5 ms·

One thing nobody seems to mention is the environmental cost of inefficient software. All those wasted CPU cycles consume electricity. A single laptop or phone o

by johnr2 7y ago

One thing nobody seems to mention is the environmental cost of inefficient software. All those wasted CPU cycles consume electricity. A single laptop or phone on it's own is insignificant, but there are billions of them. Combine that with the energy wasted shovelling unnecessary crap around the internet, and it adds up to a big CO2 problem that nobody talks about.

jupp0r 7y ago
I hear that argument very frequently and I don’t buy it. Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library, all the plane trips saved by video conferencing, all the photo film, all the sheets of paper in file cabinets, all the letters being sent as emails, all the mail order catalogues, ... you get the idea. Does anybody know of a comprehensive study on this?
- johnr2 7y ago
  > Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library.... You're right that computers have saved huge amounts of energy compared with the things you mention. My point here was that even more could be saved with a bit of thought about efficiency in programming.
- UweSchmidt 7y ago
  If websites and business software were as lean as they could be, most computers could have amazingly weak, low-powered processors. I'm quite disenchanted with software myself. It takes way too long to open any program, for this JIRA ticket to properly display. One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized. I seem to remember boot times being a frequent topic of discussion the early 2000s, because people turned off their computers. In a way, this is a great little microcosm of the problem. Just fix habits instead of fixing the software.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's not either-or. I don't buy the argument that if we didn't shovel garbage that we call "software" today, we wouldn't have equivalent but better software at all. It's a multi-agent problem, and a lot of it is driven by business dysfunction, not even actual complexity or programmer laziness. In my - perhaps limited - work experience, there's enough slack in the process of software development that I don't buy the "time to market" argument all that much.
sildur 7y ago
You are going to have a heart attack if you check the energy consumption of bitcoin.
- buboard 7y ago
  Then again , you could embed those as space heaters, or cooking machines, since they dont need portability
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    But there's no point, because all those heaters aren't going to beat ASIC farms near cheap electricity sources anyway. (Do individuals really bother mining bitcoin these days anyway?)
nikofeyn 7y ago
> it adds up to a big CO2 problem that nobody talks about if you haven’t seen it already, you’d probably be interested in the below talk by chuck moore, inventor of forth. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/
- johnr2 7y ago
  > https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/ Fascinating talk. Thanks for the link.
buboard 7y ago
I agree but apparently the number is not very big - computing is max 8% perhaps of electricity usage. But it still feels so wasteful, and also wasteful of people’s time.
- Avamander 7y ago
  I think it's actually the time that matters the most. I think the tens of thousands human lifetimes killed each day on slow software we're forced to use really adds up, how exactly I don't know, it's hard to imagine what humanity would do with the millions of work hours saved.
edflsafoiewq 7y ago
I'm not sure in the accounting of the environmental costs of modern life that inefficient software counts for much. Doing totally pointless crap with highly efficient software might be worse.
AgentOrange1234 7y ago
Sure: If you can optimize the software that runs on many millions of computers then you can have a huge impact. If you run those computers yourself you can even save money. But the vast majority of software is one-off stuff. It makes no sense to optimize it for performance instead of features, development time, correctness, ease of use, etc.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > But the vast majority of software is one-off stuff. Is it now? I can't think of any example, except a few tools we use internally in a project. Everything else I use, or I see anyone else using, has an userbase of many thousands to millions, and a lot of that is used in context of work - which means a good chunk of the userbase is sitting in front of that software day in, day out.
  - ghettoimp 7y ago
    It'd be interesting to know, say, what percentage of software developers work on programs that have less than a million users. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's the majority. For every big-ticket software offering there's going to at least be things the user never interacts with, like a build system and a test suite and a bug tracking system and whatever else. And there's just so much software everywhere, most of which we never see. Every small business has its little web site. Who knows how much software there is powering this or that device or process at random factories, laboratories, and offices. The Debian popularity contest looks like it has a big long tail of relatively unpopular packages [1]. It looks like the app store has 2 million apps, only 2857 (.14%) have more than a million dollars of annual revenue. These are of course incomplete and flawed and do not really directly address the question. I don't really know how to research this in a thorough way. [1] https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst [2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/itunes-app-store-stats/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/itunes-app-store-sta...
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
It's much worse than that: what is the environmental cost of buying a new phone because Slack runs too slowly on your old one? The things I'm doing on my phone today are not fundamentally different than what I was doing ten years ago. And yet, I had to buy a new phone.
- p0nce 7y ago
  That's why tricle down carbon tax is a right answer.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
I've heard this argument often, but I don't buy it. 1. The environmental cost of ineffective software is negligible, when compared to Bitcoin mining or other forms of hardware planned obsolescence. 2. By using more efficient software, surely, you can save a lot of CPU cycles, and it can improve the energy efficiency of some specific workloads under some particular scenarios. However, on a general-purpose PC, the desire for performance is unlimited, the CPU cycles saved in one way will only be consumed in other ways, and in the end, the total CPU cycles used remain a constant. Running programs on a PC is like buying things, when you have a fixed budget but everything is cheaper, often people will just buy more. For example, I only start closing webpages when my browser becomes unacceptably slow, but if you make every webpage use 50% less system resource, I'll simply open 2x more webpages simultaneously. LED lightning is another example, while I think the overall effect is a reduction of energy uses, but in some cases, I think it actually makes people to install more lightnings, such as those outdoor billboards. This is called the Jevons paradox [0]. For PCs, certainly, as I previously stated, in specific workloads under some particular scenarios, I totally agree that there are cases that energy use can be reduced (e.g. faster system update), but I don't think it helps much in the grand scheme of things. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

by johnr2 7y ago

jupp0r 7y ago

I hear that argument very frequently and I don’t buy it. Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library, all the plane trips saved by video conferencing, all the photo film, all the sheets of paper in file cabinets, all the letters being sent as emails, all the mail order catalogues, ... you get the idea. Does anybody know of a comprehensive study on this?

johnr2 7y ago
> Think about all the gas that is saved because people don’t have to drive to the library.... You're right that computers have saved huge amounts of energy compared with the things you mention. My point here was that even more could be saved with a bit of thought about efficiency in programming.
UweSchmidt 7y ago
If websites and business software were as lean as they could be, most computers could have amazingly weak, low-powered processors. I'm quite disenchanted with software myself. It takes way too long to open any program, for this JIRA ticket to properly display. One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > One thing that has improved was boot times, I seem to remember that Windows 7 was quite a bit faster than XP. Maybe someone in upper management wanted it to be as fast as MacOS? So speed IS possible, if it is prioritized. I seem to remember boot times being a frequent topic of discussion the early 2000s, because people turned off their computers. In a way, this is a great little microcosm of the problem. Just fix habits instead of fixing the software.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's not either-or. I don't buy the argument that if we didn't shovel garbage that we call "software" today, we wouldn't have equivalent but better software at all. It's a multi-agent problem, and a lot of it is driven by business dysfunction, not even actual complexity or programmer laziness. In my - perhaps limited - work experience, there's enough slack in the process of software development that I don't buy the "time to market" argument all that much.

sildur 7y ago

You are going to have a heart attack if you check the energy consumption of bitcoin.

buboard 7y ago
Then again , you could embed those as space heaters, or cooking machines, since they dont need portability
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  But there's no point, because all those heaters aren't going to beat ASIC farms near cheap electricity sources anyway. (Do individuals really bother mining bitcoin these days anyway?)

nikofeyn 7y ago

> it adds up to a big CO2 problem that nobody talks about if you haven’t seen it already, you’d probably be interested in the below talk by chuck moore, inventor of forth. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/

johnr2 7y ago
> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip/ Fascinating talk. Thanks for the link.

buboard 7y ago

I agree but apparently the number is not very big - computing is max 8% perhaps of electricity usage. But it still feels so wasteful, and also wasteful of people’s time.

Avamander 7y ago
I think it's actually the time that matters the most. I think the tens of thousands human lifetimes killed each day on slow software we're forced to use really adds up, how exactly I don't know, it's hard to imagine what humanity would do with the millions of work hours saved.

edflsafoiewq 7y ago

I'm not sure in the accounting of the environmental costs of modern life that inefficient software counts for much. Doing totally pointless crap with highly efficient software might be worse.

AgentOrange1234 7y ago

Sure: If you can optimize the software that runs on many millions of computers then you can have a huge impact. If you run those computers yourself you can even save money. But the vast majority of software is one-off stuff. It makes no sense to optimize it for performance instead of features, development time, correctness, ease of use, etc.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> But the vast majority of software is one-off stuff. Is it now? I can't think of any example, except a few tools we use internally in a project. Everything else I use, or I see anyone else using, has an userbase of many thousands to millions, and a lot of that is used in context of work - which means a good chunk of the userbase is sitting in front of that software day in, day out.
- ghettoimp 7y ago
  It'd be interesting to know, say, what percentage of software developers work on programs that have less than a million users. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's the majority. For every big-ticket software offering there's going to at least be things the user never interacts with, like a build system and a test suite and a bug tracking system and whatever else. And there's just so much software everywhere, most of which we never see. Every small business has its little web site. Who knows how much software there is powering this or that device or process at random factories, laboratories, and offices. The Debian popularity contest looks like it has a big long tail of relatively unpopular packages [1]. It looks like the app store has 2 million apps, only 2857 (.14%) have more than a million dollars of annual revenue. These are of course incomplete and flawed and do not really directly address the question. I don't really know how to research this in a thorough way. [1] https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst https://popcon.debian.org/by_inst [2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/itunes-app-store-stats/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/itunes-app-store-sta...

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

It's much worse than that: what is the environmental cost of buying a new phone because Slack runs too slowly on your old one? The things I'm doing on my phone today are not fundamentally different than what I was doing ten years ago. And yet, I had to buy a new phone.

p0nce 7y ago
That's why tricle down carbon tax is a right answer.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago

I've heard this argument often, but I don't buy it. 1. The environmental cost of ineffective software is negligible, when compared to Bitcoin mining or other forms of hardware planned obsolescence. 2. By using more efficient software, surely, you can save a lot of CPU cycles, and it can improve the energy efficiency of some specific workloads under some particular scenarios. However, on a general-purpose PC, the desire for performance is unlimited, the CPU cycles saved in one way will only be consumed in other ways, and in the end, the total CPU cycles used remain a constant. Running programs on a PC is like buying things, when you have a fixed budget but everything is cheaper, often people will just buy more. For example, I only start closing webpages when my browser becomes unacceptably slow, but if you make every webpage use 50% less system resource, I'll simply open 2x more webpages simultaneously. LED lightning is another example, while I think the overall effect is a reduction of energy uses, but in some cases, I think it actually makes people to install more lightnings, such as those outdoor billboards. This is called the Jevons paradox [0]. For PCs, certainly, as I previously stated, in specific workloads under some particular scenarios, I totally agree that there are cases that energy use can be reduced (e.g. faster system update), but I don't think it helps much in the grand scheme of things. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox