this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

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I used to really like youtube for all the interesting content - especially tutorial videos of all kind. Lately I have become very tired of watching moving images for content that could be delivered in text form - where I can choose to read and take it in at my own pace, in silence.

I agree that not all content can be delivered in this way, videos are incredibly helpful with a lot of stuff, but I wish more stuff could be (also) readable instead of watchable, or even listenable. Is in part an autism/accessibility thing, but also plays into my thoughts about the appropriateness of resource use for information recording/presentation/transfer from an Solarpunk computing perspective.

What do you think?

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[–] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago

Back when I forced myself through the first half of an EE bachelor with a lots of heavy maths and physics and computing I relied on youtube videos almost completely - whenever one of my profs couldn't deliver stuff in a way I could understand it (or when my autistic ears couldn't cope with the room acoustics plus their voice) I skipped class and went to youtube for help. I could not have done it with books, honestly. I needed both a human of my preference plus some well made graphics and diagrams - and then I could make sense of the concepts in the book and memorize them. Found a treasure of wonderful lecture series that had mediocre me surfing smoothly through my course before Covid put an end to it. So I guess for complex stuff videos can be great, but I'm picky and want my preferred level of information density.

These days I look up quite a range of different things: computer stuff, plants, gardening and animal stuff. Especially for the outdoor stuff there is an enormity of content online that is either in video form - so personality is quite a thing there, but I really just would like to know if I can feed plant A to animal B, or when I should seed my herbs - information that a tech person could put quickly in a table, but which some people on youtube can spin up to a 10 min video. For the computer stuff, videos can be helpful and to the point, but I would still prefer a text with images.

But yeah, it's a little frustrating to know that the content I seek is in there somewhere, somewhere in a video between walls of spoken text I cannot search in.