On any given day, Hacker News features the usual fare: startup funding rounds, AI model releases, developer tools. But this week, two unlikely stories climbed the ranks side by side. The Vatican's Latin-language website, a digital artifact that has existed largely unchanged since the late 1990s, and a manifesto for "permacomputing"—a philosophy that treats computing resources as finite, precious, and worth preserving.
These aren't nostalgia pieces. They're warnings.
The Vatican's Latin portal (www.vatican.va/latin) is a time capsule. No JavaScript. No analytics. No cookie banners. Just plain HTML, Latin text, and the occasional scanned papal encyclical. It works on a 20-year-old phone, a text-based browser, or a screen reader. It loads instantly on a satellite connection in rural Africa.
Meanwhile, the permacomputing principles document makes an argument that sounds radical only because we've forgotten how obvious it should be: software should be designed to last. Code should be maintainable. Hardware should be repairable. Energy should be conserved. The movement's name is a portmanteau of "permanent" and "computing," and it borrows from permaculture's ethos of building systems that sustain themselves rather than deplete their environment.
Both stories hit the same nerve: the tech industry is building on sand.
We ship apps that require 8GB of RAM to display a to-do list. We redesign interfaces every 18 months, breaking workflows and wasting millions of developer hours. We treat cloud compute as infinite, then wonder why electricity costs are eating margins. The average webpage now weighs more than the entire Doom game. A single ad tracker can consume more processing power than the Apollo guidance computer used to reach the moon.
This isn't sustainable. And the people who run the numbers know it.
Enter Barry Diller, the media mogul who built IAC and knows a thing or two about betting on the next big thing. This week he told an interviewer that he trusts Sam Altman personally—but that "trust is irrelevant" when it comes to AGI. Diller's point is brutal: even if Altman is the most honest CEO in Silicon Valley, the technology itself is an unpredictable force that no amount of good intentions can fully control.
The permacomputing crowd would nod grimly. They'd point out that AI's energy demands are already staggering, and that scaling to AGI would require data centers consuming as much power as entire nations. They'd note that the Vatican's Latin website, running on a server that probably cost less than a used Honda, has served millions of visitors for decades without crashing, without leaking data, without demanding a software update every Tuesday.
And then there's Pronto, the Indian startup that just secured backing from Lachy Groom after a 20-minute pitch. Pronto is doing 26,000 daily bookings in a market heading toward $18 billion. It's a classic venture story—fast, ambitious, scaling hard. But the company's name hints at the tension: "pronto" means "quickly," and the tech industry has been obsessed with speed for two decades.
The question nobody wants to answer: quick to what end?
The British have a word for this kind of situation. When they say "sorry," as the BBC recently explored, it often means "I'm not sorry at all, but I'm acknowledging that social friction exists." The tech industry's apologies for its excesses—the e-waste mountains, the planned obsolescence, the energy gluttony—have a similar quality. We say sorry for the data breaches. Sorry for the forced updates. Sorry for the planned obsolescence. But we keep building the same way.
The Vatican's Latin website offers a different model. It's not trying to disrupt anything. It's not chasing growth metrics. It's not optimizing for engagement. It's just there, doing its job, using as little as possible to accomplish as much as needed.
Permacomputing isn't Luddism. It's not about going back to punch cards. It's about asking a simple question before writing a line of code: will this still work in twenty years? If not, why are we building it?
That question matters because the decisions we make today about software architecture, energy consumption, and hardware design will determine whether the next generation inherits a flexible, repairable digital infrastructure—or a brittle, toxic landfill of obsolete gadgets and abandoned platforms.
For professionals trying to track these shifts across dozens of sources daily, the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal. Reportify AI helps cut through: it monitors developments like the Vatican's quiet defiance, permacomputing's growing influence, and AI regulation debates, distilling what actually matters into briefings that don't waste your time. In a world where a 20-minute pitch can land millions in funding but a 20-year-old website still outperforms most modern apps on resilience, knowing what to pay attention to is its own kind of computing power.