Saw lyksos post on station and decided to give it a read. As a fellow game enjoyer I have enough familiarity with the subject to give some input.

Lyksos post starts off by explaining Jevons' paradox, which in a nutshell is an oddity which has shown up as a general trend in computing where the improvements in raw performance ironically bring about less efficent and unoptimized computing experience.

To recap the concept: Because processing power and internet speeds are so darn fast for most consumers, there is a huge leeway for severe data bloat and inefficent programming practices with minimal cost to the users experience in real time.

In the world of yesteryear, processing power, storage space, and internet speeds were all highly scarce premiums. An extra few kilobytes in a image could mean many extra minutes of download time. Megabytes? Hours. Gigabytes? Might as well come back next week.

Your BASIC program has a tiny bug which eats into the PCs meager processing power? Those processing cycles lost are tangably noticable.

Oh and dont get me started on actually *storing* that data. Remember when you needed a couple of floppies or disks just to install a single basic program?

The ultimate cost of transfering or processing any kind of information is time, and time is the most finite (and therefore valuable) resource a person has.

Yet in todays world, that computational work/time taken relationship is near non-existant. downloading a gigabyte of data takes about a minute more or less assuming you're in a decent area. It doesnt matter if your program is unoptimized and takes 10% more processing cycles when those cycles are in the millions and the process still finishes faster than you can blink. The average joe schmo doesnt notice or care if a extra 500mb of website bloat causes it to take an extra 50 milliseconds of loading time and 0.012 extra watts of energy used as long as content is still delivered within expected time frames. Unless, of course, you are a technically inclined person idealogically driven by the concept of optimization and efficancy.

Lykso makes a point that its still worth worrying about computational optimization for enviromental reasons. To directly quote:

> The cycles-to-watts ratio of our hardware continues to grind higher, but ever-more bloated software consumes those extra cycles, drives hardware obsolescence, and leaves our computing habits as environmentally harmful as ever.

> Even if you don't give a damn about the environment, note that this is also one of the ways we end up buying "things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like." As ever, pro-environmental behavior tends to dovetail very nicely with anti-consumerist behavior and quite often overlaps with it.

I agree with the general sentiment of conserving energy and better computational awareness. I wanted to reflect a bit more on "harmful computing habits" though. The main argument is that bloat drives hardware obsolescence which leads to people throwing away their perfectly good old computers for faster newer ones. I would argue that this argument is slightly exaggerated, theres a little bit more nuance to why people ditch their device every few years. Things such as planned obsolescence, social-economic dick waving shenanigans of society, and plain old thoughtless greed all play their parts. Wanting The New Shiny even when Old Faithful is still kicking has become normalized largely thanks to smartphones (especially Apple stuff IMO). Compared to all that, bloat is a meager player barely worth pointing the finger at.

Lets not pretend that bloat has truly forced old pcs into obsolescene either. A little personal anecdote: My mom likes playing old-people games on pogo.com. Scrabble, canasta, all that. When her old computer finally went kaput, she didnt want to spend money on a new one. So, I dug up an old 2003 thinkcentre that was given to me free by the local computer shop. Were talking 2GB ram and a pentium processor. Maybe not Commadore64-old but old enough.

One external wifi usb adapter, a fresh install of puppy linux, and the latest version of firefox later and she had her modern bloated flash/html5 games back. All websites she used still worked fine and dandy, she could access her bank, search the internet, and order off amazon perfectly fine, granted it took a couple extra seconds. Eventually the CMOS battery in it died at which point she wanted to upgrade to a slightly faster used desktop from this decade (a used dell optiplex from the late 2000s with LM20.1 if you were wondering)

My point is that with a little bit of elbo-er-finger grease any computer from within the past 20 years can be resurrected enough to browse the modern bloated internet in a perfectly acceptable capability, assuming you have realistic expectations for a dino-pc anyways. The hardware isnt the issue, its the decades old outdated browser and obsolete OS that isnt designed for the modern web.

The real issue of obsolescense lies with the average intellegence of general population, and societal expectations in a consumer culture. Just like cars, why fix up the old when you can the buy new? Also like cars, the main problem with old ones isnt that they "dont work on new roads" its that they have piss poor fuel efficancy from outdated unregulated parts. Put a little time into updating the under-the-hood stuff and bam its like new. But how many people are willing or knowledgable enough to do that themselves?

Computers are beautiful intersections between subjective abstraction and objective reality. By themselves they are inert hunks of metal and silicon. Yet people have the power to turn that cold hunk of logical mechanism into a 'living', breathing dynamic system with great abilities to transmit subjective, artistic, and emotional experiences through audio-visual interpretations. Its kind of magical that the fundimental laws of our universe align in such a way for computers to operate how they do. Speaking of artistic audio-visual mediums, lets talk about G A M E S !

A good amount of computer history (especially in retro-gaming) is just finding ways to compact the most amount of data into the least amount of space while SQUEEEZING every drop of performance out of your hardware possible through clever programming tricks and special chips. Huge amounts of enginuity and cleverness were a NECESSITY in early computing to get around the strict limitations of relatively slow hardware.

I have a particular appreciation of NES games after watching this video on game developers creating a new nes game in 2018. It goes into all the technical hurdles and limitations that the developers had to overcome in order to create their game (which is a whopping 40kb) If you have some free time

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM