I usually just run game servers with the extra RAM/cpu threads for my friends. If my elasticsearch cluster is particularly unused some days and I have extra bandwidth I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed. Anything that makes the btop graph look active and lively makes me feel nice.

You're talking about paying for energy, some people are concerned about consuming energy.

Your colo does that mind this use?

1. Life Cycle Assessment of Fairphone 4, showing an estimated 75% of energy use occurring during production and 16% during the lifetime of use: https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairpho...

2. Eco profile of a 13.5" Surface Laptop 5, showing 85% of energy use occurring during production and 12% during the lifetime of use: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?i...

Still, I agree with you: design for efficiency and then mend and use efficiently.

> We stress that this estimate carries some uncertainty but gives us a reasonable idea of the impact of ICT. Across studies, roughly 23% of ICT's [information and communication technologies] total footprint is from embodied emissions, yet the share of embodied emissions for user devices specifically is ca. 50%. This is because, unlike networks and data centers, user devices are only used for parts of the day and use less electricity, but are exchanged often, especially in the case of smartphones.

"embodied emissions" being emissions generated from manufacturing.

older blog discussing data from older devices and electronics:

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-d...

I was going to dispute OP's comment. Thinking of my old Athlon server that used around $20 of electricity per month, cost about $600 new IIRC (mobo+CPU+RAM), and ran for more than a decade ($2400). But there has been a concerted effort to lower device power consumption, and my current 5700G server (two generations later) uses only around $5/mo of electricity.