February 21, 2026
Zero-waste PCs meet zero-chill comments
Permacomputing
Keep gadgets longer, use less power—fans cheer, critics say “apocalypse cosplay”
TLDR: Permacomputing pushes long-lasting, repairable, low‑energy tech built from what we already have. The comments explode into a clash of idealists vs. realists—some seeing noble hacker values and right‑to‑repair, others mocking it as doomsday cosplay, with meme‑y “Urbit vibes” and apocalypse book jokes everywhere.
Permacomputing is the slow fashion of tech: keep your devices for years, use less energy, and build stuff with screws not glue so you can fix it. Its playbook talks “design for disassembly,” mix‑and‑match software, and even “salvage” or “collapse” computing—using what’s already out there, or what’s left after a disaster. But the real show is in the comments: one reader calls the page “alien,” another shouts “Urbit vibes,” and a third counters that this is how the old‑school hackers thought—iconoclasts with dirt under their fingernails.
The biggest fight? Whether this is genius sustainability or performance art for doomsday preppers. A skeptic dunks on the Collapse OS angle as “unrealistic,” while a doomer‑comedian suggests printing code on platinum pages because “AI can’t destroy books (yet).” Meanwhile, others romanticize the ethos as a return to tools you actually own and can remake, not monolithic apps you throw away. There’s even a side‑quest flame about whether to code in Lisp, Forth, or straight assembly—because of course there is. Love it or loathe it, the crowd agrees on one spicy point: if tech is going to stick around, planned longevity beats planned obsolescence. Oh, and yes—still getting those Urbit vibes.
Key Points
- •Permacomputing prioritizes planned longevity, maintenance, and minimal energy use over planned obsolescence.
- •Design-for-disassembly enables repair and end-of-life reclamation using fasteners, material labeling, and everyday tools.
- •Frugal, salvage, and collapse computing define resource-limited strategies for using existing or surviving infrastructure.
- •Open computation emphasizes recombinable parts and in-context modification, beyond traditional open-source models.
- •Malleability levels range from silo to deep, aiming for seamless message flow; designing for reversibility reduces error costs and increases approachability.