Today’s digital plenty is taken for granted, but it shouldn’t. Because processors and all the other silicon-based tiny things have production supply chains that can be easily disrupted – and already have been. And because computing use energy, which comes from finite resources.
We should maximize the use of any computing resource and the lifecycle of hardware and software, for sustainability: less energy consumed, less waste, less bloated software, more streamlined design architectures. This is the field of permacomputing, and I am optimistically fascinated by it.
Pessimistically, I’m fascinated by collapse computing: what if, in a future, we live a digital scarcity where we have to extract any drop of computational power from any chip? To optimize for us, not for the environment.
Scarcity computing is a challenge. How to write functional software in just a few KBs, giving new life to old computers, create new stuff with basic processors. And so on. An adventure in revisiting our idea of digital technology.
Note to readers: this place is not organized as a blog but more like a wiki. A blog implies the need to write something regularly, and I would inevitably fail in this. Here it’s a digital garden, more than a “mainstream” website.
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