Log (rss)

I've been interested lately by the energy usage of software.

Since my current energy usage is invisible to me, it is hard to actually grasp just how bad the situation is. But I often am amazed at how inefficient many solutions are, they offer very little gain.

For example, to ensure that a service is always available, at my old job we had 3+ servers running in parallel, just in case one server hall gets hit by a tornado or other disasters.

Most services do not even need 99.99+% availability, they'd be fine with just two of those nines. Maybe that's what we should strive for instead?

Anyways, if we want to understand how we can do better, it is good to understand the energy footprint right now.

After some investigation I came by websitecarbon.com, which is extremely easy to use and gives some rough estimations. It estimates the cost of:

• Data transfer over the wire
• Energy intensity of web data
• Energy source used by the data centre
• Carbon intensity of electricity
• Website traffic

It links to Sustainable web design: Estimating digital emissions which I will need to take a closer look at.

I also asked a Permacomputing groupif they had any recommendations. Almost immediately I was recommended a few tools for measuring energy usage:

• watt-wiser
• scaphandre
• kepler

Excited to dive deeper into these resources and see how I can better understand and optimize.

- Marc

I listened to a podcast recently, the Corercusive episode on the birth of Unix with Brian Kirnighan. An interesting point made during the talk was that software development today is more about looking up information rather than building something with your own intuition. You search the answer for each query, a.k.a. stackoverflow-driven development.

I have started valuing more the software that does not require that, where you can read the manual and then understand how to use the programming language.

- Marc

I read an interesting article on local-first software. I think it perfectly summarizes the issue with cloud software and the need for more offline-friendly software.

I am happy the authors mentioned Git, as it is a prime example of successful offline-friendly collaboration. Github of course ruins it slightly by having PRs be done online.

I was a bit sad, though, that the article did not mention the dvcs fossil, which contains chat and forums built-in that auto-sync when you go online. It is also extremely easy to self-host.

In conversations about local-first, I often find email and/or activitypub to be underrated as well. Email is offline friendly, I have it synced offline. I also think you could extend it to have apps on top of it, like a todo list app. Activitypub could be used to push the envelope even further, as it is a system to stream activities. You could have those activities be signed locally and sent when you go online.

- Marc

Comma.directory will be built over time by composing together many small log entries. Each log entry contains observations, events, and thoughts that we label.These log entries will be the building blocks for a directory of concepts, which we will categorize for easier navigation.

When entering the page of a concept through the directory, the log entries that led up to the idea would show up and and, if the idea feels more fully explored, it might also contain a summary or conclusion.

- Marc