Low-tech Magazine

If you want a conspicuously "Low Tech" design aesthetic, follow this guide's steps in imitation of https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/.

If you want to make a web site that loads and renders quickly even over slow network connections and on low-resource hardware -- ostensibly the goal of the Low Tech solar website and of this derivative site -- there are better examples to imitate that don't mention carbon dioxide at all.

These sites' main offense against efficiency is the use of small-palette indexed images with heavy dithering. Dithering impairs efficient image compression. Many of the images on this page and on the solar Low Tech site would be more efficiently represented as non-dithered indexed images, perhaps using a larger palette to compensate for the lack of dithering. That's what should have been done with all the charts and text-heavy screenshots. They would look more like the source image and require fewer bytes for storage and network transfer. As it is, this "low tech" page loads 380 kB of PNG images. It's especially egregious when the source image is obviously a continuous-tone photograph, like the image at the top of the article. It should have stayed as a JPEG.

I'm reminded of Intel's environmentally dubious installation of wind micro-turbines on the roof of one of its campuses a few years ago:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/05/21/intel-catches-the-wind-with-rooftop-micro-turbine-array/

In 2015 small wind turbines were already known to generate far less…

Not sure if this is helpful, but a friend fed this conversation through ChatGPT and had it summarize for easier reading:

-The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy -Bigger by Marc Levinson

-The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos

-Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World by Erik Larson

-Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard -White

-The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War by William Manchester

-Edison by Edmund Morris

-Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

-The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

-Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

-The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

-The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

-Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael S. Malone

-The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

-The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

-Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White Jr.

-The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

-Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of…

> Performance is a feature

contradicts with brutalism IMO. like someone already said, brutalism is when form follows function and without much frivolity, and one of the functions of a website is being usable by loading smooth and fast (the wingdings are not it).

this is not necessarily a dunk on you, this is more of a dunk on David Bryant Copeland; I'm really sick of developers and programmers who co-opt design movements or other design-adjacent terms, make up a definition or principles that seem like they could fit but then fail when inspected closely. Someone here already mentioned Gumroad as an example of (neo) brutalist web design; Figma is another great example. The sites here https://brutalistwebsites.com/ are great typography-driven examples. This could even count as brutalist https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ especially because their goal, as a site running on solar power, is to be as well performing (and low bloat) as possible while still satisfying expectations of functionality.

I think my advice to you would be, look outside of the developer/programmer sphere when building out design. Brutalism is not only "the least lines of code", it's also a lot about intention when it comes to function, and then, form.

What you're experiencing and saying is actually completely right. Issues don't motivate people, and actions lead beliefs as much (or more) than vice versa

A paper on exactly this : https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcd5a

My suggestions would be these:

* Think about where your food comes from, and how it is fertilised. Read about different modes of agriculture.

* Think about minimising your energy usage, especially fossil fuels. Look at heat pumps, cycling infrastructure, that kind of thing.

* Learn about alternatives for building and anything else. Building with straw bales is a particular favourite of mine because it can be done so simplistically by people with relatively little training.

* Find projects where other people are doing stuff and join in. See the above article - self-efficacy is a muscle, build it by exercising it.

A great source of inspiration: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Edit: also, we'll blow the 1.5C carbon budget in 8 years. Sorry - we'd have to cut emissions by 20% a year every year to avoid that. Plus sequestration of course.

A prior generation of Web content had progressively-loaded images: a low-resolution (and sometimes monochrome) initially, followed by a higher-resolution image.

I'm not sure of the specific implementation(s) used, but progressive JPEP (PJPEG) Is A Thing:

<https://imagekit.io/blog/progressive-jpeg/>

Lazy-load + progressive JPEG might be a further optimised solution.

Then there's the Low-Tech Magazine approach to highly optimised, low-bandwidth dithered images:

<https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how>

Dithering is to an extent a design decision, but given that most images are not actually informative but provide site styling and branding, reduced quality on most images isn't a bad trade-off. Where representational fidelity is required, vector formats, line art, SVG, and the like may be more appropriate.

I don't think the two are particularly incompatible. This seems more like a foundational statement than a demonstration of what permacomputing in current practice might look like. Sure, things like https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ have a performance element to them, but it's meant to be illustrative of what can be achieved more than just prescriptive.

A very solid (but mundane) example of permacomputing today is just holding onto an old ThinkPad and using it for meaningful work rather than feeling the need to buy a new machine every couple years.