this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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They take energy and memory on the local devices and in the cloud. Uploading and downloading also does. Better software often needs better (new) hardware. The developers take office space and hardware and energy. Do you want me to go on?
The bigger question for my is why growth is supposed to be a good thing. With all the technology, we could work less but on the whole, we work more.
But better ones don't require any more resources than worse ones. So you can increase value with the same resource consumption.
The development of better ones does and so does design, advertisement, ...
R&D resources are usually small compared to the efficacy improvements they allow. You don't need advertisement. Though to achieve sustanability , you'd also need a very long life on products and almost complete recycling.
The topic is growth. There is no growth in sustainability. For your company to grow, you need new features, new customers, ... People say this is achievable without resources, I doubt it. That's what I'm saying.
You don't need more customers, you could deliver greater value to those customers
Example?
I try to use my phones as long as I can and I ran into situations where I couldn't update or install apps because my phone didn't meet the requirements
Fuck vendors who do not publish kernel sources.
Games, but games can also just be better and more optimized on the same hardware. It's just easier to throw more silicon at the problem, and we don't incentive caring about the planet enough.
Interestingly, better computer hardware is often actually less physical matter. What's valuable about computers isn't the amount of material, it's the arrangement of matter. That applies to both hardware and software. A phone and that same phone smashed have the same number of atoms. That phone and an equivalent from 10 years earlier are pretty close in number of atoms. My monitors and TVs today are a tenth as many atoms as the ones I had years ago.
Buying a phone every year is still about five times the matter of buying a phone every five years. Also: it is quite cynical to count atoms while children work in cobalt mines. The question of resources is more complex.
The matter from previous phones can just be recycled. We don't really do it now because we're nowhere near the growth limit OP was hypothesizing, but if it really came to it we'd mine our landfills instead of mountains.
Talking about children is changing the subject, important as that may be. We're talking about finite materials.