5 ms·

You're right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. If we can flip a bit somewhere to save some minute amount of energy, we should do that. For exampl

You're right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. If we can flip a bit somewhere to save some minute amount of energy, we should do that. For example: optimize PNGs, it's easy and a one time procedure. We can't change what's in the chair but we can change our product.

scrollaway 6y ago
If the effect is minute enough, you might be using more net energy thinking about this, typing this comment, discussing it with others and optimizing your final png than actual energy saved for your users. Feel-good savings are not helpful. You can do it but let's not pretend. Reminds me of an ex girlfriend that would account for coins she found on the ground in her monthly budget...
- robin_reala 6y ago
  It depends on scale. I’m working on a site with multiple billion visits a year, so optimising a global asset will absolutely have an effect.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  > Reminds me of an ex girlfriend that would account for coins she found on the ground in her monthly budget... Where do you find enough coins on the ground for that? I haven't come across any in my entire life.
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    Have you looked?
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    You don't, that was kinda my point :) she'd find maybe 1 eur a month if lucky.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  I assume they mean minute relative to cars or something, not minute in an absolute sense. Just as a sort of thought about this, if the entire web moved to brotli over gzip, or if we introduced an even better compression algorithm that was widely distributed across the internet, what would that impact me? A 5% reduction in CPU usage for every computer loading every page? I'd be curious to hear what that would actually amount to, power-wise.
  - brain5ide 6y ago
    I might be cynical, but that change would work only with the assumption that what is done on the page remains constant. What I guess would happen is that it would do 5% more useless operations. The limiting factor here is user's tolerance for bullshit, not some predefined functionality.
- bill_mon 6y ago
  I get your point and I agree to some extend -- a single png doesn't remove much carbon. But it's impossible to figure out where the break even point lies. It would be irresponsible to never optimize for size or cpu usage. Where would you draw the line?
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Do some napkin calculations so you get a ballpark of where the line is. That will help you discard entire categories of pointless optimizations (e.g. pictures going into a company-wide email for a 500 person company).
searchableguy 6y ago
Eh, why waste time on that when major polluters are oil, meat, packaged fast food etc. Look up Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gasprom, Exxon, Coca Cola, Nestle, Bayer, JBS, Tyson etc. Many of them are owned by investors. Why can't we punish investors which are very few compared to the number of web developers out there?
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  Maybe your hands are clean, but I'd wager most of us are customers of the companies in that list and we benefit from their behavior. Why blame the investors and not the customers?
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Most of the consumers have little choice in their consumption. Investors who are putting millions of dollars knowingly into companies that harm the environment are doing it intentionally. There is no comparison here. It's easy to change thousands/hundreds of investors responsible for these companies than billions of consumers. We have tried putting responsibility on consumers and it utterly failed. 90% of plastic isn't recycled. Many companies which promised to take your blue bin and recycle it sent it to China and other Asian countries. Repairability has only gone down.
- yoran 6y ago
  We all have a role to play in the fight against climate change. It doesn't help pointing the finger at another group of people and say that it's all their fault and that they have to fix it. It's like with taxing the wealthy. Everybody agrees the wealthier part of the population should be taxed more, but no one considers himself wealthy enough to fall in that category.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    > We all have a role to play in the fight against climate change. Yes. That's why I am proposing a real solution compared to relying on billions of people changing their habits which are intentionally forced on them by the environment. > It's like with taxing the wealthy. Everybody agrees the wealthier part of the population should be taxed more, but no one considers himself wealthy enough to fall in that category. Not comparable. Everyone who invests in companies that harm the environment get taxed heavily on their investment to offset the carbon emissions. There is no subjective wealth factor here.
josteink 6y ago
> For example: optimize PNGs, it's easy and a one time procedure. And then that PNG is loaded by a webpage, which contains no HTML, but loads 28 megabytes of JS, which your browser has to parse, JIT and run, and then that triggers loading of web-fonts, and after that we create a virtual DOM, and then render that into a real DOM... (which is probably around 150kb) And then after about 15 seconds of 100% CPU time, the browser finally has something to show... And then it loads that minified PNG. You know what? That PNG isn't the issue. That PNG probably has a highly optimized decoder, written in native code, and the relative cost of a optimized/unoptimized PNG in this case is probably 0.0001% of the total energy we just spent getting and rendering that page, a page which more often than not contains basically static content. If that page instead: 1. had been plain, pre-rendered HTML 2. had no JS, except if needed. 3. had no web-fonts, because the user already has 2000 fonts installed. (And you want to be green, right?) 4. And finally had that PNG. Then optimizing that PNG would actually have an impact. On most sites today though? Not a chance in a hell. Also: that page would render in a nano-second, so it's not just a greenification, it's an actual real world performance-optimization too.
- bill_mon 6y ago
  The savings made by a single png doesn't change in this scenario, it just drowns. One thing you can do: optimize pngs. Another thing you can do: optimize js. Focusing on the largest sinner first makes some sense, but doesn't change the fact that optimizing a png will certainly save the whales.

scrollaway 6y ago

If the effect is minute enough, you might be using more net energy thinking about this, typing this comment, discussing it with others and optimizing your final png than actual energy saved for your users. Feel-good savings are not helpful. You can do it but let's not pretend. Reminds me of an ex girlfriend that would account for coins she found on the ground in her monthly budget...

robin_reala 6y ago
It depends on scale. I’m working on a site with multiple billion visits a year, so optimising a global asset will absolutely have an effect.
searchableguy 6y ago
> Reminds me of an ex girlfriend that would account for coins she found on the ground in her monthly budget... Where do you find enough coins on the ground for that? I haven't come across any in my entire life.
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  Have you looked?
- scrollaway 6y ago
  You don't, that was kinda my point :) she'd find maybe 1 eur a month if lucky.
staticassertion 6y ago
I assume they mean minute relative to cars or something, not minute in an absolute sense. Just as a sort of thought about this, if the entire web moved to brotli over gzip, or if we introduced an even better compression algorithm that was widely distributed across the internet, what would that impact me? A 5% reduction in CPU usage for every computer loading every page? I'd be curious to hear what that would actually amount to, power-wise.
- brain5ide 6y ago
  I might be cynical, but that change would work only with the assumption that what is done on the page remains constant. What I guess would happen is that it would do 5% more useless operations. The limiting factor here is user's tolerance for bullshit, not some predefined functionality.
bill_mon 6y ago
I get your point and I agree to some extend -- a single png doesn't remove much carbon. But it's impossible to figure out where the break even point lies. It would be irresponsible to never optimize for size or cpu usage. Where would you draw the line?
- kortilla 6y ago
  Do some napkin calculations so you get a ballpark of where the line is. That will help you discard entire categories of pointless optimizations (e.g. pictures going into a company-wide email for a 500 person company).

searchableguy 6y ago

Eh, why waste time on that when major polluters are oil, meat, packaged fast food etc. Look up Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gasprom, Exxon, Coca Cola, Nestle, Bayer, JBS, Tyson etc. Many of them are owned by investors. Why can't we punish investors which are very few compared to the number of web developers out there?

names_are_hard 6y ago
Maybe your hands are clean, but I'd wager most of us are customers of the companies in that list and we benefit from their behavior. Why blame the investors and not the customers?
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Most of the consumers have little choice in their consumption. Investors who are putting millions of dollars knowingly into companies that harm the environment are doing it intentionally. There is no comparison here. It's easy to change thousands/hundreds of investors responsible for these companies than billions of consumers. We have tried putting responsibility on consumers and it utterly failed. 90% of plastic isn't recycled. Many companies which promised to take your blue bin and recycle it sent it to China and other Asian countries. Repairability has only gone down.
yoran 6y ago
We all have a role to play in the fight against climate change. It doesn't help pointing the finger at another group of people and say that it's all their fault and that they have to fix it. It's like with taxing the wealthy. Everybody agrees the wealthier part of the population should be taxed more, but no one considers himself wealthy enough to fall in that category.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  > We all have a role to play in the fight against climate change. Yes. That's why I am proposing a real solution compared to relying on billions of people changing their habits which are intentionally forced on them by the environment. > It's like with taxing the wealthy. Everybody agrees the wealthier part of the population should be taxed more, but no one considers himself wealthy enough to fall in that category. Not comparable. Everyone who invests in companies that harm the environment get taxed heavily on their investment to offset the carbon emissions. There is no subjective wealth factor here.

josteink 6y ago

> For example: optimize PNGs, it's easy and a one time procedure. And then that PNG is loaded by a webpage, which contains no HTML, but loads 28 megabytes of JS, which your browser has to parse, JIT and run, and then that triggers loading of web-fonts, and after that we create a virtual DOM, and then render that into a real DOM... (which is probably around 150kb) And then after about 15 seconds of 100% CPU time, the browser finally has something to show... And then it loads that minified PNG. You know what? That PNG isn't the issue. That PNG probably has a highly optimized decoder, written in native code, and the relative cost of a optimized/unoptimized PNG in this case is probably 0.0001% of the total energy we just spent getting and rendering that page, a page which more often than not contains basically static content. If that page instead: 1. had been plain, pre-rendered HTML 2. had no JS, except if needed. 3. had no web-fonts, because the user already has 2000 fonts installed. (And you want to be green, right?) 4. And finally had that PNG. Then optimizing that PNG would actually have an impact. On most sites today though? Not a chance in a hell. Also: that page would render in a nano-second, so it's not just a greenification, it's an actual real world performance-optimization too.

bill_mon 6y ago
The savings made by a single png doesn't change in this scenario, it just drowns. One thing you can do: optimize pngs. Another thing you can do: optimize js. Focusing on the largest sinner first makes some sense, but doesn't change the fact that optimizing a png will certainly save the whales.