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Comment by aledevv | Hacker News Reader

Loving the homage to the Whole Earth Catalog. The pivot from "infinite growth and optimization" to "computing within limits" and permacomputing is becoming less of a fringe philosophy and more of a practical necessity.

As hardware recycling and e-waste become bigger challenges, projects like the Damaged Earth Catalog remind us that modern software bloat is a choice, not an inevitability. We need more focus on resilient, low-power, and maintainable tech stacks.

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One the one hand, that many people on here are so opposed to this kind of thinking (your post was flagged) is no suprise, since this is in many parts more of business than a hacker forum, so profit trumps all other concerns.

Yet considering, that many people here are also often unhappy with wasteful and user hostile software, like windows, i think a look at this kind of thinking can be really beneficial. Especially, since at least the actual programmers reading this site can easily have small impacts on these kind of problems, by just making sure, they craft their software with more care on such issues.

With these sentiments I always remember E.T. game for Atari. It took six weeks to develop that game, it would take an hour to develop now for experienced game dev, even without ai. So we do have some bloat now but we also have tremendous amount of productivity, mature tools, languages and hw.

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