this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
1101 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
57435 readers
4383 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is what happens every time society goes along with tech bro hype. They just run directly into a wall. They are the embodiment of "Didn't stop to think if they should" and it's going to cause a lot of problems for humanity.
I remember the feeling of intuitive respect and trust when I was a kid, which transferred to tech bros from companies like Motorola and Sun and DEC.
It's no longer there, but remember how serious it all felt in 2002.
A lot of accumulated momentum used by wrong people.
Honestly, for me, young me had no fucking clue how bad tech could be for the world just physically. The massive power draw, the massive water consumption, I'm sure there are nestle level employee and child abuse situations to boot.
Noone ever talked about the cost of fucking anything. Just blinders all the way until it crashes and we tally the victims and how much money was lost or it cost to fix it.
The one thing the Crypto bros did was show everyone how absurd this all really could be, and all for less than nothing.
I agree.
It's very cool to have a personal computer that can play music, display pictures, play videos, render scenes in POV-Ray, so on. But I don't think I need a new one every year, I don't think I'd need anything as performant as what I have (not considering network effects), and I'd be happy to use a year 2003 (or even 1993, with dedicated chips Amiga-style one can make it usable for playing video and music too) performance PC with modern power efficiency.
I don't think there's any need to press for building machines able of doing even more of mostly useless work.
And about hidden costs of that power efficiency too - making modern chips is so complex that the production is more centralized than that of intercontinental ballistic missiles. That means rot in the society that only shows itself when it's too late, like with any overcentralization.
So maybe power efficiency doesn't have to be quite modern, ha-ha.
Overcentralization applies to other things in that industry too, I think I just wanted to add it to your list of hidden costs.