Increasing Productivity With Less Hardware, Little Power, and Fewer CPU Cycles (and Far Less Digital Waste in General)
THE last time I rebooted my laptop this Web site was still running WordPress and it was a warm day in 2023. My wife's main laptop and my secondary laptop (I use 4 in tandem these days) also have an uptime of about a year and they rarely waste time by demanding that we restore sessions, reopen applications, reload data files, reconnect to SSH etc. They're just there and they "snooze" when we're AFK in order to lessen energy consumption. A lot of the software we use is coded by us, for us.
A lot of people who glance at our PCs (as they visit us) act a bit baffled, as much of what we're using is a bunch of terminals and some text editors. Many people mistake the size (weight) of a program for "power" (associating bloat with productivity) because they're indoctrinated to think that new and "powerful" computers will enhance productivity, e.g. if their keyboard has an extra key for "hey hi" (AI); they also wrongly conflate the waste of power, e.g. chatbots in use, with "gains" (output that's produced by a bot is typically worse than useless and 'dilutes' the actual signal of human work).
I've actually seen people buying new PCs because apparently seeing HD videos (on a small screen) demands "better" hardware, even if the naked eye can barely appreciate the difference and the "sound system" is just a single speaker lodged inside some plastic laptop.
Let's get rid of this harmful notion that more bloated software is good for anything other than revenue/sales of companies like Intel. Don't worry about Intel; your government is likely subsiding it already (at your own expense), whether by creating some facilities in your country (e.g. Germany) or just handing over your money (debt) without your consent. This whole situation isn't pretty. Trump and Biden did the same with Microsoft [1, 2], repeatedly in fact, and this week it looks like so-called 'defence' contracts are misused to bail out the struggling "open"AI (we put links about it in Daily Links earlier today). █