31–40 of 99 posts
Abstinence-only climate education is such a depressing notion. There is plenty of clean energy. It is not running out. The idea that we should impoverish ourselves to protect against a problem we can solve without impoverishing ourselves is unjustifiably self-destructive.
No one has yet mentioned bitcoin?
http://github.com/tinspin/rupy
If you want to be able to run production servers on Raspberry 2 & 4 this is today your only real alternative.
Now I'm building a 3D action MMO that runs on the Raspberry 4, good luck getting Unity or Unreal to work on that device!
The biggest waste of electricity is AAA gaming, both because it uses alot but also because it creates nothing of value.
Follow Minecraft (btw also a waste of energy) modding and Roblox and extrapolate, useful gaming allows you to OWN your work.
Abstinence-only climate education is such a depressing notion. There is plenty of clean energy. It is not running out. The idea that we should impoverish ourselves to protect against a problem we can solve without impoverishing ourselves is unjustifiably self-destructive.
It's not necessarily impoverishing and depressing. It can be, especially if enforced from outside, but many people find satisfaction in minimalism and frugality.
This is fascinating. We are barely keeping up with demand for computing with all those inefficient languages, architecture and difficulties of scale we face now. We waste cycles, bandwidth, memory and still do not have enough developer time to build or simply keep up with demand. Just imagine how much more work is to be done when we face additional constraints of reuse of old devices, conserving energy, and device ut…
We aren't slowing down, we are going back to normal levels of development. For the last 20 years we've been rushing and agiling everything for the sake of money, sacrificing backwards compatibility and maintainability. Reusing old devices is a given. A program works until an update breaks it. The hardware is perfectly suited for this - x86 has ridiculous back compat. The challenges you point out are completely self m…
Software that helps people to organise for a political cause mainly. So, communication is the first example.
Software that helps scientific research of ecology also directly impacts our ability to fix things.
More software is impactful in indirect ways.
> As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. Considering that on AWS potentially every millisecond of compute time and every database write is billed separately, I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. > Extending the life time is also the key action…
One aspect I didn't see much discussion on is about tradeoffs. Yes, computing demand is increasing, but does it all have a negative environmental balance? Example - modern cars. They are full of electronics (there are around 80 ECUs in a modern car), but these electronics make the cars safer and lower the fuel consumption. Just look at how much the CO2 output for the same engine power decreased over time. Some of it…
In the case of cars, according to this [1] (seemingly based on US Federal data), the improvements in car efficiency since the 60s, is: > Noteworthy fuel-economy trends, taking into account the length of time represented: > A minor decrease between 1966 and 1973 (from 13.5 mpg to 12.9 mpg). > A modest increase between 1973 and 1991 (from 12.9 mpg to 19.6 mpg). > No change between 1991 and 2004 (19.6 mpg for both years…
Abstinence-only climate education is such a depressing notion. There is plenty of clean energy. It is not running out. The idea that we should impoverish ourselves to protect against a problem we can solve without impoverishing ourselves is unjustifiably self-destructive.
Potential, yes. We just don't have the infrastructure to harness it at the moment, nor will we have it in the close future.
In the meantime we're running on dirty energy. (Source: IEA)
Yes, it's depressing.
> It is not running out.
Unless you have a technological breakthrough to announce, the problem is not so much "clean energy running out" as "clean energy not being there yet, and dirty energy either running out or our time with a bearable climate running out."
Yes, it's depressing.
> Abstinence-only climate education is such a depressing notion.
On board with that. But this is about moderation, not abstinence.
"Wear condoms, drink sensibly, and don't change your phone every year."
Yep, it's depressing.
Except the alternative is more depressing to me. But sure, if we cure aids, vaccinate against hangovers, and perfect fusion...
No one has yet mentioned bitcoin?
Exactly… the projection that datacenters' demand for computing power won't be offset by silicon efficiency improvements is somewhat speculative; the projection that Bitcoin's demand for computing power won't be offset by silicon efficiency improvements is obvious and is by design of the fucking system .
so in reality, bitcoin provides an direct incentive for more efficient computing (the kind that can't be handle with by building smaller, more efficient processors). it might do more to boost computational efficiency (and reduce emissions) than all the millions of pages of blogger platitude-ing flooding the internet
No one has yet mentioned bitcoin?
The good thing about Bitcoin is that we can just ban it, since nobody actually uses it for anything important. It could be turned off tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.