alt Hacker NewsThe bottleneck might be the air in the room
Comments
Great article! I did build a open source one years ago: https://andrefiedler.de/open-source-co2-ampel/
It's on my desk and I can confirm, opening the window if it gets orange helps a lot with thinking.
Some days in the morning it shows red and I barely can't think or get awake. Opening the window and it changes instantly.
I wonder if the corona times trend to WFH and jump to Teams/Zoom/etc meetings instead of physical meetings had/has a positive effect in regards to this.
Why did your startup fail? The CO2 was sitting at 1.000 ppm
I find it kind of funny that we've been low-key suffocating the higher order function of our brains ever since we started building structures to live in with very little awareness of it. My mom is one of those people who complains that the air is getting stale and opens a window, the hero we needed.
Working from home next to my open window feels generally way better then being in the office. Perhaps this is contributing. Still, seems more of a case for WFH rather than against, as article mentions some people have tried to make the case for.
I also use my Aranet everywhere. The nice thing is you quickly develop a feel for when you need to ventilate spaces you know so you don’t need it there anymore. I also developed a feeling for new (to me) rooms a bit.
I once woke up with the fam in a hotel with airco at 5500 ppm. It is then that I learned the airco does not blow fresh air (logical after thinking about it).
I wonder how many high impact political decisions (eg EU treaties) have been made in rooms like these.
One easy way to fix this for many people's bedrooms or home offices: look at your HVAC system, and there's probably an option to have the fan run all the time, even if the heat or air isn't running. Turn that on, and your home's CO2 levels will drop substantially.
My employer started using CO2 monitors in meeting rooms 15 years ago, it’s really a useful thing to have. As well as the meeting rooms having windows you can open.
As a cyclist, I've heard a similar argument for years about indoor training, and particularly doing difficult indoor intervals beyond FTP.
Very interesting. It would be nice if HVAC monitored this and helped adjust for optimum performance.
I heard a Freakonomics podcast recently with similar takeaways - that air pollution has a direct effect on cognition skills.
Topic must be very interesting to have this much discussion on an obviously AI-written article. I couldn’t get past the first few sentences.
Matches my experience. Basement home offices are the worst offenders.
The building science community has not buy and large came to the agreement that the CO2 itself is the cause of the cognitive decline. It could be the Canary in the coal mine telling us there is an accumulation of compounds causing the decline.
Why that matters? You need good ventilation regardless, but instead of just thinking of CO2, try to minimize compounds in your air by selecting things for the room that smell less and off-gas less.
Are there studies which analyze performance Vs artificial CO2?
Natural CO2 in a room probably correlates strongly with other things given off by humans... Farts, water vapour, viruses, etc.
The effect needs to be properly understood before totally redesigning the nations ventilation systems on a possibly wrong premise.
The practical bottleneck for most AI tooling isn't model capability anymore - it's the orchestration layer. Getting reliable behavior across edge cases requires more engineering than people expect from demos.
Interesting.
Perhaps using non-ozone negative ionizers would also help.
Hey, just FYI to everyone:
Even though this article is conveying good (and useful) information, it seems to be completely AI-generated.
Pangram clocks it as 100% AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/c410d4b4-abfd-4ca0-b52d-db0d...
Someone else in the thread lists it as 99%: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector
Also, it sort of jumps out at you if you're used to reading AI writing. Claude loves to start paragraphs with "Here is the uncomfortable part".
I'm not necessarily saying this automatically makes it bad, but everyone should be aware of the source of their information.
The really uncomfortable part is that 1000 ppm isn’t that far off from how EARTH will be. A terrifying scenario that will be like Total Recall with people clamoring for and paying for fresh air. Those that can’t will be permanently in a stupor.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/carb...
Similar to this a closed motorcycle helmet without air circulation increases CO2 extremely rapidly, within 60s it's already at really high levels. Open your visor when you stop!
When I was homeless, I often battled extreme sleep deprivation. I would often play tabletop games in a coffeehouse during the nighttime hours, and of course I found myself nodding off in there, even with the hubbub and the smell of fresh-roasted coffee brewing all night long.
I also attended liturgies at church all the time, and let me tell you, there is no CO2 machine like faithful Christians packed into a little chapel who are all singing for 90 minutes, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder. I was absolutely desperate to stay awake during those times, and I knew instinctively that it was an issue with the CO2/O2 mix in the room, and I was personally the most sensitive to it, being extremly sleep-deprived, but I am certain that many others felt the physical adverse effects, without being cognizant of what was causing them.
I still suffer from sleep deprivation today, and when I settle in to our chapel of silent prayer, I often find myself nodding off uncontrollably, and it's so frustrating because I want to be alert and actively praying, but the environment is just... so relaxing. There are only about 4-5 other humans in the room, so the genesis is basically just me relaxing in a sitting, quiescent pose for a significant amount of time. I believe that the room is well-ventilated, but are they constantly recirculating air? The air outside can be 115 degrees; are there active intakes that must cool this hot, dry, dusty air? That's a lot of work!
My father having worked in Environmental Health & Safety, I became fairly good at recognizing hazardous or troublesome situations, especially indoors and with large numbers of people. I try to avoid getting embroiled in them, and it usually does no good to try and alert any supervisor or management about the issues, but this blogger is right; we must raise awareness and take action.
i love seeing things i saw on twitter two years ago at the front page of hn man like what are we doing
if I travel and expect to be working I now bring a CO2 meter
I am able to open the windows at home and at work but have to be reminded to air out, but I always feel much clearer when I do.
Also, take walks. I am lucky to be able to walk to and from work and it helps immensely.
Just open the door
You know what also impacts my decision making ability? Freezing my ass off because people are opening all the windows every five minutes.
Wow, what a revelation. People rediscover basic things in life :D.
Aranet detectors are superb, and – best of all! – made in Latvia.
Support European!
if price is no object get the AirGradient PM2.5+CO2
but Ikea now makes the most affordable PM2.5+CO2 sensor, at $35 a no-brainer
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/alpstuga-air-quality-sensor-sma...
in there is a very nice/expensive Sensirion SN63C sensor that costs nearly as much as the Ikea itself
https://sensirion.com/company/news/press-releases-and-news/a...
unfortunately Ikea requires Matter network not plain wifi for communication so I've been looking for a cheap Matter hub or DIY SPR
open a window, wait, ok, ok, turn up the , wait, no, ummm, hmmmmm re, re, no forget that, hmmm anyway, as a person with a strong interest in civil engineering, systems, and the subset of air handling, I can say that there has long been disenting arguments about how things are built,that have been ignored due to cost, which are large in terms of internal volumes required, and the intractable issues around, noise, filtration, heating/cooling and maintenance. And as the climate warms, and in many areas pollution increases , the inadequate methods used to "calculate" requirements, get further from real world needs. You could try throwing a desk through a window, but as that is one of the things the planners and engineers have antisipated, it will prove to be surprisingly difficult.
Yet another reason to have meetings while walking outside: air quality and a natural limit on time, and the mental benefits that come from movement.
[flagged]
[dead]
> You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions.
A terrible way to make decisions.
I have a CO2 monitor and I don't understand one thing - it seems that CO2 increases more quickly during summer than during winter. If I close my windows it takes longer to reach 1000 ppm during winter than it does during the summer.
I didn't gather concrete data on this but this is just what I eyeballed over the last few years. Does anyone know why could this be the case?