Permacomputing

Short reminder:

The human genome, with all its magic, is about 3,117,275,501 base pairs long. Source: Wikipedia

If you would encode that data digitally, and store it on a SSD drive, it would take up < 1 GB.

So, if we can do so much magic with 1 GB, that should be an inspiration to all software to do more, with less space.

Thank you for coming to my talk.

Just the other day I read an article about how the average size and weight of cars have increased significantly in the past 60 years, both in Germany and the US.

I have a screenshot (in german):

I wonder whether there is a common reason, for why both software and cars seem to undergo "bloating" right now.

Maybe, it is because we live in a time where we don't appreciate making efficient use of resources anymore.

But maybe somebody has other ideas?

So what's it got to do with this community?

I wonder, whether, if we find an efficient solution to the obesity of cars, maybe that would lead to an efficient solution against software bloat as well?

The abundance of digital storage and processing power has caused an explosion in wastefulness, which shows in things like ridiculous hardware requirements for computing even the most trivial tasks. Permacomputing is about using computation only when it has a strengthening effect on ecosystems.

Hello! Can someone shed some light about the fact that there's no "LowTech" definition on the Permacomputing wiki ?

Looking for perspectives about the above. On my meanderings around the web I've found cybersecurity is all the rage now, cybersecurity experts are desperately needed. Looks a bit like a protection scheme to me - first have everyone save their data in the cloud and buy a smart fridge, then flood everything with ethical hacking courses and cybersecurity certifications.

Reminds me of my marketing translation days working on copy where you always were supposed to outpace your competitors by using some [insert software here]-as-a-service solution to 'compete in an increasingly fast-paced business environment'. Yay rat race.

On the other hand, as to cybersecurity experts, we will need smart people who can re-stupidify our smart appliances when they go rogue.

What would you consider ethical work within IT? Now and in a brighter future?

I have an ac1900 wifi router that isn't in use and had support dropped by the vendor. My home network is already set up, so I don't have a need for it – otherwise, I'd probably flash OpenWRT on it. Any ideas for what I could use it for?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4470763

(link covers a 2021 study by Purdue, Yale, and MIT)

Some folks think teleworking is favorable to the environment on the basis that they avoid driving to work. IMO that’s quite far-fetched when you consider that a worksite with a capacity of ~1000 workers would consume much less energy than heating and cooling 1000 residential homes. Then you have account for the footprint attributed to heavy internet bandwidth demands.

Nothing beats cycling to work and working on-site. But if you are working from home, it’s worthwhile to try to attend non-video conferences. A presenter may have no choice in some cases but certainly you need not see everyone’s faces.

FWiW, these are steps to disable high-bandwidth frills:

Firefox

(disable animations)

• disable animations (non-CSS, non-GIF varieties): about:config » toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled » true→false
• disabling CSS animations needs these ad-hoc steps
• disabling animated GIFs (useless?): about:config » image.animation_mode » (normal → none) or (normal → once, to just disable the play loops) Or for refined on-the-fly control install this plugin ⚠Disabling animated GIFs in Firefox may be useless. I get the impression animated GIFs are still fetched but simply not played automatically, thus bandwidth is still wasted.

(disable still images)

about:config » permissions.default.image » 1→2

Chrome/Chromium

• Disabling animations- impossible (bug report from ~14 years ago still unresolved). Hence “stop using Chrome” in the title.

(disable GIF animations only)

Install this plugin first which only works sometimes; when it fails try this one.

(disable still images)

1. Click the Customize and control Google Chrome menu button, which is the on the far-right side of the URL toolbar.
2. Select Settings on the menu to bring up that tab.
3. Click Privacy and security on the left side of Google Chrome.
4. Select Site Settings to view the content options.
5. Then click Images to bring up the options shown directly below.
6. Select the Don’t allow sites to show images radio button.

I have deliberately spared readers from the source links to the above info because the information is buried in enshitified webpages with shenanigans like cookie popups that have no reject all option. Looks like this post is a bit enshitified itself since the details/summary HTML tags are broken here (they tend to be accepted on other Lemmy instances). If anyone knows the fix plz let me know. (reported)

I used to really like youtube for all the interesting content - especially tutorial videos of all kind. Lately I have become very tired of watching moving images for content that could be delivered in text form - where I can choose to read and take it in at my own pace, in silence.

I agree that not all content can be delivered in this way, videos are incredibly helpful with a lot of stuff, but I wish more stuff could be (also) readable instead of watchable, or even listenable. Is in part an autism/accessibility thing, but also plays into my thoughts about the appropriateness of resource use for information recording/presentation/transfer from an Solarpunk computing perspective.

What do you think?

Dual booting Linux with a small windows partition this time so that I have more space for any programs I can't get going with Wine.

As a bonus, I discovered that my RAM and battery are replaceable too.

These two groups exist:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Both are small but it looks like slrpnk.net has more traction. IMO both might want to consider mentioning the other in the side-bar so folks know to cross-post.

One or two AA or AAA batteries can power a 1980s pager for a whole year without recharging. This is because most pagers of that time period are one-way. Since it only listens, it avoids the energy cost of constantly transmitting to all towers in range. So it’s even better than a feature phone (dumb phone). The beneficial side-effect: you’re untrackable apart from being in the service area.

It’s not a good state of affairs in the US though. All but 2 pager service providers have gone out of business. It’s a duopoly and last time I checked you can only get annual contracts for a price that’s higher than prepaid mobile service. You also can no longer buy new pagers because no one makes them (apart from POCSAG hobbyist varieties which then require you to build your own transmitter). This means you’re limited to whatever still exists in the 2nd hand market for hardware.

So it sucks in the US. Is it better anywhere else? In principle pagers are still important for first responders because they’re more reliable than SMS, so they should really still exist everywhere at least to the extent that competence prevails.

Now that the web is rich in garbage I try to think of how the UX can be made tolerable again. Consider this scenario:

Bob sees an article of interest and decides to share it. I have no idea why Bob’s experience was decent enough that he feels the article is worthy of sharing, but I’m getting tor-hostility, CAPTCHAs, popups, dysfunction that requires JavaScript perms, etc. In short, Bob’s link goes to a shit hole.

So how can we fix this?

What if Bob copies the full text of the article and creates an archive of sorts in the fediverse? That solves the enshitification problem but it risks harassment from copyright police. Or does it not? The fair use doctrine specifically permits a work to be quoted for the purpose of commentary. It’s also easily justified because the web has become so exclusive (e.g. Tor blocking) that a case can be made for including a copy of the article along with Bob’s commentary. Because what happens now? Alice the Tor user gets blocked from the page and can only read people’s comments which have no context because the web is broken. Bob copying the original text enables Alice to appreciate Bob’s work (his commentary).

I also wonder if bilingual people can go a step further in mitigating copyright harassment. Suppose Juan reads the English article, machine translates it into Spanish, then corrects the flaws because he’s fluent in Spanish, and then posts the Spanish version. Do copyrights survive translation? If Juan comments in Spanish, then surely the Spanish translation is critical to non-English speakers understanding Juan’s post.

I think this idea would benefit the permacomputing movement because avoiding web enshitification is a way to access content with less resources. The original poster may have to run a shit ton of heavy JavaScript to reach the text, but then everyone attending his thread can function with a simple text client.

#askFedi #lawFedi

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.

Greyjays in beta right now but it already looks like it has better data sovrienty than youtube, with easy access to other platforms as well.

From the video description:

In this session, I will explore some playful low-power, sometimes analog, computation systems and esoteric programming languages, designed to work offline, on salvaged devices, advised from spending the past 7 years sailing around the Pacific Ocean.

No seafaring experience required.

Devine Lu Linvega
Hundred Rabbits, Crew

Devine Lu Linvega is a designer and musician living aboard a sailboat somewhere on the foggy shores of the Pacific ocean. Devine has been developing and teaching livecoding environments all the while fending off the rising tide of noxious modern software and operating systems.

---

Recorded Sept 22, 2023 at Strange Loop 2023 in St. Louis, MO.

Couldn't post a direct link, this is hosted on a gemini capsule and Lemmy accepts only http.

gemini://misfin.org/

💌 manifesto

Email is just as bad as the Web. It's grown to be complex, secure only with other protocols bolted onto it, and it supports all the nasty misfeatures that the Web does, like cookies and tracking beacons. Even worse, it's seeing active hostility from the major players of the Internet. Most ISPs block traffic on port 25, and you can't deliver mail to any of the big names (like Gmail) without jumping through hoops - and even then, it's a coin toss.

A good piece on the topic.

I would love it if there was a way around this, a standard way for people interested in the small web to communicate. Something like Gemini, which can be grokked and implemented by one person. To that end, I've been working on a replacement - but I need some feedback.

📰 the details

I've written up specs for a protocol named Misfin, named after the Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN). It's spartan, but not overly so. It's only concerned with sending messages; mailbox management and relaying are out-of-band. Neither does it do much to combat spam - it probably won't be used by enough people to matter - but it avoids the worst of SMTP's security gotchas.

📝 the protocol: less is more

Maybe we should just worry about text. Maybe we don't want to accept big huge messages from strangers. Maybe we should be asking people nicely if they want to receive an attachment, rather than just sending it to them. Consider the following protocol. We send a single request, no more than 2048 bytes, and with an assumed mime of text/gemini:

misfin://[email protected] Everything after this is the body of the message.\r\n

And the server tells us if it was accepted:

20 \r\n

Message sent, ezpz. Misfin is limited, but not crippled. Want to send a binary file? Throw it up on a Gemini server (you have one of those, yeah?) and link to it - you get the fingerprint of the receiver's certificate, so you could even gate it for them if it's eyes only. Can't fit your message into 2K? Send two, or maybe write less. (Most of the emails I got on the Gemini mailing list were smaller than that anyway).

🔭 but is there a better way

Maybe. That's why I need your feedback. Download the reference specification and shoot me a Misfin letter (!) at [email protected]

Or, make a ticket on Sourcehut, or Github, or post about it on Station. Up to you. But you could be the first to send me a Misfin letter...

Less digital life, more real life.

These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.

During my years as a marketing translator I've probably translated the phrase 'in today's fast-paced business environment' or some variations thereof hundreds of times. These words raise my heart rate when I read them, and I eventually had to give up marketing translation as I wasn't capable of normalizing living in a fast-paced environment.

I'm not even sure who created this fast-paced environment, and is now expecting me, a tiny human, to keep up with it. Forces me to rush my children into it too, prepared to get prepared for the modern life, clad in ever freshly-washed garments and with their faces washed, and shoes tied well, early in the morning. Become a productive citizen, now!

And it gets worse - to keep up with the rush I'm offered products. Machines, more machines, so I can do everything fast enough for the fast-paced environment. All while the real, actual, living environment goes down the drain, also ever more quickly. Nobody gets to rest in this fast-paced environment, we are all constantly running. From what?

In the same vein I'm encouraged to make my free time worthwhile - why not monetize it somehow? Do what I always wanted: become a writer, a video artist! So I pull my brains, quickly. Put something out there, make it bright, make a lot (with the convenient tools offered us so we can keep up with the rush) because otherwise it will drown in all the other content out there.

Then the tiredness creeps in, endless content scrolling by, and we all get more tired by consuming/producing/consuming/producing mile by mile of this ludicrous mixture of bright content and dystopian news, and the fast-paced environment getting faster. Who are we anymore? For some reason, we cannot exist in the fast-paced environment. It must be us, maybe it's a mental illness?

If we forced an animal to run in a fast-paced threadmill all day, what would happen? What if we forced the animal to run a little more, by withholding food or threatening to do so? How many hours more could the animal run, for how long, before breakdown? Or would someone step in and stop whoever does shit like this to an animal?

The tiredness is telling us to rest, like the tired animals we are, and slow down the consuming, and producing, of things without substance and nutritious value. So permacomputing being slow, this community being slow, the fediverse in general being slow should be seen as a positive feature. We permit ourselves to slow down again, and switch off electronics more often. There was this guy on German kids TV in the 80s (he was pretty much a proto-solarpunk and the show, Löwenzahn, would mix scientific and environmental topics). At the end of the show he would always tell us to switch off the TV and go outside. I'll pass the message on: 'Abschalten!'

This autumn is dedicated to Practising Permacomputing; a concept and a nascent community of practice-oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology derived, among others, from permaculture principles. As part of this community, space is offered to makers and thinkers in digital culture (and other connected areas) to put the fundamentals and applications of permacomputing into practice through a series of workshops, a meetup, and a concluding day of public presentations with guests. Join us to explore permacomputing futures!