permacomputing

“Why aren’t we thinking about these values from slow fashion or slow food and applying them to our digital lives?”

Mediocre computing  is computing that aims for parity with mediocre human performance in a realish domains where notions of excellence are ill-posed.

Excellent computing  is computing that aims to surpass the best-performing humans in stylized, closed-world domains where notions of excellence are well-posed.

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle , because it’s about closely matching the outpu