this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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Sustainability

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Topics around green technology and practices that actually work, not the green-washing stuff, and getting off the addition to fossil fuels before we wreck this little ball of dirt we call Earth.

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I really struggle to understand the direction of today's society. (mastodon.bsd.cafe)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I really struggle to understand the direction of today's society.

For years, we've been saying we need to reduce emissions and consumption, removing chargers from smartphone boxes "to pollute less," then the "AI" comes along and we reopen fossil fuel power plants, increasing consumption and emissions for... well, who knows why!

We make people feel guilty for not switching to an electric car (or one with high energy efficiency), yet we fly for pure leisure, just to get "a few more likes" on YouTube.

We create increasingly efficient electronic devices, focus on the consumption and emissions of data centers (local or remote), and then stop optimizing code and dependencies because "there’s autoscaling" and "resources are cheap."

To me, these are ideological short circuits.

#Sustainability

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@[email protected]

A nice excerpt (especially the last question) from UNIX: A History and a Memoir, by Brian W. Kernighan (2020).

“As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: “By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world.” It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11’s with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That’s about one thousandth of a typical laptop of today. Would your laptop support a population of a million users?”

(million = thousand times thousand)