21–30 of 266 posts
I find these articles terrifying, and yet unreal. Like it's not really happening. I guess this is what denial feels like.
I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like “ecological Armageddon” really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?
This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…
> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Yo…
I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry...
https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equ...
Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.
Email, word processing, the vast majority of commercial workloads, would work fine on machines with a tiny fraction of the typical PCs power today. But developers insist on using godawful “frameworks” to do the most trivial things. Like JS based text editors that take gigs of RAM to do less useful stuff than Emacs could do in megs.
The PC of the future is something like an RPi with an eInk display with a solar panel on the other side.
I find these articles terrifying, and yet unreal. Like it's not really happening. I guess this is what denial feels like.
That's because it's an alarmist piece which aren't too difficult to find in The Guardian. They do sell papers after all. I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like “ecological Armageddon” really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?
And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered specie…
People don’t care.
And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered specie…
> When do we do something? When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.
Honduras is being impacted. Our reaction in the USA is to block the refugees fleeing famine and drought from reaching us and “invading”. Similarly with Europe and African refugees.
This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…
Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically…
This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Yo…
mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry... https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equ... Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Email, word processing, the vast majority of commercial workloa…
It's big (~23Mt), but not as big as aviation (~860Mt).
https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…