As chips get faster they also automatically become inherently more efficient (more operations per unit of energy). But if you buy a new machine with every advancement that’s a hell of a lot of e-waste being traded for energy efficiency. So I have to wonder where permacomputing folks stand on that. I’m still using hardware from 15 years ago and my newest phone is trapped on AOS 5.1. Thus I have very little e-waste but I probably have more energy waste. Which is worse?
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Permacomputing
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Computing to support life on Earth
Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.
Definition and purpose of permacomputing: http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html
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I guess every case is different - and you have to figure out what works for you.
Recently I had to replace my laptop, and as I use it for work I have no choice but going for a not too old model and install a double boot with Windows. I'd rather not, but there we are.
Phones, not sure, I use mine to read lemmy posts, but also for online banking and paying stuff, and taking photos of plants and mushrooms that I want to identify. But I also dislike having the phone with me all the time and wish I could return to dumb phone and restrict my social media use to the laptop. One could get used to pay stuff in town again, and have a sketch book and some pencils for the plants and mushrooms.
As for e-waste/energy waste - there also seem to be a lot of different approaches. How far do you want to go to restrict your energy use, for example, given that each transmitted byte costs energy? Some people will want to become amish-ly strict and will allow only the most essential snippet of text, others don't want to give up their daily moving cat picture with bells and whistles and a pop tart ...
I must say the banking apps are totally antithetical to permacomputing because they are the big offenders in pushing chronic upgrades that result in phones as landfill. It’s really a contest between desktop banking and analog banking (which includes bank by mail). I’m willing to do desktop banking only to the extent that privacy is respected. More and more banks are blocking tor and outsourcing bill pay to huge centralized corps who get to see everyone’s payments. So privacy and the environment are at odds and you have to choose between them.
When you talk about data transmission, that’s a bit different than processing power. I use very little bandwidth by doing everything in text (I even disable images in my gui browser). And because my consumption is low it’s much cheaper to connect over prepaid mobile networks than to have a hardwire. But then transmitting over the air wastes more energy per byte than a hardwire. The worst is Starlink, which I heard uses 30 times the energy per byte than terrestrial wireless.
Lets nature do the work....? Artificial energy?
What is it with this quackery stuff on Lemmy.
To really explain in depth what seems to be an approach of engineering and new age quackery would go too far here. I'll try to be short:
Solarpunk (the main topic of the instance where Permacomputing is at home) tries to imagine a (near and implementable) future where humans manage to live in harmony with nature, not to return some more primitive way of life of the past, but instead come up with a mixture of modern tech and traditional techniques of community land management, a lot of it copied from native land management techniques.
These techniques (often summarized under the term 'permaculture') aim towards a land management that is less energy-intensive than our current modern agriculture. This can be achieved by mimicking (or modifying) naturally existing ecosystems and turning them into food landscapes. A lot of resources in these landscapes are circled, instead of bringing in large external inputs.
A few people have taken this approach and apply it to computing, and try to redefine how we could use the internet in less energy-intensive and more human ways and work with what we have at hand.
I could have written your comment some five or six years ago, before I saw how permaculture worked and that it worked, but 'let nature do the work' is definitely a thing compared with how we got used to do stuff in the fossil fuel industrial era.
Wonderful. For what it's worth I'm here and I support this area of thought and work very very much. It seems to be another battlefield in the science wars or adjacent - techies getting mad because people are trying to comment socially (or in this case ecosocially) on what they, the diehard techies, regard as objective reality in their domain of study. Well it doesn't mean we can't endeavor to think in an interdisciplinary way here. It's weird how militant even many of these open source 'anarchist' zealots get about some people trying to see what they can do about addressing the issue of a massive machine of planetary destruction. I mean it seems right up their alley otherwise.
Welcome to permacomputing!
I used to be fairly tech-optimistic, but I'd now call myself tech-cautious. I'm still as giddy and excited as before about moving (or digital) parts functioning beautifully together, but I also demand they do no damage to the living world and/or the fabric of communities. Which means reevaluating the tech we use, for example collecting and publishing energy use for different technologies. Their usefulness, resources spent, harm caused needs to be part of the decision whether we actually want certain tech to exist.