41–50 of 99 posts
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.
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There is no point in trying to fight climate change as an individual. The scale of pollution by industry is so mind-bogglingly massive that there is nothing that we can do to make a difference. We could all turn off every device, never buy anything new, and go back to eating foraged berries while living in a cave and climate change would still happen. To give recent example of how industry works with no regard whatso…
Industry ultimately exists to serve individuals. > We could all turn off every device, never buy anything new, and go back to eating foraged berries while living in a cave and climate change would still happen. If consumers disappeared then its not like industry would keep on churning pollution to no end.
Airlines carried on flying without passengers.
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…
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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.
except all the goods and services that it currently stands in as a reference for (given people had to buy it with their own money, which they provided some service to obtain) but hey,
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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…
>mythical software 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.
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Industry ultimately exists to serve individuals. > We could all turn off every device, never buy anything new, and go back to eating foraged berries while living in a cave and climate change would still happen. If consumers disappeared then its not like industry would keep on churning pollution to no end.
If consumers disappeared then its not like industry would keep on churning pollution to no end. Airlines carried on flying without passengers.
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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 .
bitcoin mining provides an opportunity for anyone, anywhere to convert their computing resources into value. the competitive pressure is to have more efficient energy usage than your competitors 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 red…
It also massively increases emissions and does nothing to decrease them. The difficulty adjustment algorithm of bitcoin will ensure that you always have to keep wasting more resources to mine, and will cancel out any gains you ever make. By design. Bitcoin is explicitly built to waste resources.
> To address these challenges, action is needed on many fronts. What will you do to make frugal computing a reality? Frustrating that the authors ends with such an "open note", without any practical "first steps". (This [1] at least _tries_ to give some options, as arguable as they are.) There are obvious contenders: * keep your phone longer. Brag about it. Find a persuasive way to _demand_ that apps, updates, etc...…
I've found Nabil Hassein's "Computing, Climate Change, and all our Relationships" to be a very insightful take on this topic, much more so than the linked article:
https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/nabil-hassein-computing...
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except all the goods and services that it currently stands in as a reference for (given people had to buy it with their own money, which they provided some service to obtain) but hey,
Literally nobody buys goods with bitcoin. Any services you buy tend to exchange to real money as soon as they get the payment.
if I steal an ancient coin worth $10,000 dollars from you, and you're upset about it, am I making a good rebuttal by saying: "it's not like you could buy anything at the grocery store with it anyways"
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Literally nobody buys goods with bitcoin. Any services you buy tend to exchange to real money as soon as they get the payment.
just because bitcoin wasn't directly involved in a transaction doesn't mean it isn't standing in for economic value if I steal an ancient coin worth $10,000 dollars from you, and you're upset about it, am I making a good rebuttal by saying: "it's not like you could buy anything at the grocery store with it anyways"
That is bringing actual value to society. We can get rid of it and it will be a net positive.