Free Software Philosophy with Energy Design Priorities

Why this?

Free Software today is like a aircraft carrier. What started as a raft on the 386, became a kernel with over 8 million lines of code. Today you can use Linux on microcontrollers, 64 core processors, but nothing user space with a priority on energy-first design. The purpose of this repository is to explicitly focus on designing a kernel based for a solar powerable mobile device. https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-libre-autarkic-laptop This project rejects the mainline kernel philosophy and seeks to make an RTOS such as Zephyr for userspace applications and not IoT.

License changed to Gaia Public License- where all code belongs to the earth. I would call it GPL, but to avoid ambiguity with the other GPL, I call it the EPL.

Software license page: https://gist.github.com/hatonthecat/129c4da1f11a3a69ac25072d7e834b48

The only alignment in this philosophy is eco-alignment. Contrast with AI, which constantly needs to re-align with anthropic principles. The priorities of AGI and ASI are never in perfect alignment, and the time it takes to realign temporarily is an inefficiency shouldered by externalities.

This open source design may resemble

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware#Reception_and_impact

"Further, Vasilis Kostakis et al.[80] have argued that open-source hardware may promote values of equity, diversity and sustainability. Open-source hardware initiative transcend traditional dichotomies of global-local, urban-rural, and developed-developing contexts. They may leverage cultural differences, environmental conditions, and local needs/resources, while embracing hyper-connectivity, to foster sustainability and collaboration rather than conflict.[80] However, open-source hardware does face some challenges and contradictions. It must navigate tensions between inclusiveness, standardization, and functionality.[80] Additionally, while open-source hardware may reduce pressure on natural resources and local populations, it still relies on energy- and material-intensive infrastructures, such as the Internet. Despite these complexities, Kostakis et al. argue, the open-source hardware framework can serve as a catalyst for connecting and unifying diverse local initiatives under radical narratives, thus inspiring genuine change.[80]"

https://www.appropedia.org/Open_Source_Appropriate_Technology

"Criticism This type of idea is clearly not mainstream and suffers from the same criticisms as open source software. In addition, it has been claimed that the decline of the appropriate technology movement is said to be part of the 'remasculinization' of US after the Vietnam War through the Reagan regime.[12] According to Pursell, AT failed because of the inability to counter advocates of agribusiness, large private utilities, and multinational construction companies. These groups maintained the elitist, narrow and traditional definition of the word 'technology' to forward their interests, and not those of the developing world.[12]"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106707

https://249x.substack.com/p/garbatrage-for-sustainable-robotics

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563657.3596128

https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes#the-climate-tribes-of-today

"Those in climate tech bring a “disruptor’s mindset” to climate. They can be characterized as mildly reactionary to the eco-globalists, believing that the last two decades of global negotiations have little to show for, and that we can instead move faster and more efficiently through the early-stage private sector – primarily, startups. Some in climate tech still have battle scars from the early 2000s cleantech bubble, but enough time has passed that a new generation is willing to learn from previous lessons and experiment with new opportunities.

Those in climate tech see policy as a means of unlocking innovation, rather than as a primary tool for change. The goal is to remove policy roadblocks, not add more (see, for example, the Institute for Progress’s paper on National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reform, which argues that the environmental review process is “slowing down the clean energy transition”). Instead, they focus on innovating through commercial markets.

...While energy maximalists skew more towards the R&D side of technology, climate tech operates more on the commercial side of the pipeline: bringing existing technologies to market. Those in climate tech are always looking for low-hanging fruit, overlooked gaps and points of leverage. The carbon removal initiative Frontier, for example, released a “carbon removal (CDR) gap database”, highlighting major knowledge and innovation barriers to carbon removal."

The ironic thing is that some climate tech is actually heavily R&D, but does involve existing technologies, with the exception that R&D is geared towards optimized energy efficiency, rather than an existing technology. Performance per watt computers, for example, unlocking solar-powerable mobile devices. While commercial pipeline is certainly part of the effort, climate tech is potentially the most disruptive of the tribes, including that of energy maximalists, because climate tech seeks to optimize the performance per energy consumed, rather than encouraging maximum production of energy if the path to that involves expensive maintenance (e.g. nuclear).

From Climate Tribes article ^

From Climate Tribes article ^

"Hard stick in the very center: Not very tasty, but a necessary and oft-unappreciated foundation. This group would work in climate regardless of its trendiness: those with science backgrounds, or in relevant industries like energy or manufacturing. They’re motivated by personal curiosity and desire to solve an (often technical) problem."

The charts above points out that certain "climate tech" (which I consider anything energy efficient) developments are low-hanging fruits, overlooked gaps,and points of leverage to make progress more quickly. I think this is far more true in semi-conductor design such as fabless startups that seek to design more energy efficient chips that do not require large wafer dies, yet offer modular chiplets that allow many low-volume customers. While AI startups overlap in some of these regions, a lot of inefficiencies result in devloping software and hardware for platforms that may not be supported years from now, leading some to question the resource utilizaton of certain datacenters.