71–80 of 99 posts
I have at least totally given up on high-end personal computing (think your top-notch Alienware computers) and have been living with a 470S that I purchased from the company as X-hand a while ago. I'll probably stay frugal on computing power for the rest of my life, unless forced to change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is plenty of clean energy. 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…
> nor will we have it in the close future It would be better if people with broken crystal balls stopped insisting on business as usual on the middle of revolutions. We are not on the "there's no reason renewables couldn't replace fossil fuels, we just have to invest a little in R&D" anymore. We are at the "yep, we replaced all of those on your left yesterday, today we are doing the next line" stage, and we are going…
But looking at this:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
I do not read it as "we replaced all of those on your left yesterday" ; but rather as "we have moslty kept those on your left, but some of the new ones we're building are a not as dirty, and anyway last year was weird."
If you look at the whole "electricy mix vs energy mix", I read it as, yes, sorry, even more of a challenge.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Now, "depressing" is not in anyway "desperate". Of course the grids are improving in rich countries, the mixes are improving in rich countries, the batteries are popping here and there that will make intermittency more manageable in rich countries, etc... And that's a challenge !
But I insist on "in the close future".
There's more than 60% of our electricity, and more than 80% or our energy that we need to transition.
I understand we have 10/20 years to do so, not 50.
Then again, I'm bad at predictions. Maybe we're at the start of an exponential curve - I've spent the last two years missing them.
Do you believe coal plants are going to close "viraly" in the next few years ? (Not only new hydro/wind/solar popping up)
Do you see a wave of gasoline cars getting out of the road ? (Not only new EVs poping up ?)
[Edit]: Regarding the whole "we've replaced those on your left..." https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal...
A patient goes to the doctor.
"You drink two bottles of scotch per week, that's too much !"
A month later, the patient comes back.
"I made progress doctor ! Now I drink half a glass of orange juice, and three bottles of scotch."> 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...…
No one has yet mentioned bitcoin?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, nobody mines bitcoin on GPUs. Surely you would know that if you're here trying to make argument about it?
I was under the impression that standard bitcoin mining leveraged GPUs for the heavy lifting. If that's not the case I'm happy to know what does
For instance, here is a shipping container that burns 1 megawatt of power in a pure and complete waste of energy and carbon emissions: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021123118285...
> To address these challenges, action is needed on many fronts. What will you do to make frugal computing a reality? I dunno, isn't this the same thing as blaming climate change on the people who take a single vacation by plane per year, no matter what else they're doing the other 51 weeks to try to live a non-wasteful life? I like my home server and having my data here, on LAN speed. Of course that's probably not th…
It’s the opposite. The article is targeting people in the software industry. Their actions are multiplied by every instance of their software being used.
So it’s more like asking people who design aircraft what they will do about the climate crisis — not the individual consumer who buys a plane ticket.
The incentives are still there for churning out more and more code, compile it on more and more CI/CD pipelines, run it on clusters of more and more powerful machines, and interface it to more and more powerful computers in our pockets which have gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, mad gigahertz multi-core CPUs but somehow still amount to being slow dumb terminals. Damn, even open source world favors constant chu…
I've noticed this at "work", network failed one day, no more printer; elders told me they had paper templates to fill in case computers don't work. It took 30s to fill it while listening to the person[0]. It takes 3 good minutes on a computer.
I guess it's how cycle goes.. things go obese until they have to crash and be redesigned.
ps: Not only this but the process is hyper redundant, and humanly heavier .. on paper I listen to the person, fill as data comes, that person doesn't wait alone, while I wait for the app to respond and have to input the same data 3 times in different forms (data that can be inferred from that person's case id). We all make more efforts, waste more time.
[0] similar to the abacus vs pocket calculator contest done long ago
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nor will we have it in the close future It would be better if people with broken crystal balls stopped insisting on business as usual on the middle of revolutions. We are not on the "there's no reason renewables couldn't replace fossil fuels, we just have to invest a little in R&D" anymore. We are at the "yep, we replaced all of those on your left yesterday, today we are doing the next line" stage, and we are going…
I accept the accusation of pessimism. Even being very familiar with the same source as yours ! But looking at this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... I do not read it as "we replaced all of those on your left yesterday" ; but rather as "we have moslty kept those on your left, but some of the new ones we're building are a not as dirty, and anyway last year was weird." If you look at the w…
Where do you see that? Coal is falling about as quickly as the fastest rate it ever grew, natural gas is falling (I didn't expect that one 2 years ago). The only fossil fuel growing is oil, very slowly and from a low initial level.
And the growth on renewables continues on an exponential curve. At some point the exponential must stop, but here we are, on the double digits of market share and still exponential. (Click on the "Relative Change" box if you can't see it on the main one.)
Anyway, we have more than 10 years if we start strong and right away. The more we do right now, the more time we have to the hardest problems. And once we have electricity surplus (solar will almost certainly give us that), we can extend it indefinitely.
> Do you believe coal plants are going to close "viraly" in the next few years ?
They have been doing that for the last 3 years.
> Do you see a wave of gasoline cars getting out of the road?
That will take time. I see a wave of diesel trucks getting out of the road, but not cars.
About your edit, yes, if you restrict your time frame and geographical area, your data gets noisier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If consumers disappeared then its not like industry would keep on churning pollution to no end. Airlines carried on flying without passengers.
Temporarily . Because they were expecting the consumers to return, which was in this case reasonable expectation. Do you really think they would continue to do so indefinitely?
So sure, they're not doing whatever they're doing today permanently. They're doing a series of temporary things forever. Because that's different!