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Frugal Computing (2021)

102 points by Seirdy 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dgb23 5y ago
So this is not just about reducing cycles and network calls, but also about increasing the longevity of software and hardware. From a software point of view this means core quality attributes: performance, security, maintainability. As a web developer I feel we _want_ to focus more on these things, as they are interesting and rewarding, but from a business perspective we typically see them as costly, secondary thresholds that we need to achieve, rather than primary targets. Mechanical sympathy needs time to design, think, learn, measure. Stable, maintainable software needs testing, analysis, refactoring. Again, these are all things pretty much every intrinsically motivated programmer likes to do. But with everything related to resource distribution: People only start to pay for things when the external pressures are already there, or when its too late.
hamilyon2 5y ago
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 utilisation. Additionally, as we slow down development of software to accommodate new constraints or simply cut usage of compute, we delay/hinder deployment of software which can help save our biosphere elsewhere. Or lift people from poverty. So this might not be justified after all. This is complicated, we must work harder and save the planet. One thing is 8K tvs and datacenters to stream content, other is socially and environmentally important compute.
- allendoerfer 5y ago
  1.) Make it work. 2.) Make it right. 3.) Make it fast. While some individual software is at step 3, as a society overall we have much work ahead of us at step 1.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  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 made and it's time we repay our technical debt. As far as biosphere goes, it's like saying a slow dentist harms surgeons. What even is this mythical software which protects the biosphere and lifts people from poverty? SV is not contributing to such efforts, nor is any general SE corporation. We will just slow down and consume less software. Less, but better maintained.
  - hamilyon2 5y ago
    >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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
hughrr 5y ago
This always interests me. I always push for more efficient use of computing resources but there isn’t any interest in this while it’s cheap
- phtrivier 5y ago
  If this follows the same trend as energy, I'm curious about what will happen when the energy and environmental impact has to be factored into the price of internet consumption. At some points, bandwith will stop being "free", the price of electronics will grow, etc... Then it will reach a tipping point where the masses can not afford anymore what had become "essential". Millenials and GenZ made lots of fun of boomers in yellow yest complaining about gas price. I wonder what demonstrations will look like when we can't afford Netflix and Tiktok and Zoom any more. For me, I'm old enough to remember a time where switching the modem on was a thoughfull decision, because of the phone bill. But I'm afraid it's not going to make things any easier than it was for the yellow vests who had gone through one or two gas shocks in the 70s...
- open-source-ux 5y ago
  "...there isn’t any interest in this while it’s cheap" I agree. This topic was discussed recently on a HN thread and I'll repeat what I said then. Some of the most popular languages are the least performative. But if a program runs slowly, many developers will simply throw more hardware at the problem. The "hardware is cheap" attitude is widespread among developers and is frankly embarrassing. Compare that to other industries that strive to improve energy efficiency. Imagine if a manufacturer said that they were going to make fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency because "hardware is cheap". It sounds ridiculous. A typed, compiled language can give you good performance and smaller memory footprint for free with the reduced computing resources that implies - no premature optimisation required. Among developers, there is also a double-standard in attitudes and practice. Developers complain loudly when they are at the receiving end of slow or memory-hungry apps (or websites). But when it's their turn to build apps or sites, they will prioritise languages or technologies that suit their own ease and comfort above all else. The user-experience, performance, memory footprint - all take a back seat.
mro_name 5y ago
I find 'frugal' align very well with 'convival'. It stresses the relation of creator and tool and demands the tool to serve and not dominate or hide the task at hand but foster freedom and happiness. Also of interest: Permacomputing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225
ojciecczas 5y ago
The internet should operate like a sunflower, servers should follow the sun. Data centers should operate on solar energy, deploying themselves at the sunrise and shutting down at sunset in given location.
- mro_name 5y ago
  shutting down datacenters is a neat idea. Know https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...?
- El_RIDO 5y ago
  Here is an example of doing just that - with a nice graph of where the site is currently served from: http://solarprotocol.net/ http://solarprotocol.net/
- davegauer 5y ago
  I like this a lot. Or even without a distributed system, just having a server deliver varying levels of compute/bandwidth based on the position of the Sun (a forum goes text-only at sunset, starts delivering images again at sunrise, does batch processing at high noon).
zokier 5y ago
> 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 for datacentres Currently e.g. AWS still is actively selling m4 type ec2 instances, which were introduced in 2015 and use Haswell generation CPUs from 2013. Heck, they seem to be even selling the ancient m1 type instances through their "previous generation instance" program[1]. I think it is safe to assume that hyperscalers are squeezing every bit of use they can from old hardware. Afaik their main motivation for new hardware is to optimize energy efficiency, so that sounds exactly what the article wants. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/
- 0thgen 5y ago
  I think people underestimate the economic mechanisms needed to solve an issue like this. changing personal individual behavior and spouting platitudes works in disney movies, not in a society with 8-billion members
- musingsole 5y ago
  > I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. I'd argue we ARE already working with computational resources as precious commodities. If you are in an area where it matters, you consider the logistics of acquiring, retaining, and utilizing all of your CPU and memory. It's precisely this that fed the rise of AWS. So, do we need a new economy putting pricing on these resources? No! We already have it. We're just shocked at how cheap it is. But why shouldn't it be? You're messing with virtual realities where it's possible to teleport objects from one side of the universe to the other at almost no cost. Compare that with the friction of moving a real world object to the other side of your house. Thermodynamics apply. I'm pretty tired of navel gazing about the efficiency of computing when it was invented as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of the CRITICALLY inefficient systems. Your smartphone and its code are not the bottleneck in the world system. Stop optimizing the wrong parts.
- 5y ago
phtrivier 5y ago
> 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... keep working. I don't know what difference 5 years vs 3 years do, though. * make fun of people who change their phone all the time. (Or for that matter, make fun of consumerism _in general_.) Assuming peer pressure stands a chance against advertising industry. * write efficient software ? (The joke is that anything that can be rewritten in Rust will be rewritten in Rust; but the jury is still out on whether the energy saved _running_ Rust code will offset the energy consumed _compiling_ it.) * write no software ? (especially if you're in the cat picture and fake news sharing business ?) [1] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
- floatboth 5y ago
  > the jury is still out on whether the energy saved _running_ Rust code will offset the energy consumed _compiling_ it Obviously depends on how much the compiled code is run. If it's a one-off script, no. If it's a server that will serve a million requests, or a browser that is shipped to a million users that will use the same version for a few months, a thousand times yes. And the vast majority of energy use that can be attributed to programs is in the second category.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  You know, it feels like some of that advice isn't entirely viable, though i support it on some level. > * keep your phone longer. Brag about it. Find a persuasive way to _demand_ that apps, updates, etc... keep working. I don't know what difference 5 years vs 3 years do, though. > * make fun of people who change their phone all the time. (Or for that matter, make fun of consumerism _in general_.) Assuming peer pressure stands a chance against advertising industry. Currently i have an ulePhone Armor X7 Pro, a phone that i got because it was both affordable and relatively rugged (i've dropped it once on concrete while doing pull-ups, it didn't even have a scratch on it) as well as water/dust proof. Despite the fact that the battery is not removable (something that's an entirely different can of worms) or in a form factor that's hard to get aftermarket replacements for, it's suitable for most of my needs - probably one of the least bad choices i could have made with these constraints in mind. That said, the kernel is from 2020, the Android security patches are from 2020 and Android 10 will hit its own EOL in a few years anyways. Not only does the software have planned obsolescence baked into it by the OS going out of support eventually, not only is it abandoned by the developers who aren't actively shipping patches, but it will also not be possible to install custom ROMs because of either the bootloaders being locked by default (which sometimes don't even have ways around this) or the drivers being oddly specific and half of the phone's functionality breaking with those, which i've experienced even back in Android 2.X days. Of course, phones aren't the only problematic bits of software here: old hardware is basically killed due to insecure OSes like Windows XP, Windows 7 and others for certain goals like gaming (and no, Linux is not and will not be suitable for that on older hardware for numerous titles) or other pieces of software that have become increasingly bloated nowadays and require better/modern hardware to run. Who knows, maybe we'll eventually even see x86 be retired completely, it's not like all of our software is backwards compatible even as we speak, many focusing on just x64 and not even testing their software on older architectures. Though perhaps that only applies to decades, not a few years, as far as time scales are concerned. > * write efficient software ? (The joke is that anything that can be rewritten in Rust will be rewritten in Rust; but the jury is still out on whether the energy saved _running_ Rust code will offset the energy consumed _compiling_ it.) > * write no software ? (especially if you're in the cat picture and fake news sharing business ?) Maybe we should also think about how to limit what our current software can do, to prevent it from eating all of the system resources for whatever reason (it being written badly, having unreasonable demands for hardware because "RAM that's not used is wasted" and so on)? For example, currently i run Docker Swarm on my homelab with containers, each of which has a resource limitation in place: none can use up more than 1 core of my CPU which consequently means that nothing can typically bring down the entire system by misbehaving. I wish we'd easily be able to do the same for desktop software on all OSes, just set affinity to N core(s) by default for software that we don't want to give too much processing power and allow it to request more. Same for memory. Same for disk space. I am okay with offending packages working slowly, hitting the swap space or being OOM killed (or even them requesting more resources), i'm not okay with some software package thinking its owns my machine and slowing everything down. In summary, however, i'll try to make my hardware and software last: Debian (community LTS)/Ubuntu LTS/Rocky Linux are all suitable for now, even on my homelab boxes with used 200GEs with just 35W TDP, and i guess my phone will also be okay until it's overcome by malware that will proceed to steal any and all of my data, should companies not get there first.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I’ve found that writing mobile apps (especially native apps) is basically de facto “frugal computing.” Power consumption is a big part of mobile app development. I haven’t had the opportunity to write stuff that really sucks down a power load. I have a pretty cool ML app that really sucks down the battery. It can drain 3% of my battery in about 5mins. The phone gets noticeably hot in my hand. I guess they are using their own ML engine, as opposed to the hardware-assisted stuff in the phone. On the other hand, most games on my phone seem to run cool. I suspect that’s because they leverage Metal.
hasa 5y ago
No one has yet mentioned bitcoin?
- user-the-name 5y ago
  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.
  - 0thgen 5y ago
    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)
  - 0thgen 5y ago
    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,
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Literally nobody buys goods with bitcoin. Any services you buy tend to exchange to real money as soon as they get the payment.
      - 0thgen 5y ago
        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"
        user-the-name 5y ago
        It stands in for a gambling token, that is all. Speculators like to gamble using it. That is bringing actual value to society. We can get rid of it and it will be a net positive.
vladoh 5y ago
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 comes from better mechanics like turbos or filters, but a lot of it comes from better electronics in the engine ECU. Another example - logistics. Delivery companies are able to much better plan demand, routes and inventory thanks to big data processing in data centers. Yes, a data center consumes a lot of energy, but it also helps reduce emissions from trucks driving around less. I don't have exact numbers, but I think everybody can imagine how increased computing in some areas (not all) improves the environmental impact. These are things that need to be considered in order to avoid unintended consequences.
- phtrivier 5y ago
  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). > A modest increase between 2004 and 2008 (from 19.6 mpg to 21.8 mpg). > A minor increase between 2008 and 2017 (from 21.8 mpg to 22.3 mpg). The term "modest" is probabling misleading, but looking at the graph in the linked site is more telling: basically, efficienty increased after the first gas shock, and "more or less" stalled in the 2000s. So maybe the addition of electronics in the 70/80s had an impact in consumption, but I would argue it's less obvious for the additions in the 90s/2000s/2010s - although it would take a bit longer to show as the older cars are still on the road. Impact on safety, though, I don't know. As for the CO2 emission, I have a hard time taking any number at face value, knowing that, ironically, some of the electronings on board can be designed to cheat emision tests [2] - but that's probably unfair. [1] https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
Chuck Moore (creator of Forth [1] ) has a ultra-low power processor that is a fascinating possible solution: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0PclgBd6_Zs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0PclgBd6_Zs [1] Forth programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)
wink 5y ago
> 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 the ideal thing from a power usage perspective. Does it offset the fact that I am hardly using a car? Am I allowed to use up the old lightbulbs I still have or is it really better to go out and buy LEDs for everything? Should I replace my hardware all the time because it uses less power or keep the old stuff that is just fine? What can I do if the damn phone manufacturers won't ship updated after 2 years when I'd gladly use it for 4 years? Must I buy Apple now? Sure, everyone has their own 'I will not give in' topics, but more and more I am getting disillusioned that I personally can make any impact.
- onion2k 5y ago
  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 whatsoever to the climate, the German airline Lufthansa flew 21,000 entirely empty flights during periods of lockdown so that airports didn't change their schedules[1]. We are at the point now that unless industries change we should really start thinking about how we live with climate change, not how we stop it. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airplanes-empty-slots-covid https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airplanes-empty-slots-covid
  - zokier 5y ago
    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.
Veedrac 5y ago
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.
- floatboth 5y ago
  It's not necessarily impoverishing and depressing. It can be, especially if enforced from outside, but many people find satisfaction in minimalism and frugality.
  - Veedrac 5y ago
    I am objecting to the politics, not the practice.
  - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    > "Live in the pod, eat the bugs." How about not letting the state and alarmist NGOs make that decision for me?
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    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
- rvense 5y ago
  Maybe we could abstain from computing and engage more in other activities...
- phtrivier 5y ago
  > 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 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...
bullen 5y ago
I made the most efficient and scalable HTTP app server with integrated distributed JSON database to replace all serverside software I was depending on: http://github.com/tinspin/rupy 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.
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
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 churn. New libraries come with breakage that demands every application out there to adapt with little to no reward, those applications aren’t becoming any better, they just keep chasing new languages, new frameworks, new windowing systems, re-solve problems solved long ago, and all of it is just to keep up. Gosh, there was this comparison on how long would it take to cold boot a machine, open a document in a text processor, and print it out. The contenders were a 8-bit Commodore with floppies and a modern MacBook Pro. Guess what, while Mac won, it wasn’t by a wide margin at all. The Mac could likely easily emulate a dozen Commodores. Where are all the gains? 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. There’s also this thing that while we rely on tech more and more, we are just as far from actually automating the boring stuff away as we have been for the last 40 years. The stories about a plucky worker automating their job and not telling anyone are just as appealing today as they were two decades ago. And all this tech has bugs, is fragile, sucks big time and brings in a lot of frustration. (Steps away from the soapbox and walks into the sunset.)
- 0thgen 5y ago
  "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 increase, and all the developing countries can't. It's a great way to ensure the technology gains of the world don't go to any of the countries that need them "we are just as far from actually automating the boring stuff away as we have been for the last 40 years." that's quite a statement. millions of white papers on new technology and billions (probably trillions) of dollars spent on automation moved us zero steps in the direction we've been aiming for?
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
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.
- jackling 5y ago
  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.
  - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
    No, not really, actually the reason is that I do not really need them.
giantg2 5y ago
I'd imagine corporations and smartphones are mostly responsible. Phones seem to last only about 3 years. My company has probably upgraded my workstation/laptop 5 times in the 10 years I've worked there. I guess a pi and audrino are the newest computers I have. But my newest typical/traditional computer is 10 years old, and my personal laptop is 14.
askhan 5y ago
Walking the walk, especially the site menu.
askhan 5y ago
Walking the walk, especially the sidebar menu.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
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.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Apparently the space telescopes have liquid helium cooling, and there are .1 Kelvin pools in space for astronomical detectors. I guess you can use pools of onboard liquid as heat sinks if the radiative surface is insufficient at peak, and then radiate the rest from the heat sink pool when it is, say, behind the earth or not working as hard.
julian_sark 5y ago
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.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
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-in-2021-part-9/ http://techrights.org/2022/01/02/article-on-digital-rights-i... https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell.html https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell... https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/uncharitable.html https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/uncharitable.html See also Gerry McGovern's "World Wide Waste 2021" which links to useful papers and sources of analysis Katie Singer's article: https://www.ourwebofinconvenienttruths.com/letter-3/ https://www.ourwebofinconvenienttruths.com/letter-3/ This by Alba Ardura Gutiérrez: https://cvbj.biz/we-eat-fish-contaminated-by-the-electronic-waste-we-send-to-africa.html https://cvbj.biz/we-eat-fish-contaminated-by-the-electronic-...
- modo_mario 5y ago
  Your last link doesn't work due to the domain being for sale.
  - lioeters 5y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20211031183933/https://cvbj.biz/we-eat-fish-contaminated-by-the-electronic-waste-we-send-to-africa.html https://web.archive.org/web/20211031183933/https://cvbj.biz/...

102 points by Seirdy 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

So this is not just about reducing cycles and network calls, but also about increasing the longevity of software and hardware. From a software point of view this means core quality attributes: performance, security, maintainability. As a web developer I feel we _want_ to focus more on these things, as they are interesting and rewarding, but from a business perspective we typically see them as costly, secondary thresholds that we need to achieve, rather than primary targets. Mechanical sympathy needs time to design, think, learn, measure. Stable, maintainable software needs testing, analysis, refactoring. Again, these are all things pretty much every intrinsically motivated programmer likes to do. But with everything related to resource distribution: People only start to pay for things when the external pressures are already there, or when its too late.

hamilyon2 5y ago

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 utilisation. Additionally, as we slow down development of software to accommodate new constraints or simply cut usage of compute, we delay/hinder deployment of software which can help save our biosphere elsewhere. Or lift people from poverty. So this might not be justified after all. This is complicated, we must work harder and save the planet. One thing is 8K tvs and datacenters to stream content, other is socially and environmentally important compute.

allendoerfer 5y ago
1.) Make it work. 2.) Make it right. 3.) Make it fast. While some individual software is at step 3, as a society overall we have much work ahead of us at step 1.
Bancakes 5y ago
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 made and it's time we repay our technical debt. As far as biosphere goes, it's like saying a slow dentist harms surgeons. What even is this mythical software which protects the biosphere and lifts people from poverty? SV is not contributing to such efforts, nor is any general SE corporation. We will just slow down and consume less software. Less, but better maintained.
- hamilyon2 5y ago
  >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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

hughrr 5y ago

This always interests me. I always push for more efficient use of computing resources but there isn’t any interest in this while it’s cheap

phtrivier 5y ago
If this follows the same trend as energy, I'm curious about what will happen when the energy and environmental impact has to be factored into the price of internet consumption. At some points, bandwith will stop being "free", the price of electronics will grow, etc... Then it will reach a tipping point where the masses can not afford anymore what had become "essential". Millenials and GenZ made lots of fun of boomers in yellow yest complaining about gas price. I wonder what demonstrations will look like when we can't afford Netflix and Tiktok and Zoom any more. For me, I'm old enough to remember a time where switching the modem on was a thoughfull decision, because of the phone bill. But I'm afraid it's not going to make things any easier than it was for the yellow vests who had gone through one or two gas shocks in the 70s...
open-source-ux 5y ago
"...there isn’t any interest in this while it’s cheap" I agree. This topic was discussed recently on a HN thread and I'll repeat what I said then. Some of the most popular languages are the least performative. But if a program runs slowly, many developers will simply throw more hardware at the problem. The "hardware is cheap" attitude is widespread among developers and is frankly embarrassing. Compare that to other industries that strive to improve energy efficiency. Imagine if a manufacturer said that they were going to make fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency because "hardware is cheap". It sounds ridiculous. A typed, compiled language can give you good performance and smaller memory footprint for free with the reduced computing resources that implies - no premature optimisation required. Among developers, there is also a double-standard in attitudes and practice. Developers complain loudly when they are at the receiving end of slow or memory-hungry apps (or websites). But when it's their turn to build apps or sites, they will prioritise languages or technologies that suit their own ease and comfort above all else. The user-experience, performance, memory footprint - all take a back seat.

mro_name 5y ago

I find 'frugal' align very well with 'convival'. It stresses the relation of creator and tool and demands the tool to serve and not dominate or hide the task at hand but foster freedom and happiness. Also of interest: Permacomputing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225

ojciecczas 5y ago

The internet should operate like a sunflower, servers should follow the sun. Data centers should operate on solar energy, deploying themselves at the sunrise and shutting down at sunset in given location.

mro_name 5y ago
shutting down datacenters is a neat idea. Know https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...?
El_RIDO 5y ago
Here is an example of doing just that - with a nice graph of where the site is currently served from: http://solarprotocol.net/ http://solarprotocol.net/
davegauer 5y ago
I like this a lot. Or even without a distributed system, just having a server deliver varying levels of compute/bandwidth based on the position of the Sun (a forum goes text-only at sunset, starts delivering images again at sunrise, does batch processing at high noon).

zokier 5y ago

> 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 for datacentres Currently e.g. AWS still is actively selling m4 type ec2 instances, which were introduced in 2015 and use Haswell generation CPUs from 2013. Heck, they seem to be even selling the ancient m1 type instances through their "previous generation instance" program[1]. I think it is safe to assume that hyperscalers are squeezing every bit of use they can from old hardware. Afaik their main motivation for new hardware is to optimize energy efficiency, so that sounds exactly what the article wants. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/

0thgen 5y ago
I think people underestimate the economic mechanisms needed to solve an issue like this. changing personal individual behavior and spouting platitudes works in disney movies, not in a society with 8-billion members
musingsole 5y ago
> I think the financial incentives are already there to consider computational resources precious. I'd argue we ARE already working with computational resources as precious commodities. If you are in an area where it matters, you consider the logistics of acquiring, retaining, and utilizing all of your CPU and memory. It's precisely this that fed the rise of AWS. So, do we need a new economy putting pricing on these resources? No! We already have it. We're just shocked at how cheap it is. But why shouldn't it be? You're messing with virtual realities where it's possible to teleport objects from one side of the universe to the other at almost no cost. Compare that with the friction of moving a real world object to the other side of your house. Thermodynamics apply. I'm pretty tired of navel gazing about the efficiency of computing when it was invented as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of the CRITICALLY inefficient systems. Your smartphone and its code are not the bottleneck in the world system. Stop optimizing the wrong parts.
5y ago

phtrivier 5y ago

> 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... keep working. I don't know what difference 5 years vs 3 years do, though. * make fun of people who change their phone all the time. (Or for that matter, make fun of consumerism _in general_.) Assuming peer pressure stands a chance against advertising industry. * write efficient software ? (The joke is that anything that can be rewritten in Rust will be rewritten in Rust; but the jury is still out on whether the energy saved _running_ Rust code will offset the energy consumed _compiling_ it.) * write no software ? (especially if you're in the cat picture and fake news sharing business ?) [1] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

floatboth 5y ago
> the jury is still out on whether the energy saved _running_ Rust code will offset the energy consumed _compiling_ it Obviously depends on how much the compiled code is run. If it's a one-off script, no. If it's a server that will serve a million requests, or a browser that is shipped to a million users that will use the same version for a few months, a thousand times yes. And the vast majority of energy use that can be attributed to programs is in the second category.
KronisLV 5y ago
You know, it feels like some of that advice isn't entirely viable, though i support it on some level. > * keep your phone longer. Brag about it. Find a persuasive way to _demand_ that apps, updates, etc... keep working. I don't know what difference 5 years vs 3 years do, though. > * make fun of people who change their phone all the time. (Or for that matter, make fun of consumerism _in general_.) Assuming peer pressure stands a chance against advertising industry. Currently i have an ulePhone Armor X7 Pro, a phone that i got because it was both affordable and relatively rugged (i've dropped it once on concrete while doing pull-ups, it didn't even have a scratch on it) as well as water/dust proof. Despite the fact that the battery is not removable (something that's an entirely different can of worms) or in a form factor that's hard to get aftermarket replacements for, it's suitable for most of my needs - probably one of the least bad choices i could have made with these constraints in mind. That said, the kernel is from 2020, the Android security patches are from 2020 and Android 10 will hit its own EOL in a few years anyways. Not only does the software have planned obsolescence baked into it by the OS going out of support eventually, not only is it abandoned by the developers who aren't actively shipping patches, but it will also not be possible to install custom ROMs because of either the bootloaders being locked by default (which sometimes don't even have ways around this) or the drivers being oddly specific and half of the phone's functionality breaking with those, which i've experienced even back in Android 2.X days. Of course, phones aren't the only problematic bits of software here: old hardware is basically killed due to insecure OSes like Windows XP, Windows 7 and others for certain goals like gaming (and no, Linux is not and will not be suitable for that on older hardware for numerous titles) or other pieces of software that have become increasingly bloated nowadays and require better/modern hardware to run. Who knows, maybe we'll eventually even see x86 be retired completely, it's not like all of our software is backwards compatible even as we speak, many focusing on just x64 and not even testing their software on older architectures. Though perhaps that only applies to decades, not a few years, as far as time scales are concerned. > * write efficient software ? (The joke is that anything that can be rewritten in Rust will be rewritten in Rust; but the jury is still out on whether the energy saved _running_ Rust code will offset the energy consumed _compiling_ it.) > * write no software ? (especially if you're in the cat picture and fake news sharing business ?) Maybe we should also think about how to limit what our current software can do, to prevent it from eating all of the system resources for whatever reason (it being written badly, having unreasonable demands for hardware because "RAM that's not used is wasted" and so on)? For example, currently i run Docker Swarm on my homelab with containers, each of which has a resource limitation in place: none can use up more than 1 core of my CPU which consequently means that nothing can typically bring down the entire system by misbehaving. I wish we'd easily be able to do the same for desktop software on all OSes, just set affinity to N core(s) by default for software that we don't want to give too much processing power and allow it to request more. Same for memory. Same for disk space. I am okay with offending packages working slowly, hitting the swap space or being OOM killed (or even them requesting more resources), i'm not okay with some software package thinking its owns my machine and slowing everything down. In summary, however, i'll try to make my hardware and software last: Debian (community LTS)/Ubuntu LTS/Rocky Linux are all suitable for now, even on my homelab boxes with used 200GEs with just 35W TDP, and i guess my phone will also be okay until it's overcome by malware that will proceed to steal any and all of my data, should companies not get there first.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I’ve found that writing mobile apps (especially native apps) is basically de facto “frugal computing.” Power consumption is a big part of mobile app development. I haven’t had the opportunity to write stuff that really sucks down a power load. I have a pretty cool ML app that really sucks down the battery. It can drain 3% of my battery in about 5mins. The phone gets noticeably hot in my hand. I guess they are using their own ML engine, as opposed to the hardware-assisted stuff in the phone. On the other hand, most games on my phone seem to run cool. I suspect that’s because they leverage Metal.

hasa 5y ago

No one has yet mentioned bitcoin?

user-the-name 5y ago
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.
- 0thgen 5y ago
  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)
- 0thgen 5y ago
  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,
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Literally nobody buys goods with bitcoin. Any services you buy tend to exchange to real money as soon as they get the payment.
    - 0thgen 5y ago
      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"
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        It stands in for a gambling token, that is all. Speculators like to gamble using it. That is bringing actual value to society. We can get rid of it and it will be a net positive.

vladoh 5y ago

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 comes from better mechanics like turbos or filters, but a lot of it comes from better electronics in the engine ECU. Another example - logistics. Delivery companies are able to much better plan demand, routes and inventory thanks to big data processing in data centers. Yes, a data center consumes a lot of energy, but it also helps reduce emissions from trucks driving around less. I don't have exact numbers, but I think everybody can imagine how increased computing in some areas (not all) improves the environmental impact. These are things that need to be considered in order to avoid unintended consequences.

phtrivier 5y ago
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). > A modest increase between 2004 and 2008 (from 19.6 mpg to 21.8 mpg). > A minor increase between 2008 and 2017 (from 21.8 mpg to 22.3 mpg). The term "modest" is probabling misleading, but looking at the graph in the linked site is more telling: basically, efficienty increased after the first gas shock, and "more or less" stalled in the 2000s. So maybe the addition of electronics in the 70/80s had an impact in consumption, but I would argue it's less obvious for the additions in the 90s/2000s/2010s - although it would take a bit longer to show as the older cars are still on the road. Impact on safety, though, I don't know. As for the CO2 emission, I have a hard time taking any number at face value, knowing that, ironically, some of the electronings on board can be designed to cheat emision tests [2] - but that's probably unfair. [1] https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

Chuck Moore (creator of Forth [1] ) has a ultra-low power processor that is a fascinating possible solution: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0PclgBd6_Zs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0PclgBd6_Zs [1] Forth programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

wink 5y ago

> 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 the ideal thing from a power usage perspective. Does it offset the fact that I am hardly using a car? Am I allowed to use up the old lightbulbs I still have or is it really better to go out and buy LEDs for everything? Should I replace my hardware all the time because it uses less power or keep the old stuff that is just fine? What can I do if the damn phone manufacturers won't ship updated after 2 years when I'd gladly use it for 4 years? Must I buy Apple now? Sure, everyone has their own 'I will not give in' topics, but more and more I am getting disillusioned that I personally can make any impact.

onion2k 5y ago
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 whatsoever to the climate, the German airline Lufthansa flew 21,000 entirely empty flights during periods of lockdown so that airports didn't change their schedules[1]. We are at the point now that unless industries change we should really start thinking about how we live with climate change, not how we stop it. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airplanes-empty-slots-covid https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airplanes-empty-slots-covid
- zokier 5y ago
  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.

Veedrac 5y ago

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.

floatboth 5y ago
It's not necessarily impoverishing and depressing. It can be, especially if enforced from outside, but many people find satisfaction in minimalism and frugality.
- Veedrac 5y ago
  I am objecting to the politics, not the practice.
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  > "Live in the pod, eat the bugs." How about not letting the state and alarmist NGOs make that decision for me?
- agumonkey 5y ago
  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
rvense 5y ago
Maybe we could abstain from computing and engage more in other activities...
phtrivier 5y ago
> 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 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...

bullen 5y ago

I made the most efficient and scalable HTTP app server with integrated distributed JSON database to replace all serverside software I was depending on: http://github.com/tinspin/rupy 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.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago

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 churn. New libraries come with breakage that demands every application out there to adapt with little to no reward, those applications aren’t becoming any better, they just keep chasing new languages, new frameworks, new windowing systems, re-solve problems solved long ago, and all of it is just to keep up. Gosh, there was this comparison on how long would it take to cold boot a machine, open a document in a text processor, and print it out. The contenders were a 8-bit Commodore with floppies and a modern MacBook Pro. Guess what, while Mac won, it wasn’t by a wide margin at all. The Mac could likely easily emulate a dozen Commodores. Where are all the gains? 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. There’s also this thing that while we rely on tech more and more, we are just as far from actually automating the boring stuff away as we have been for the last 40 years. The stories about a plucky worker automating their job and not telling anyone are just as appealing today as they were two decades ago. And all this tech has bugs, is fragile, sucks big time and brings in a lot of frustration. (Steps away from the soapbox and walks into the sunset.)

0thgen 5y ago
"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 increase, and all the developing countries can't. It's a great way to ensure the technology gains of the world don't go to any of the countries that need them "we are just as far from actually automating the boring stuff away as we have been for the last 40 years." that's quite a statement. millions of white papers on new technology and billions (probably trillions) of dollars spent on automation moved us zero steps in the direction we've been aiming for?

hnthrowaway0315 5y ago

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.

jackling 5y ago
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.
- hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  No, not really, actually the reason is that I do not really need them.

giantg2 5y ago

I'd imagine corporations and smartphones are mostly responsible. Phones seem to last only about 3 years. My company has probably upgraded my workstation/laptop 5 times in the 10 years I've worked there. I guess a pi and audrino are the newest computers I have. But my newest typical/traditional computer is 10 years old, and my personal laptop is 14.

askhan 5y ago

Walking the walk, especially the site menu.

askhan 5y ago

Walking the walk, especially the sidebar menu.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

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.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Apparently the space telescopes have liquid helium cooling, and there are .1 Kelvin pools in space for astronomical detectors. I guess you can use pools of onboard liquid as heat sinks if the radiative surface is insufficient at peak, and then radiate the rest from the heat sink pool when it is, say, behind the earth or not working as hard.

julian_sark 5y ago

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.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

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-in-2021-part-9/ http://techrights.org/2022/01/02/article-on-digital-rights-i... https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell.html https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell... https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/uncharitable.html https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/uncharitable.html See also Gerry McGovern's "World Wide Waste 2021" which links to useful papers and sources of analysis Katie Singer's article: https://www.ourwebofinconvenienttruths.com/letter-3/ https://www.ourwebofinconvenienttruths.com/letter-3/ This by Alba Ardura Gutiérrez: https://cvbj.biz/we-eat-fish-contaminated-by-the-electronic-waste-we-send-to-africa.html https://cvbj.biz/we-eat-fish-contaminated-by-the-electronic-...

modo_mario 5y ago
Your last link doesn't work due to the domain being for sale.
- lioeters 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20211031183933/https://cvbj.biz/we-eat-fish-contaminated-by-the-electronic-waste-we-send-to-africa.html https://web.archive.org/web/20211031183933/https://cvbj.biz/...