The Art of Frugal Computing

Feeling of Computing

Feeling of Computing is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the computer is tragically less humane than it could be. There’s a world of possibilities that get more beautiful the further away from the norm you go. We’re here to explore this world together, to discuss ideas about theory and practice, and to champion and support our members’ research and development efforts to reimagine the computer.

feeling of computing, london

💞 welcome to the london branch of the feeling of computing community. 💞

Retrocomputing as a Model for Sustainable and Cognitive Computing: Lessons from Low-Resource Systems

This paper argues that retrocomputing constitutes a conceptually productive model for rethinking sustainability in contemporary computing. Early computing systems operated under strict hardware constraints, necessitating efficiency, clarity, and minimalism in both software and interaction design. In contrast, contemporary systems are frequently characterised by computational excess, software bloat, and attention-fragmenting interfaces. Drawing on examples from early home computing and command-line environments, this paper analyses how low-resource systems make visible forms of computational minimalism with relevance to present-day design challenges. A central theoretical contribution is the distinction between interface-level and system-structure-level design analysis, which demonstrates that cognitive effects arise not only from visual and interactional surface features but from deeper computational organisation. The discussion integrates perspectives from human-computer interaction and cognitive science, particularly in relation to attention, cognitive load, and user experience. The paper adopts a conceptual and exploratory approach grounded in systematic literature review, aiming to identify design-relevant patterns rather than to provide empirical validation. It introduces the concepts of computational minimalism and cognitive sustainability as complementary analytical frameworks, and derives five principles for sustainable system design. Crucially, the paper also address

Bare the wealth

A Linux programmer builds a "wealth monitor" that tracks Red Hat's valuation and who's getting rich off free software.

softer computing club

a cozy community of humans and computers on the planet earth

Home - Green Web Foundation

We need a fossil free internet by 2030. The internet is the world's biggest coal powered machine, and this is bug in the system we can fix.

Would you pay $30 a month for a faster web browser that eats less battery?

The Mighty web browser is an old idea that’s new again

at · Aesthetic Computer

A self-hosted ATProto Personal Data Server for the Aesthetic Computer community — paintings, moods, code, tapes, papers, and more.

Hold on to Your Hardware

A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.

aesthetic.computer/core

Monorepo for Aesthetic.Computer

Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again)

Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.

Feeling of Computing — Conversations