11 ms·

Permacomputing Wiki

261 points by entaloneralie 4y ago

vkoskiv 4y ago
Since I recently received my MNT Reform laptop, I feel like it's appropriate to shill it here. Built like a tank, to be upgradeable for a long time. Also comes with more sustainable LiFePO4 batteries! I love mine, and will be using it for a very long time.
- amatecha 4y ago
  I really want one! It will probably be my next "new computer" purchase, unless something more appealing to me is made (probably not happening). amazing balance of fully open hardware and sustainable/repairable. I couldn't feel good about buying a computer that is not OSHW. It just feels wrong to buy single-use unrepairable stuff that has forced obsolescence built in (looking at Apple ecosystem especially here). That said, my current hoard of old ThinkPads is doing well so it's pretty tough to justify purchasing anything new.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  I’ve been very interested in this, but one thing I haven’t seen: What’s the display like? If you have a calibrator, what’s the gamut? They got the input devices right, but I’m curious if they got the output right. They paid attention to the DAC, so I have hope.
  - vkoskiv 4y ago
    No calibrator, sorry, but from a totally layman perspective, the panel is very nice and has good colors and viewing angles. Wouldn't say it's quite comparable to a P3 gamut panel, but I switched to this from a 2018 MacBook Pro, and those are known for having good panels. Of course, this panel is a bit smaller and lower resolution, but 1920x1080 at this panel size is still very nice and crisp. I had a look online, and there are similar compatible panels from innolux that have a glossy finish, which might be a mod I'll do in the future.
    - CobaltFire 4y ago
      Thanks for the feedback!
- bullen 4y ago
  Too bad it's only OpenGL ES 2, I need 3. Do they have a roadmap for upgrades?
  - vkoskiv 4y ago
    Yeah, the SoC and RAM are on a replaceable board, and upgrades are in the works. The connector is also fully documented, so other parties can also design SoMs for it. I'd also really like to see OpenGL ES 3 myself!
eternityforest 4y ago
I like the idea in theory, but basically all systems currently in use, are good enough to run "pseudosimplicity" programs without trouble. We don't need to make stuff all that lightweight, Moore's law seems to have won. We just need to not invent a new way to make things horribly slow or otherwise bad, like, by not making stuff cloud first or have a mandatory blockchain feature. Of course, a movement can be about more than one thing at once, and if the permacomputing community values through and through simplicity for it's own sake, I can't argue with that.
dustractor 4y ago
In one of the more obscure Ursula K Le Guin books, there was a passage that has always stuck with me. She's describing a hypothetical society where (to paraphase) they had eventually come to the realization that: "the computer, once invented, could not be un-invented" They put most of the storage on the moon, most of the processing power in a network of satellites, and in every village there was a hut with a dumb terminal. The vast majority of the population didn't need computer skills, only the handful of people whose lifetime tenured position was to maintain the hut and the terminal. The only 'useful' function provided by the terminal was you could tell it what you had and what you wanted, and if there were people nearby with complementary needs and wants, it would tell you which direction to walk.
- widjit 4y ago
  that sounds very interesting; do you have any idea which book this was?
  - brian_herman 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
- wcerfgba 4y ago
  Sounds great! Which novel was this?
  - rst 4y ago
    Sounds like Always Coming Home
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  This seems like it would leave the dumb-terminal users at the mercy of whomever controlled the compute and storage infrastructure.
  - gunshai 4y ago
rollcat 4y ago
I absolutely love it, that the website is available over plaintext HTTP. (The maintainer(s) should consider honouring the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests header[1], so that modern browsers still get the HTTPS version.) I've recently got my hands on a PowerBook G4 (2002), a quite interesting and still somewhat capable machine; however the OSX version it's stuck on (10.5.8) is having more and more problems reaching the TLS-secured web: TenFourFox is no longer maintained; Safari, curl, etc are all built against an ancient release of OpenSSL; etc. Even downloading TenFourFox is no longer possible, as system Safari can no longer load SourceForge, since SF requires a more modern TLS version than what the OS can understand. Treating both plaintext HTTP and modern HTTPS as first-class citizens is the way to go for such projects & efforts, so hats off. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/web/http/headers/upgrade-insecure-requests https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/web/http/headers/up...
- 320x200 4y ago
  Oh thanks for the tip! Did not know about the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests, will have a look and add to the wiki :) Your story is exactly why we gave both HTTP and HTTPS access. I'm also still super inspired and happy to see how the whole Amiga website ecosystems tend to be served mostly over HTTP, so that it's possible to browse such resources on the most modest/limited/bare configurations.
- orang2tang 4y ago
  You might be interested in this: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/interwebppc-browser-a-rebrand-of-tenfourfox-for-the-future.2292691/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/interwebppc-browser-a-r...
  - rollcat 4y ago
    This is awesome! Thank you!
- bombcar 4y ago
  Is it possible to MITM yourself and use a proxy to downgrade SSL for you?
MWil 4y ago
"Is there even place for high technology (such as computing) in a world where human civilizations contribute to the well-being of the biosphere rather than destroy it?" One helpful indicator would be the technology required to prompt and hold this discussion.
- otikik 4y ago
  Yes, here are some perhaps more direct examples: Irrigation control for fields, temperature control for greenhouses and compost piles, early detection of fires via treatment of satellite imagery, calendar control (when to plant seeds, when to fertilize), knowledge repository, calculation of shaded/lighted areas throughout the year.
alex_young 4y ago
"Don't do things that harm the biosphere" and "maximize the lifespans of hardware components" seem to be in conflict with each other. Post 2008, CPU typical use efficiency per Watt has doubled every 1.5 years [1]. This means that your decade old machine is probably burning a lot of coal and dumping heavy metals into the atmosphere. Doesn't sound too green to me. [1] https://www.koomey.com/post/153838038643 https://www.koomey.com/post/153838038643
- JoshCole 4y ago
  A lot of the principles they give are of the in dying you shall die variety of errors. Learning is counterintuitive. There are a lot of times in learning where getting what you want means intentionally getting what you don't want. As you've said, though with different words, their second principle doesn't respect that. It is near-term thinking masquerading as a long-term concept; myopia, not wisdom. At the root of the error in short term thinking is pride. You think you know, but you don't know - not as you ought to know. So you stay trapped in a local minima. That local minima comes with unforced error. Which means a potential stochastic chance for extinction. Geometric probability distributions drives this to certainty. So in dying you die forever. Notice - nature doesn't optimize for longevity. Thus, it gains it. The biospheres actual version of what they are trying to get at is absurdly different. Remember I said learning was counterintuitive? The actual solution was to "eat shit" and "die". If they were really taking advice from permaculture the idea of eating our own shit would have taken center stage. Manure isn't exactly an unfamiliar concept in that world. It is foundational. Literally, not figuratively, but literally. It is the dirt.
- criddell 4y ago
  Maybe they should say optimize rather than maximize, but then it's pretty hard for me as a consumer to know when it makes sense to upgrade.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I think to truly advance this discussion in good faith (as opposed to just as a general snow against e-waste concerns), you have to look at the full lifespan story. Like, yeah, that computer that's 10 years old maybe shouldn't be running any more, but do the gains associated with annual replacement justify the production and e-waste cost of all the intermediate ones? What about a 2- or 3-year replacement cadence? How does the calculus change if the computer is being operated somewhere where it's cold most of the year and so the "waste" heat still has a useful function? How does it change if throwing out the computer also means throwing out a battery and screen, as is the case for laptops and phones? Does the extra mass of a tower pay for itself in terms of longer lifespan as people upgrade those systems piecemeal?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nairodd 4y ago
as far as inspiration goes, Devine Lu Linvega's ideas and lifestyle is pretty interesting to me. would recommend people check him out. definitely adjacent. edit: also the low tech movement can be relevant
skybrian 4y ago
Presumably, the principle of maximizing the life of hardware means after it's gone into production and is widely replicated. (And, hopefully, standardized.) This the long-term supported version. But to get the design right, you need to make prototypes, and probably a lot of them. I try to minimize design mistakes because reprinting a part is tedious, but I still have a box full of 3D printed parts that turned out not to fit quite right. This is also true of education. Most of what students create themselves is never really used. Either it's thrown away or gets put on a shelf somewhere. Making things badly and throwing them away is an essential part of education.
feiss 4y ago
I love the concept, it’s very appealing. However, I can’t stop thinking that this is mostly aimed to a post apocalyptic scenario, and if that is the case, computers would be the least thing to worry about :(
- ipdashc 4y ago
  This one seems more reasonable, but I recall seeing similar projects/initiatives in the past, aimed more towards post-apocalyptic scenarios... and yeah, I share the same exact thought as you. Computers are totally useless in such a world, with the possible exception of data storage
  - unsafecast 4y ago
    I think data storage would be extremely important in that case. If we notice the apocalypse is coming, one of the first things I'm doing is downloading the entire Wikipedia, agriculture websites, survival guides, etc. As much as I possibly can. A raspberry pi can be used to index into that. (Obviously I'd buy supplies etc. too) If this happens, you want a reliable, low-power, easy to maintain no-BS computer, since you have more important things to do than mess with that. Now if we think a bit more into the future, at some point humans will start living in okay environments and we're probably going to want to start building computers again. Having some infrastructure for this would help in bootstrapping computing. Maybe we'll know better this time, maybe we wouldn't destroy our own civilization the second time. This is obviously all just theorising, but I can see myself needing a reliable low-power computer during an apocalypse.
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  An encrypted communication service would come in very handy during an apocalypse.
betwixthewires 4y ago
Ugh. Permaculture might have biosphere balance as a secondary effect, but the idea and focus of effort is about allowing natural processes to perform the maintenance for you. It is about using living machinery to automate the process. It jives well with sustainability, and that's fantastic, but that's not the focus. The focus is on the efficient production of useful goods in ways that require minimal maintenance by letting other creatures do all the work for you. How exactly do you do computation in that way? There are ways, I'm sure. But not with anything resembling computers we use today. You'd basically need living computers. I'd love that, but I am not a fan of this rebranding of the term "permaculture" to shoehorn silicon into the sustainability movement, it doesn't fit, unfortunately.
- taneq 4y ago
  > You'd basically need living computers. Sounds like a sweatshop.
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    There were some interesting articles on HN a few weeks ago about doing backpropagation in a machine learning system with physical systems, the particular example I remember was a natural language processing system using a metal plate and sound. Everything that happens in the universe is a computational process. You could build a living computer with enough knowledge about genetics and feedback mechanisms between species and specimens. A living computer doesn't have to be a human brain, or even resemble a brain at all. It might resemble a forest or a fish tank.
    - amatecha 4y ago
      or a mycelium network! :)
- culi 4y ago
  If this doesn't go so far as to convince you this is possible, I hope it at least opens you up to the idea that it is an ideal we can get close to: https://t2tile.com/ https://t2tile.com/
gtirloni 4y ago
> Human-sized computing: a reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person (from the low-level hardware details to the application-level quirks). That ship sailed many decades ago.
Fice 4y ago
> Human-sized computing: a reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person (from the low-level hardware details to the application-level quirks). "Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual." Dan Ingalls. Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, 1981. http://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls%20-%20Design%20Principles%20Behind%20Smalltalk.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls%20-%20Design%20Principles...
xialvjun 4y ago
I think permacomputing is something about software rather than hardware. For hardware, to human civilization it's all about the use of power. But for software, we have lost so many things. Many documents have lost, many software can run in nowhere. That's the problems we should solve.
- Findecanor 4y ago
  I'd say that permacomputing's principles are first of all something to apply when designing new systems and new software, so as to prevent that from happening again. I think systems such as Nix/Guix would be useful for permacomputing, with which (unlike in many Linux distros) you can keep old libraries that older un-upgraded apps depend on right beside newer versions of those libraries.
kepano 4y ago
I love this idea and what is proposed in the Principles, but it's missing a crisp definition. It relies a bit too much on the reader's knowledge of permaculture. I like the idea of piggybacking on permaculture but it's not a perfect analogy, because computing isn't exactly a naturally flourishing phenomenon. What does carry over is the idea of being more thoughtful about computing, reducing energy waste, and generally architecting these systems for a longer time horizon. Perhaps in a way that can encourage stewardship over multiple generations.
narrator 4y ago
What are you going to do about tin whiskers[1] showing up in electronics? How will you get lead soldered electronics that don't grow tin whiskers and short randomly now that the EU has banned lead solder in new products? Are you going to use electronics from before 2006 when the RoHS legislation came into effect? Is anyone making consumer electronics with everything nickel plated for durability despite the cost and weight issues? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
- bullen 4y ago
  Simple, you wipe them off when you change the heatpaste.
  - ansible 4y ago
    > Simple, you wipe them off when you change the heatpaste. That doesn't work so well for BGA packages. I'd need to do some research to see if reflowing the solder would fix a low level of tin whiskers. Usually, the flux effectively increases the surface tension of the solder, causing it to form nicely around the pads and contacts. So it isn't clear to me how well the reflow will work without additional flux.
pabs3 4y ago
Reminds me a bit of the Bootstrappable Builds project. https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/
pkdpic 4y ago
I love it, the principles really hold up to decent scrutiny.
ermir 4y ago
Could computers be built without perishable components such as capacitors? From my experience they're the first components that usually break down or have the shortest shelf life.
- RalfWausE 4y ago
  I would highly suggest a look into the topic of analog computers for this purpose
hosh 4y ago
It's a good attempt, though reading https://permacomputing.net/Principles/ https://permacomputing.net/Principles/ ... I don't think the authors really needed to create a different set of design principles for computing. Rather, applying the existing permaculture ethical and design principles to computing would have gotten everything and a lot more. For example, rather than "Care for Life" and "Care for Chips", those are still derived from the ethical principles of "Care for Earth", "Care for People", and "Fair Share". And those three ethical principles are more comprehensive. Further, it would contextualize the purpose of computing, and not just simply designing the thing itself, in isolation. The 12 design principles for Permaculture are also far clearer because they contextualize the relationship of the computing with the people, rather than the design of the machine by itself. For example, "Expose Everything" is not a bad design principle when looking at just the machine ("observability"), but it is not nearly as versatile as the more generalized Permaculture design principle of "Observe and Interact". It's more important to look at a computational device's place in the overall ecology. When I apply this to my backyard, I cannot always directly "observe and interact" the root system of plants. If I dig up the plant to examine its root system, then I have most likely killed that plant. I have to make guesses. Looking at it from a different angle, the Permaculture design concept of "Zones" was is a way to organizing things so one can systematically "Observe and Interact". Another Peramculture design principle is "Integrate not segregate", another reason to "Expose Everything". Another one is "Keep it small and simple" in which there are two better Permaculture design principles, "Use Small and Slow Solutions", and "Apply self-regulation and accept feedback". Those two principles allows for the system to adapt, change, and grow, within the local conditions, and take advantage of regenerative cycles. So I think it is a nice try, but I think the author has not yet really applied the Permaculture principles sufficiently broadly and flexibly.
- hosh 4y ago
  Having said all of that, I remember coming across the saying -- what isn't grown is mined. Permaculture is great for working with what's grown. I don't know if it says much about what's mined. Computing and hardware technology ultimately comes from the assembly of what is mined. If so, maybe there is a place for developing a separate of design principles for things that are mined, not grown. What separates things that are mined and things that are grown is that things that are grown are capable of regenerating on its own without the human beings doing anything. What's mined don't have that kind of autonomy, or if they do, they start to resemble things that are grown, and we would have to treat it as participants of an ecology. That includes integrating them with existing ecosystems, lest they become invasive (things that grow vigorously, but do not contribute anything to the existing ecosystem).
def- 4y ago
I was expecting this to be about Reversible Computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
tpoacher 4y ago
Nice site. Is it also available on gemini by any chance?
bullen 4y ago
This is what this looks like in practice: http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png You can also use streacom cases with Atom 8-core (load balancer) and Xeon for that extra kick in computing, but 3x Raspberry 4 can saturate a symmetric 1Gb/s. Rather than 1x 10Gb/s it's better to have 2x 1Gb/s (preferably distant from each other) with all passively cooled components under 60 celcius at full blast during the hottest day in summer. The whole capable of running atleast 24 hours on lead-acid backup.
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  What do you do with this?
  - bullen 4y ago
    MMO server + client. http://github.com/tinspin http://github.com/tinspin
foxhop 4y ago
goodpoint 4y ago
> Avoid unreliable dependencies, especially as hard (non-optional) dependencies. Meanwhile: cloudflare outage, SaaS and cloud oligopolies, browser monopoly.

261 points by entaloneralie 4y ago

Since I recently received my MNT Reform laptop, I feel like it's appropriate to shill it here. Built like a tank, to be upgradeable for a long time. Also comes with more sustainable LiFePO4 batteries! I love mine, and will be using it for a very long time.

amatecha 4y ago
I really want one! It will probably be my next "new computer" purchase, unless something more appealing to me is made (probably not happening). amazing balance of fully open hardware and sustainable/repairable. I couldn't feel good about buying a computer that is not OSHW. It just feels wrong to buy single-use unrepairable stuff that has forced obsolescence built in (looking at Apple ecosystem especially here). That said, my current hoard of old ThinkPads is doing well so it's pretty tough to justify purchasing anything new.
CobaltFire 4y ago
I’ve been very interested in this, but one thing I haven’t seen: What’s the display like? If you have a calibrator, what’s the gamut? They got the input devices right, but I’m curious if they got the output right. They paid attention to the DAC, so I have hope.
- vkoskiv 4y ago
  No calibrator, sorry, but from a totally layman perspective, the panel is very nice and has good colors and viewing angles. Wouldn't say it's quite comparable to a P3 gamut panel, but I switched to this from a 2018 MacBook Pro, and those are known for having good panels. Of course, this panel is a bit smaller and lower resolution, but 1920x1080 at this panel size is still very nice and crisp. I had a look online, and there are similar compatible panels from innolux that have a glossy finish, which might be a mod I'll do in the future.
  - CobaltFire 4y ago
    Thanks for the feedback!
bullen 4y ago
Too bad it's only OpenGL ES 2, I need 3. Do they have a roadmap for upgrades?
- vkoskiv 4y ago
  Yeah, the SoC and RAM are on a replaceable board, and upgrades are in the works. The connector is also fully documented, so other parties can also design SoMs for it. I'd also really like to see OpenGL ES 3 myself!

eternityforest 4y ago

I like the idea in theory, but basically all systems currently in use, are good enough to run "pseudosimplicity" programs without trouble. We don't need to make stuff all that lightweight, Moore's law seems to have won. We just need to not invent a new way to make things horribly slow or otherwise bad, like, by not making stuff cloud first or have a mandatory blockchain feature. Of course, a movement can be about more than one thing at once, and if the permacomputing community values through and through simplicity for it's own sake, I can't argue with that.

dustractor 4y ago

In one of the more obscure Ursula K Le Guin books, there was a passage that has always stuck with me. She's describing a hypothetical society where (to paraphase) they had eventually come to the realization that: "the computer, once invented, could not be un-invented" They put most of the storage on the moon, most of the processing power in a network of satellites, and in every village there was a hut with a dumb terminal. The vast majority of the population didn't need computer skills, only the handful of people whose lifetime tenured position was to maintain the hut and the terminal. The only 'useful' function provided by the terminal was you could tell it what you had and what you wanted, and if there were people nearby with complementary needs and wants, it would tell you which direction to walk.

widjit 4y ago
that sounds very interesting; do you have any idea which book this was?
- brian_herman 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
wcerfgba 4y ago
Sounds great! Which novel was this?
- rst 4y ago
  Sounds like Always Coming Home
pmoriarty 4y ago
This seems like it would leave the dumb-terminal users at the mercy of whomever controlled the compute and storage infrastructure.
- gunshai 4y ago

rollcat 4y ago

I absolutely love it, that the website is available over plaintext HTTP. (The maintainer(s) should consider honouring the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests header[1], so that modern browsers still get the HTTPS version.) I've recently got my hands on a PowerBook G4 (2002), a quite interesting and still somewhat capable machine; however the OSX version it's stuck on (10.5.8) is having more and more problems reaching the TLS-secured web: TenFourFox is no longer maintained; Safari, curl, etc are all built against an ancient release of OpenSSL; etc. Even downloading TenFourFox is no longer possible, as system Safari can no longer load SourceForge, since SF requires a more modern TLS version than what the OS can understand. Treating both plaintext HTTP and modern HTTPS as first-class citizens is the way to go for such projects & efforts, so hats off. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/web/http/headers/upgrade-insecure-requests https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/web/http/headers/up...

320x200 4y ago
Oh thanks for the tip! Did not know about the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests, will have a look and add to the wiki :) Your story is exactly why we gave both HTTP and HTTPS access. I'm also still super inspired and happy to see how the whole Amiga website ecosystems tend to be served mostly over HTTP, so that it's possible to browse such resources on the most modest/limited/bare configurations.
orang2tang 4y ago
You might be interested in this: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/interwebppc-browser-a-rebrand-of-tenfourfox-for-the-future.2292691/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/interwebppc-browser-a-r...
- rollcat 4y ago
  This is awesome! Thank you!
bombcar 4y ago
Is it possible to MITM yourself and use a proxy to downgrade SSL for you?

MWil 4y ago

"Is there even place for high technology (such as computing) in a world where human civilizations contribute to the well-being of the biosphere rather than destroy it?" One helpful indicator would be the technology required to prompt and hold this discussion.

otikik 4y ago
Yes, here are some perhaps more direct examples: Irrigation control for fields, temperature control for greenhouses and compost piles, early detection of fires via treatment of satellite imagery, calendar control (when to plant seeds, when to fertilize), knowledge repository, calculation of shaded/lighted areas throughout the year.

alex_young 4y ago

"Don't do things that harm the biosphere" and "maximize the lifespans of hardware components" seem to be in conflict with each other. Post 2008, CPU typical use efficiency per Watt has doubled every 1.5 years [1]. This means that your decade old machine is probably burning a lot of coal and dumping heavy metals into the atmosphere. Doesn't sound too green to me. [1] https://www.koomey.com/post/153838038643 https://www.koomey.com/post/153838038643

JoshCole 4y ago
A lot of the principles they give are of the in dying you shall die variety of errors. Learning is counterintuitive. There are a lot of times in learning where getting what you want means intentionally getting what you don't want. As you've said, though with different words, their second principle doesn't respect that. It is near-term thinking masquerading as a long-term concept; myopia, not wisdom. At the root of the error in short term thinking is pride. You think you know, but you don't know - not as you ought to know. So you stay trapped in a local minima. That local minima comes with unforced error. Which means a potential stochastic chance for extinction. Geometric probability distributions drives this to certainty. So in dying you die forever. Notice - nature doesn't optimize for longevity. Thus, it gains it. The biospheres actual version of what they are trying to get at is absurdly different. Remember I said learning was counterintuitive? The actual solution was to "eat shit" and "die". If they were really taking advice from permaculture the idea of eating our own shit would have taken center stage. Manure isn't exactly an unfamiliar concept in that world. It is foundational. Literally, not figuratively, but literally. It is the dirt.
criddell 4y ago
Maybe they should say optimize rather than maximize, but then it's pretty hard for me as a consumer to know when it makes sense to upgrade.
mikepurvis 4y ago
I think to truly advance this discussion in good faith (as opposed to just as a general snow against e-waste concerns), you have to look at the full lifespan story. Like, yeah, that computer that's 10 years old maybe shouldn't be running any more, but do the gains associated with annual replacement justify the production and e-waste cost of all the intermediate ones? What about a 2- or 3-year replacement cadence? How does the calculus change if the computer is being operated somewhere where it's cold most of the year and so the "waste" heat still has a useful function? How does it change if throwing out the computer also means throwing out a battery and screen, as is the case for laptops and phones? Does the extra mass of a tower pay for itself in terms of longer lifespan as people upgrade those systems piecemeal?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nairodd 4y ago

as far as inspiration goes, Devine Lu Linvega's ideas and lifestyle is pretty interesting to me. would recommend people check him out. definitely adjacent. edit: also the low tech movement can be relevant

skybrian 4y ago

Presumably, the principle of maximizing the life of hardware means after it's gone into production and is widely replicated. (And, hopefully, standardized.) This the long-term supported version. But to get the design right, you need to make prototypes, and probably a lot of them. I try to minimize design mistakes because reprinting a part is tedious, but I still have a box full of 3D printed parts that turned out not to fit quite right. This is also true of education. Most of what students create themselves is never really used. Either it's thrown away or gets put on a shelf somewhere. Making things badly and throwing them away is an essential part of education.

feiss 4y ago

I love the concept, it’s very appealing. However, I can’t stop thinking that this is mostly aimed to a post apocalyptic scenario, and if that is the case, computers would be the least thing to worry about :(

ipdashc 4y ago
This one seems more reasonable, but I recall seeing similar projects/initiatives in the past, aimed more towards post-apocalyptic scenarios... and yeah, I share the same exact thought as you. Computers are totally useless in such a world, with the possible exception of data storage
- unsafecast 4y ago
  I think data storage would be extremely important in that case. If we notice the apocalypse is coming, one of the first things I'm doing is downloading the entire Wikipedia, agriculture websites, survival guides, etc. As much as I possibly can. A raspberry pi can be used to index into that. (Obviously I'd buy supplies etc. too) If this happens, you want a reliable, low-power, easy to maintain no-BS computer, since you have more important things to do than mess with that. Now if we think a bit more into the future, at some point humans will start living in okay environments and we're probably going to want to start building computers again. Having some infrastructure for this would help in bootstrapping computing. Maybe we'll know better this time, maybe we wouldn't destroy our own civilization the second time. This is obviously all just theorising, but I can see myself needing a reliable low-power computer during an apocalypse.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
An encrypted communication service would come in very handy during an apocalypse.

betwixthewires 4y ago

Ugh. Permaculture might have biosphere balance as a secondary effect, but the idea and focus of effort is about allowing natural processes to perform the maintenance for you. It is about using living machinery to automate the process. It jives well with sustainability, and that's fantastic, but that's not the focus. The focus is on the efficient production of useful goods in ways that require minimal maintenance by letting other creatures do all the work for you. How exactly do you do computation in that way? There are ways, I'm sure. But not with anything resembling computers we use today. You'd basically need living computers. I'd love that, but I am not a fan of this rebranding of the term "permaculture" to shoehorn silicon into the sustainability movement, it doesn't fit, unfortunately.

taneq 4y ago
> You'd basically need living computers. Sounds like a sweatshop.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  There were some interesting articles on HN a few weeks ago about doing backpropagation in a machine learning system with physical systems, the particular example I remember was a natural language processing system using a metal plate and sound. Everything that happens in the universe is a computational process. You could build a living computer with enough knowledge about genetics and feedback mechanisms between species and specimens. A living computer doesn't have to be a human brain, or even resemble a brain at all. It might resemble a forest or a fish tank.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    or a mycelium network! :)
culi 4y ago
If this doesn't go so far as to convince you this is possible, I hope it at least opens you up to the idea that it is an ideal we can get close to: https://t2tile.com/ https://t2tile.com/

gtirloni 4y ago

Fice 4y ago

> Human-sized computing: a reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person (from the low-level hardware details to the application-level quirks). "Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual." Dan Ingalls. Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, 1981. http://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls%20-%20Design%20Principles%20Behind%20Smalltalk.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls%20-%20Design%20Principles...

xialvjun 4y ago

I think permacomputing is something about software rather than hardware. For hardware, to human civilization it's all about the use of power. But for software, we have lost so many things. Many documents have lost, many software can run in nowhere. That's the problems we should solve.

Findecanor 4y ago
I'd say that permacomputing's principles are first of all something to apply when designing new systems and new software, so as to prevent that from happening again. I think systems such as Nix/Guix would be useful for permacomputing, with which (unlike in many Linux distros) you can keep old libraries that older un-upgraded apps depend on right beside newer versions of those libraries.

kepano 4y ago

I love this idea and what is proposed in the Principles, but it's missing a crisp definition. It relies a bit too much on the reader's knowledge of permaculture. I like the idea of piggybacking on permaculture but it's not a perfect analogy, because computing isn't exactly a naturally flourishing phenomenon. What does carry over is the idea of being more thoughtful about computing, reducing energy waste, and generally architecting these systems for a longer time horizon. Perhaps in a way that can encourage stewardship over multiple generations.

narrator 4y ago

What are you going to do about tin whiskers[1] showing up in electronics? How will you get lead soldered electronics that don't grow tin whiskers and short randomly now that the EU has banned lead solder in new products? Are you going to use electronics from before 2006 when the RoHS legislation came into effect? Is anyone making consumer electronics with everything nickel plated for durability despite the cost and weight issues? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)

bullen 4y ago
Simple, you wipe them off when you change the heatpaste.
- ansible 4y ago
  > Simple, you wipe them off when you change the heatpaste. That doesn't work so well for BGA packages. I'd need to do some research to see if reflowing the solder would fix a low level of tin whiskers. Usually, the flux effectively increases the surface tension of the solder, causing it to form nicely around the pads and contacts. So it isn't clear to me how well the reflow will work without additional flux.

pabs3 4y ago

Reminds me a bit of the Bootstrappable Builds project. https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/

pkdpic 4y ago

I love it, the principles really hold up to decent scrutiny.

ermir 4y ago

Could computers be built without perishable components such as capacitors? From my experience they're the first components that usually break down or have the shortest shelf life.

RalfWausE 4y ago
I would highly suggest a look into the topic of analog computers for this purpose

hosh 4y ago

It's a good attempt, though reading https://permacomputing.net/Principles/ https://permacomputing.net/Principles/ ... I don't think the authors really needed to create a different set of design principles for computing. Rather, applying the existing permaculture ethical and design principles to computing would have gotten everything and a lot more. For example, rather than "Care for Life" and "Care for Chips", those are still derived from the ethical principles of "Care for Earth", "Care for People", and "Fair Share". And those three ethical principles are more comprehensive. Further, it would contextualize the purpose of computing, and not just simply designing the thing itself, in isolation. The 12 design principles for Permaculture are also far clearer because they contextualize the relationship of the computing with the people, rather than the design of the machine by itself. For example, "Expose Everything" is not a bad design principle when looking at just the machine ("observability"), but it is not nearly as versatile as the more generalized Permaculture design principle of "Observe and Interact". It's more important to look at a computational device's place in the overall ecology. When I apply this to my backyard, I cannot always directly "observe and interact" the root system of plants. If I dig up the plant to examine its root system, then I have most likely killed that plant. I have to make guesses. Looking at it from a different angle, the Permaculture design concept of "Zones" was is a way to organizing things so one can systematically "Observe and Interact". Another Peramculture design principle is "Integrate not segregate", another reason to "Expose Everything". Another one is "Keep it small and simple" in which there are two better Permaculture design principles, "Use Small and Slow Solutions", and "Apply self-regulation and accept feedback". Those two principles allows for the system to adapt, change, and grow, within the local conditions, and take advantage of regenerative cycles. So I think it is a nice try, but I think the author has not yet really applied the Permaculture principles sufficiently broadly and flexibly.

hosh 4y ago
Having said all of that, I remember coming across the saying -- what isn't grown is mined. Permaculture is great for working with what's grown. I don't know if it says much about what's mined. Computing and hardware technology ultimately comes from the assembly of what is mined. If so, maybe there is a place for developing a separate of design principles for things that are mined, not grown. What separates things that are mined and things that are grown is that things that are grown are capable of regenerating on its own without the human beings doing anything. What's mined don't have that kind of autonomy, or if they do, they start to resemble things that are grown, and we would have to treat it as participants of an ecology. That includes integrating them with existing ecosystems, lest they become invasive (things that grow vigorously, but do not contribute anything to the existing ecosystem).

def- 4y ago

I was expecting this to be about Reversible Computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

tpoacher 4y ago

Nice site. Is it also available on gemini by any chance?

bullen 4y ago

This is what this looks like in practice: http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png You can also use streacom cases with Atom 8-core (load balancer) and Xeon for that extra kick in computing, but 3x Raspberry 4 can saturate a symmetric 1Gb/s. Rather than 1x 10Gb/s it's better to have 2x 1Gb/s (preferably distant from each other) with all passively cooled components under 60 celcius at full blast during the hottest day in summer. The whole capable of running atleast 24 hours on lead-acid backup.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago
What do you do with this?
- bullen 4y ago
  MMO server + client. http://github.com/tinspin http://github.com/tinspin

foxhop 4y ago

goodpoint 4y ago

> Avoid unreliable dependencies, especially as hard (non-optional) dependencies. Meanwhile: cloudflare outage, SaaS and cloud oligopolies, browser monopoly.