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Seriously .. the world is going up in flames .. and at the same time there's all these people walking around in the global west who're apparently hooked on giga

by ephbit 4y ago

Seriously .. the world is going up in flames .. and at the same time there's all these people walking around in the global west who're apparently hooked on gigapixels and ever more bandwidth/storage space/gigaherz and so on .. it's so f*** up. An example of a slower and less dumb way to run our ecosphere into the ground: I convert all podcasts I listen and want to keep to opus @ 20 kbit/s which on average results in 1/5 of the original file size.

tgv 4y ago
Conversion also costs energy. Save more energy by not listening to podcasts. But that's the cheap shot at your slightly ranting arguments. USB isn't going to run us into the ground. Transport uses up so incredibly much more energy, almost none of which comes from sustainable sources at the moment. Cooling and heating too, obviously. Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment.
- ephbit 4y ago
  > Transport uses up so incredibly much more energy, ... True. I never claimed otherwise. > ...almost none of which comes from sustainable sources at the moment. I know. The world is roughly at 80 % fossil energy right now, as far as I remember. Trust me on this, energy is one of the topics I spend time reading and thinking about several times a day. > Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment. Here's the thing. It's about this mentality of: this small thing here doesn't really matter. But people in this "ever more culture" reliably put one "small thing" after the other in their basket of consumption capacity .. until it's full. These people ask "I can have more, why shouldn't I?" rather than "I can have more, do I really want/need more?" Do you enjoy watching your movie at 8k 4 times more than at 4k because it comes with 4x the pixels? If you do, I pity you. I recently watched some Linus Tech Tips video where he installs their 1 PB of storage and boasts about their new camera that can record videos with a data rate of 300 MB/s ... 1 TB per 3 seconds ... yeah! ... sorry (not sorry), despite all my fascination with tech, this attitude is just so heinously wasteful and damaging. As if these hundreds of HDDs hadn't taken any ressources and weren't consuming quite a bit of electricity. Again .. > Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment. I don't worry about the cable. I worry about the f*** up culture/attitude.
- ephbit 4y ago
  > Conversion also costs energy. Save more energy by not listening to podcasts. Yea, no .. people should have fun and do the things they want. But being needlessly wasteful while doing them is just asocial because in the end it hurts the whole ecosphere. I want to store the podcasts I listen to so I do. But I do it in a way that doesn't need TBs of disk space. Besides, the conversion is only necessary because the content is delivered in utterly over the top bitrate. And also, once I've converted a file to lower bitrate, from then on every time I do something with it (play, copy, ...) it will consume less energy than doing the same thing with the large original file.

by ephbit 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

Conversion also costs energy. Save more energy by not listening to podcasts. But that's the cheap shot at your slightly ranting arguments. USB isn't going to run us into the ground. Transport uses up so incredibly much more energy, almost none of which comes from sustainable sources at the moment. Cooling and heating too, obviously. Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment.

ephbit 4y ago
> Transport uses up so incredibly much more energy, ... True. I never claimed otherwise. > ...almost none of which comes from sustainable sources at the moment. I know. The world is roughly at 80 % fossil energy right now, as far as I remember. Trust me on this, energy is one of the topics I spend time reading and thinking about several times a day. > Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment. Here's the thing. It's about this mentality of: this small thing here doesn't really matter. But people in this "ever more culture" reliably put one "small thing" after the other in their basket of consumption capacity .. until it's full. These people ask "I can have more, why shouldn't I?" rather than "I can have more, do I really want/need more?" Do you enjoy watching your movie at 8k 4 times more than at 4k because it comes with 4x the pixels? If you do, I pity you. I recently watched some Linus Tech Tips video where he installs their 1 PB of storage and boasts about their new camera that can record videos with a data rate of 300 MB/s ... 1 TB per 3 seconds ... yeah! ... sorry (not sorry), despite all my fascination with tech, this attitude is just so heinously wasteful and damaging. As if these hundreds of HDDs hadn't taken any ressources and weren't consuming quite a bit of electricity. Again .. > Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment. I don't worry about the cable. I worry about the f*** up culture/attitude.
ephbit 4y ago
> Conversion also costs energy. Save more energy by not listening to podcasts. Yea, no .. people should have fun and do the things they want. But being needlessly wasteful while doing them is just asocial because in the end it hurts the whole ecosphere. I want to store the podcasts I listen to so I do. But I do it in a way that doesn't need TBs of disk space. Besides, the conversion is only necessary because the content is delivered in utterly over the top bitrate. And also, once I've converted a file to lower bitrate, from then on every time I do something with it (play, copy, ...) it will consume less energy than doing the same thing with the large original file.