Sustainability

Here is how most of us ship software in 2026. You pick a framework, pull in a few hundred dependencies, and your service idles at a gigabyte of RAM before it does a single useful thing. Nobody profiles it. Nobody asks why. If it’s slow, you scale up. Compute is cheap, your time is expensive, and the bill goes to someone else. We’ve accepted this as normal. I used to live in a different world. I’d spend hours, sometimes whole weekends, squeezing every last byte out of code. Getting a program to run on hardware that “couldn’t possibly” handle it was the best feeling I knew. My inspiration was the demoscene: impossible visual effects rendered in 64 kilobytes or less. I’d watch one and just sit there asking myself, how on earth did they do that? ...

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming. Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and through them: stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere. There’s a note taped to the wall: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” I bring this thought experiment up when I’m in the right mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction. What it actually does is strip away the thing most of us never question: the assumption that there is an “outside” that absorbs our mistakes and refills our supplies. ...