this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

Definition and purpose of permacomputing: http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html

XMPP chat: https://movim.slrpnk.net/chat/lowtech%40chat.disroot.org/room

Sister community over at lemmy.sdf.org: !permacomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

There's also a wiki: https://permacomputing.net/

Website: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html

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What is Permacomputing? (damaged.bleu255.com)
submitted 1 year ago by schmorpel to c/permacomputing
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Permacomputing is a term originating from the demoscene, known for squeezing the most out of very restricted computing resources, such as the 4k intro with a maximum executable file size of 4096 bytes.

Permaculture uses methods that lets nature do the work, minimizing the reliance on artificial energy. Heikkilä sees similarities between how both permaculture practitioners and hackers find clever solutions to problems. He writes that the existence of computers can only be justified by their ability to augment the potential of humans to have a strengthening effect on ecosystems.

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[–] activistPnk 2 points 1 year ago

I must say the banking apps are totally antithetical to permacomputing because they are the big offenders in pushing chronic upgrades that result in phones as landfill. It’s really a contest between desktop banking and analog banking (which includes bank by mail). I’m willing to do desktop banking only to the extent that privacy is respected. More and more banks are blocking tor and outsourcing bill pay to huge centralized corps who get to see everyone’s payments. So privacy and the environment are at odds and you have to choose between them.

When you talk about data transmission, that’s a bit different than processing power. I use very little bandwidth by doing everything in text (I even disable images in my gui browser). And because my consumption is low it’s much cheaper to connect over prepaid mobile networks than to have a hardwire. But then transmitting over the air wastes more energy per byte than a hardwire. The worst is Starlink, which I heard uses 30 times the energy per byte than terrestrial wireless.