A discussion on the internet forum lines, which I think is really worth checking out:
The resource leak bug of our civilization
The introductory post, by Brian Crabtree aka tehn – which could as well have been a blog post, or an article – talks about how our computing systems are inherently wasteful and bloated. Every time I download a simple utility and see that it weights 500Mb or more I get reminded of this.
In the meantime, people create whole animations in 256 bytes. And I think it’s worth stressing bytes. Of course this is art, and not an application to get things done, but it still tells us something, something Brian perfectly put into words.
I saw demo art on extreme platforms as a careful craft that attains incredible feats while sacrificing generality and development speed. However, during recent years, I have become increasingly convinced that the portion of true tradeoff is quite marginal. An ever-increasing portion of the waste comes from abstraction clutter that serves no purpose in final runtime code. Most of this clutter could be eliminated with more thoughtful tools and methods without any sacrifices. What we have been witnessing in computing world is nothing utilitarian but a reflection of a more general, inherent wastefulness, that stems from the internal issues of contemporary human civilization.
tehn on llllllll.co
Brian doesn’t just point the finger at the problem, he goes quite deep into it: a fascinating, and at the same time frightening analysis of the state of software and the world in general in 2024. One that affects us more than we think, even if we’re not developers. But there’s also an outlook, something we can do about it, at least partially. But I’ll stop here and just let you go and read the article yourself. It’s great food for thought.