You'll be glad you know ed on that day when you're stuck with nothing but a thin-client teletype terminal on Mars and having to edit a file stored on Earth 24 light-minutes away.
I call Andy Weir's stuff Back-of-The-Envelope-Calculation-fic and Chipperfic, because both his The Martian and Project Hail Mary have a ton of back of the envelope calculations and a chipper protagonist. _
There is a price. Each character entails a bit more entropy in the universe. The price is small, but the currency with which it is paid one in limited supply.
Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible.
The heat death of the universe, also known as the Big Freeze (or Big Chill), is a scenario under which continued expansion results in a universe that asymptotically approaches absolute zero temperature.[18] Under this scenario, the universe eventually reaches a state of maximum entropy in which everything is evenly distributed and there are no energy gradients—which are needed to sustain information processing, one form of which is life. This scenario has gained ground as the most likely fate.[19]
In this scenario, stars are expected to form normally for 10^12 to 10^14 (1–100 trillion) years, but eventually the supply of gas needed for star formation will be exhausted. As existing stars run out of fuel and cease to shine, the universe will slowly and inexorably grow darker. Eventually black holes will dominate the universe, which themselves will disappear over time as they emit Hawking radiation.
Remember the cost, when your fancy modeline with Unicode in color sits at the bottom of your virtual terminal.