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Frugal Computing (2021)

wimvanderbauwhede.github.io

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Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#81

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

floatboth wrote: post #28
Veedrac wrote: post #25

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.

> "Live in the pod, eat the bugs."

How about not letting the state and alarmist NGOs make that decision for me?

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#82

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Veedrac wrote: post #25

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.

>There is plenty of clean energy.

If that was true the problem of climate change wouldn't exist.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#83

Post by [deleted] »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #82
Veedrac wrote: post #25

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.

>There is plenty of clean energy. If that was true the problem of climate change wouldn't exist.

[deleted]

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#84

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Here's an idea. A pie in the sky idea!

What is SpaceX's starship good for? Well, what does space have? Solar power in gobs.

A lot of the economic barriers for space based stuff is just moving stuff around and getting it back to earth. Well, for computation you don't have to do that. You just beam the answers back.

Starlink has the networking substrate already. With the end of exponential churn in hardware, soon orbiting computing can have a longer lifecycle.

Starship is targetting 10$/kilogram. You can fit a computer in a kg easily. The launch cost will be a fraction of the procurement and other lifetime costs of the computer.

I guess cooling is the other issue. I don't know much about cooling in space. I know it is REALLY HOT on the sun side, and REALLY COLD on the other, but radiating heat usually involves other molecules touching the hot thing. Maybe you put reflective paint on the computing unit to keep the sun out, and the cold side chills the rest of the computer to near-absolute zero? Again, I am clueless about space heat dissipation.

But if you can ALSO get really cold temperatures, you can also overclock the CPUs to run faster and get more compute.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#85

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

jackling wrote: post #71
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #62

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.

Was you reason for this change purely because of the environmental impacts? I know a decent amount of people who are concerned for the environment, but tend to buy high end PCs, mainly for gaming.

No, not really, actually the reason is that I do not really need them.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#86

Post by 0thgen »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #64
0thgen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I were to become a dictator of a large part of the world, I’d tax heavily all the extra cycles, all extra watts of power wasted, all extra RAM, and all excess bytes sent over the wire, and tax it enough to eat into profits of big tech. Incentives done right would make the developers think of efficiency from day one" The best part about this is all the current first world countries could deal with that tax increas…

> The best part about this is all the current first world countries could deal with that tax increase, and all the developing countries can't. Well, if your way of dealing with such tax would be to outsource all the "dirty" bits to developing countries where they just don't care, or be like Germany, claiming of being oh so green while buying dirty electricity made from coal from Poland and Czechia, sorry, can't stand…

fair enough

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#87

Post by 0thgen »

user-the-name wrote: post #76
0thgen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That hasn't been the case for most of the decade. I already told you what does: Completely custom-built hardware that can do nothing but bitcoin mining, such as Antminers. 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...

alright, in that case you're right, the processors seem wasteful

though interestingly, the specialized processors alkso seem like an example of a second order effect of bitcoin: driving innovation towards more energy efficiency. (though the tradeoff here seems to be wasting materials versus wasting energy)

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#88

Post by agumonkey »

floatboth wrote: post #28
Veedrac wrote: post #25

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.

And potentially clear benefits in reduction:

- caloric restriction is very often cited as global health improvement

- I personally biked everywhere in the last months and I don't miss my car, my muscle mass has been restored and cardiac health too

- less performant computing also means less addictive behavior, deeper use potentially

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#89

Post by julian_sark »

Meanwhile, I'm at the pub while a PC streams a Twitch stream nobody watches.

I hate Twitch streams, but Twitch assuming I am watching nets items in a game I play, and that Skinner box is strong.

At least I put the streams on extra low quality. But I recon Twitch streams running only for "drops" are about as bad for the climate as Bitcoin.

Yay 2022. Yay misguided advertisement or whatever the reason they do silly stuff like this.

Re: Frugal Computing (2021)

#90

Post by lioeters »

modo_mario wrote: post #4
nonrandomstring wrote: post #2

This subject is very high in my interest and activity recently. I am trying to find more good models, data sources, so do please add anything of quality. Vanderbauwhede's is a good account of device composition, but as you can see it's a hugely more complex set of inter-linked issues, Here are some pop/accessible articles I wrote last year: http://techrights.org/2022/01/02/article-on-digital-rights-i... https://cheap…

Your last link doesn't work due to the domain being for sale.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211031183933/https://cvbj.biz/...
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