Cat HicksFrom a behavioral and psychological perspective (not interested in this thread in an "arguing about whether our estimation is right" perspective lol), I think the halting, difficult, but clearly emerging work of starting to reckon with the climate costs of computing is so incredibly cool and important. Some questions I want research to ask about this include:
How does the relationship a developer has with the computing resources around them change when climate and ecology are brought into the picture? Does this produce unexpected other changes, for instance, I speculate without evidence that it might reframe your interactions with technology to be less abstract. Despite the massive crisis of climate concerns, is there a protective effect from this? Might this make some technology work feel less alienated from the world?
Do folks in software overall tend to show a "bigger is better" bias or mental model? That's a big question, but assuming this does exist, given that climate conscious computing might emphasize more targeted use of resources, would introducing climate conscious computing shift that bias? Might you begin to value smaller and more targeted solutions? Would this have a spillover effect to other areas of work that don't even have the same sustainability concern?
Glyph@grimalkina “folks in software” is an awful broad brush to be painting with here. If I had to guess I would say that this industry does have that bias, but I think we inherit it from capital, not technology. It is the “bigger is better” of the railroad robber barons, not the homebrew computer club
@grimalkina as others have pointed out already, if you look at what technical things devs do for fun when financial motivations are removed, you see a lot of small things — artificial constraints on executable size, retrocomputing hardware, raspberry pis and adafriot trinkets. Small is fun. Small is human scale.