5 ms·
> accumulated a serious underinvestment in capacity says who? the world's rivers and oceans are polluted with micro-plastics and heavy metals from E*Waste, w
by mistrial9 5y ago
> accumulated a serious underinvestment in capacity
says who? the world's rivers and oceans are polluted with micro-plastics and heavy metals from E*Waste, while thirty years of "wild west" profits and dog-eat-dog markets, COMDEX and single-use devices will take 1000 years to degrade in Nature.
Calls for "more" to be viewed with earned-suspicion IMO
- btgeekboy 5y agoWhile I do agree that e-waste is a real problem, it’s not like we can just sit with old tech and say “nah, that’s good enough.” We need both more and better fabs, and better waste handling / recycling.
- beamatronic 5y agoMaybe a certain level of tech IS good enough. A better world for people means education and healthcare, not a 1mm slimmer disposable phone.
- peanuty1 5y agoNewer chips are also more energy efficient (at least, at the same level of performance).
- beamatronic 5y agoIsn’t a recyclable, user-replaceable battery better for the environment in the long run?
- KSteffensen 5y agoDoes that improved energy efficiency outweigh the energy costs of replacing perfectly capable existing chips?
- TrevorJ 5y agoA phone from 3 years ago, running software from 4 years ago would be as fast as anyone would reasonably need, but it gets obsoleted via software bloat. More frameworks, more layers of abstraction and no confining force that forces anyone to write software that isn't a bloated mess.
- inetknght 5y ago> it’s not like we can just sit with old tech and say “nah, that’s good enough.” But, why not?
- potta_coffee 5y agoI'm of the opinion that what we have is good enough. What we need are consumer devices that are not made with planned obsolescence in mind. I have perfectly viable devices that are sitting around that I don't want to throw in a landfill, that are deprecated purely because of software changes. It's clear when we can afford to toss all of our ram / compute at running Electron applications.
- inetknght 5y agoI completely agree with you.
- btgeekboy 5y agoRemember when someone famously said 640kb of memory ought to be enough for anybody? Imagine if video games' audio/video just stopped improving past the SNES. Imagine if we decided that 56k dialup was good enough. Imagine if we stopped improving cell phone cameras past the iPhone 3G. These things seem pretty low quality now because we've incrementally built so many better things in the interim. The unleaded gasoline of today is going to be as absurd as the leaded gasoline of yesterday within many our lifetimes. But we can't make big leaps without the interim nudges forward - the N64, the DOCSIS cable modem, modern phone cameras, hybrid vehicles. To do those, we need better microchips. We also need more of them. Just because the richest areas of the world have theirs doesn't mean the less-well-off areas need to be shut out because they didn't get in on time.
- charcircuit 5y ago>Remember when someone famously said 640kb of memory ought to be enough for anybody No because that is a made up quote.
- Beldin 5y ago