place, making all repairs more difficult.". A local non-Apple-authorized service shop offered the battery replacement so I was eager to accept this offer. It took them a week after which they returned me the device with a new battery but broken WiFi (and Bluetooth). There was clearly something wrong with the 2.4GHz antenna, as WiFi reception was bad and Bluetooth was choppy. I returned them the device, they kept if for another week and returned in the same state - broken WiFi. Clearly they did not have skills nor testing tools / procedures to to fix what they broke. And I was afraid the...

The recent global increase of energy prices has redefined our perspective. Suddenly many people started paying attention to what they do, how to conserve, and in general what energy means to our lives. It turns out everything depends on energy. Which of course is not that surprising, but we simply were not paying attention to this fact when energy was cheap. Of course there is a lot of lament in the media, but that is not relevant. Media needs crisis and lament to thrive. So just ignore it. The good news is the expensive energy will undoubtedly result in overall reduced consumption which will lead to reduced manufacturing and reduced energy use. The media will call this a recession, which of course has a negative bias. But does not have to be that negative at all. We cannot continue growing the economies infinitely based on the finite resources (the planet Earth). It is just not possible. So are we at the end of growth? Maybe. Or maybe not there yet. But definitely there has been some ...

Continuing the series on designing for longevity, a couple of thoughts on skimping on hardware.  Of course less capable chips are less expensive. They even do not need to be less costly to manufacture, but simply a smaller / slower chip is positioned to be a lower cost part in comparison to high end parts. But because most of the products today are defined by software and software upgrades, contrary to hardware upgrades, do not have negative impact on the environment, it is fundamentally important the hardware should have room to accommodate such updates for many years. Skimping on hardware is simply a false economy. Typically we are talking about sub-dollar or single-digit dollar amounts for a chip versus the costs of replacing the whole product built around that chip. One example is my (now 7 years old) Philips Android TV. It has a nice 55" 4k LED panel and a good set of speakers. Unfortunately the Android subsystem (which was already limited at the time of purchase) is complete...

Solid state electronic components seemed to me like a liberation from the problem of wear and tear. Any product containing mechanical parts has been subject to wear and the limited lifetime of those mechanical products has been something obvious and natural. Solid state has brought the new concept of "no moving parts" and to many it was like "finally these products can live forever".  Unfortunately "forever" for typical electronic solid state products means just a couple of years. And capacitors are in most part responsible for this failure. Initially I thought this problem applied only to electrolytic capacitors , which I have been regularly replacing in some of my aging gear. Recently, however, I have experienced a couple of failures of the so-called "actor" modules in my smart home system. These actors are small electronic cubes mounted in walls behind regular wall switches. They are a great way to upgrade an analog electrical installation to ...

The effects of longevity tend to be very often underestimated and overlooked. But this is a fundamental mechanism influencing economies, extraction of natural resources and quality of life in general. For humans longevity, known also as life expectancy, has had a profound effect with progress of medicine in the last 100-200 years. The number of people on Earth has been growing not because there are so many new births, but because we live so much longer. The life expectancy doubled or even tripled. During the early industrial era, an average life expectancy in Liverpool, England was about 25 years. Now it has more than tripled. It is not uncommon we have 4 generations alive - grand-grand parents, grand parents, parents and children. Simply speaking the same birth rate results in 3x the number of living people. The same applies to manufacturing and consumption. Businesses want to manufacture more. So the logic is simple - reduce the longevity of products. Then to have the same amount of ...

This week a good friend of mine decided to shut down his factory and close the business. After 27 years. It was a great factory manufacturing super nice glassware for tier-1 customers and also providing employment for many workers in the town. What killed it were the high energy proces, in particular the natural gas which skyrocketed in Europe, especially after the Russian invasion on Ukraine. Glassworks are super dependent on energy, as it takes a lot of it to melt glass. So this is not unexpected they struggle to survive where energy proces are high and thrive where energy is cheap. It probably makes much more sense to craft a glass bowl somewhere in, say, Kazakhstan, and ship it over to Europe, than pay Kazakhstan (or Russia) for the energy to manufacture the same bowl in Europe. At the same time the lighting control software business has accelerated significantly during the same period of time, with energy savings being the key feature driving sales. It turns out that adding a smal...

Things always look clearer in perspective. And at the same time we typically do not see when something moves on continuously at what seems to be a very slow speed. Living in a city you basically wake up everyday and the city everyday is the same. No change, no progress. But move out for a bit longer and come back. Then the changes are clear. If there are changes. Since the pandemic eased out this Spring, I have returned to fairly frequent business travel. I know, I know, this is bad for the environment, but to my excuse the result of that travel is makin much more good for the environment - through the massive energy savings our software enables. So I feel absolved to some extent. And yes, the pandemic has done a loot of good for the environment too, by enabling videoconferencing as the primary means of doing business. But still some things work a lot better when you meet face to face. Especially conventions and trade shows when you meet new people. It is still hard to meet new people ...

I do not believe in electric cars. In fact they are one of the biggest lies out there today. They have very little in common with protecting the environment. The life-time carbon footprint of an electric car is more or less equal to a traditional car. So switching from an ICE vehicle to an EV does not move the needle. And speaking of mobility in the context of the climate: there are many super easy things which could move the needle: stopping buying new cars would be the first. Some people do that every 2-3 years. That is completely irrational, in particular considering they often complain how bad the new car is compared to the old one. Or simply driving less. 3 weeks ago attending an industry convention in Bellevue, WA, I was the only passenger on a public bus to the Airport. The bus is $3.25 and the ride takes 50 minutes. Comparing to $35 and 40 minutes by Uber. It must be a monumental effort to take this bus, as clearly nobody was able to do do that. Or nobody cared. Back to EVs - t...

Las Vegas is fabulous. You know that even before you arrive, as this is exactly what the flight attendants tell you when boarding a LAS flight. Of course. It cannot be anything else but fabulous. And the Vegas fame aside, it really was fabulous for us las week at LightFair International, the first grand industry trade show after COVID19. There was desire and energy in people to meet face to face and shake hands. We saw that back in March at New York's LEDucation. Which was the indicator of the LightFair to come. The booths were crowded for all three days - we has meetings up until the last hour. And of course mornings ad evenings were busy too with joint breakfasts with customers and after hours parties. It has been so encouraging to see that much energy in people and so many happy faces. This all means the lighting industry is back up to speed and guess what is the leading theme these days? Energy savings. Of course. LED retrofits are becoming no-brainers and with lighting control...