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Cryptocurrencies isn't the only space to have a poor environmental footprint, Machine Learning as well has a horrible record and contributes to harming the envi

Cryptocurrencies isn't the only space to have a poor environmental footprint, Machine Learning as well has a horrible record and contributes to harming the environment.

hmrr 5y ago
Also rebuilding the same docker containers 500 times a day… We could do a whole lot better with our energy usage across the whole industry.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
[flagged]
- Guest42 5y ago
  Personally, I get tired of the apples to oranges comparisons whereby bitcoins and blockchain have the same feature set as currency and banks. Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen. agreed. have you heard of hREA [1] and http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws, led by Bob and Lynn from http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org, and others? it's sort of an open source SAP alternative designed as local-first networked software. "Radically distributed supply chain systems". it uses the REA accounting method [2] to implement LETS and mutual credit type economic networks for cooperatives / small business ecosystems / commons based peer production / any transitional/solidarity economies. Bonfire is also implementing the Valueflows vocabulary on ActivityPub [3]. [1] https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea [2] http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html [3] https://bonfirenetworks.org/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/
    - Guest42 5y ago
      I appreciate the response and will have to investigate these. My more recent jobs have taken me away from these areas but they are very interesting topics. I think that there are many valid ways to improve business systems software, but that the current leaders are entrenched to a level that they won’t be replaced, similar to libre office not taking off regardless of its rich set of features. I am glad that open source databases have done well though. I recall working at a large manufacturing warehouse that switched systems, 2 years into the schedule they had to continue to push out the changeover for a variety of issues.
- colesantiago 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    So what's your intent in calling out machine learning?
jnwatson 5y ago
Let’s ban CI. Imagine all the extra CPU cycles we spend testing our software.
- occz 5y ago
  The fact that you're trying to make anyone think that the two are comparable is ridiculous.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  The difference is that CPU cycles that go to CI have value in that they expose defects in software before users run into them, where they would cause more economic damage. If CI didn't exist, then the overall utility of software would decrease, so in effect CI pays for itself. This is not so with cryptocurrency.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Do you have proof of this assertion? Otherwise it sounds like the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle greenwashing that corporations put out in the '90s to get us to believe that using plastic overconsumption wasn't really bad at all. All I'm reading is: it needs to be banned if I don't like it, but if I use it and like it then it's useful.
    - pcwalton 5y ago
      I don't want cryptocurrency mining to be banned, since it's essentially impossible to do that, but I wish people would stop mining cryptocurrency as I don't see benefits that outweigh the costs. There's nothing wrong with expressing opinions as to what society's resources should go to.
bko 5y ago
If there were only some way to allocate resources based on their most productive means. Imagine if you could attach a number to a resource, like energy, that accounts for its various possible usages. If the resource becomes more available, this number will go down and if it becomes more scarce, the number would go up. If you wanted to use the resource, you would have to pay this number. So naturally, you wouldn't pay to use the resource for something silly. Similarly, if it's important, you'd pay as much as you had to to use the resource. This would discourage people from using the resource foolishly. The beautiful thing about this system is that you don't have to have moral judgements about what is or isn't worthy. It wouldn't be up to any one individual to say you should use resource for X and not Y. The number would be self adjusting as more or less resources become made available or more or less uses for the resources are discovered. And as the number went up, it would incentivize people to create more of that resource or create a resource to replace it. If only such a number existed...
- bfdm 5y ago
  Yea this doesn't really work when the resource is also necessary to live and in parallel has massive externalities not being properly accounted for. This is some praise the market reductive lunacy. Obviously energy production, pricing and consumption needs to be heavily regulated in any sensible society.
  - thinkloop 5y ago
    If only it were possible to adjust that number to better reflect these market failings through a shared elected body of some sort...
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > If there were only some way to allocate resources based on their most productive means. If that were the case, we'd have optimal formulas to allocate goods throughout the economy and market economics would be completely obsolete. Whatever your position on markets, the reason they exist is because we don't know how to most efficiently allocate goods a priori. Markets and prices offer us a mechanism, however imperfect and prone to externalities, to allocate resources efficiently. You'd also probably be able to solve the Knapsack problem and the Multi-Armed Bandit problem. I'd love something like this also, but I'm not holding my breath.
Ekaros 5y ago
How much resources we spend on adds and tracking? What is the footprint of all the extra code that gets downloaded each time we load some website? Could we do better?
dagmx 5y ago
I assume you're talking about training? But inference in turn can save many CPU cycles by reducing computation to get results.

Cryptocurrencies isn't the only space to have a poor environmental footprint, Machine Learning as well has a horrible record and contributes to harming the environment.

hmrr 5y ago

Also rebuilding the same docker containers 500 times a day… We could do a whole lot better with our energy usage across the whole industry.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

[flagged]

Guest42 5y ago
Personally, I get tired of the apples to oranges comparisons whereby bitcoins and blockchain have the same feature set as currency and banks. Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen. agreed. have you heard of hREA [1] and http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws, led by Bob and Lynn from http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org, and others? it's sort of an open source SAP alternative designed as local-first networked software. "Radically distributed supply chain systems". it uses the REA accounting method [2] to implement LETS and mutual credit type economic networks for cooperatives / small business ecosystems / commons based peer production / any transitional/solidarity economies. Bonfire is also implementing the Valueflows vocabulary on ActivityPub [3]. [1] https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea [2] http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html [3] https://bonfirenetworks.org/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/
  - Guest42 5y ago
    I appreciate the response and will have to investigate these. My more recent jobs have taken me away from these areas but they are very interesting topics. I think that there are many valid ways to improve business systems software, but that the current leaders are entrenched to a level that they won’t be replaced, similar to libre office not taking off regardless of its rich set of features. I am glad that open source databases have done well though. I recall working at a large manufacturing warehouse that switched systems, 2 years into the schedule they had to continue to push out the changeover for a variety of issues.
colesantiago 5y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  So what's your intent in calling out machine learning?

jnwatson 5y ago

Let’s ban CI. Imagine all the extra CPU cycles we spend testing our software.

occz 5y ago
The fact that you're trying to make anyone think that the two are comparable is ridiculous.
pcwalton 5y ago
The difference is that CPU cycles that go to CI have value in that they expose defects in software before users run into them, where they would cause more economic damage. If CI didn't exist, then the overall utility of software would decrease, so in effect CI pays for itself. This is not so with cryptocurrency.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Do you have proof of this assertion? Otherwise it sounds like the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle greenwashing that corporations put out in the '90s to get us to believe that using plastic overconsumption wasn't really bad at all. All I'm reading is: it needs to be banned if I don't like it, but if I use it and like it then it's useful.
  - pcwalton 5y ago
    I don't want cryptocurrency mining to be banned, since it's essentially impossible to do that, but I wish people would stop mining cryptocurrency as I don't see benefits that outweigh the costs. There's nothing wrong with expressing opinions as to what society's resources should go to.

bko 5y ago

If there were only some way to allocate resources based on their most productive means. Imagine if you could attach a number to a resource, like energy, that accounts for its various possible usages. If the resource becomes more available, this number will go down and if it becomes more scarce, the number would go up. If you wanted to use the resource, you would have to pay this number. So naturally, you wouldn't pay to use the resource for something silly. Similarly, if it's important, you'd pay as much as you had to to use the resource. This would discourage people from using the resource foolishly. The beautiful thing about this system is that you don't have to have moral judgements about what is or isn't worthy. It wouldn't be up to any one individual to say you should use resource for X and not Y. The number would be self adjusting as more or less resources become made available or more or less uses for the resources are discovered. And as the number went up, it would incentivize people to create more of that resource or create a resource to replace it. If only such a number existed...

bfdm 5y ago
Yea this doesn't really work when the resource is also necessary to live and in parallel has massive externalities not being properly accounted for. This is some praise the market reductive lunacy. Obviously energy production, pricing and consumption needs to be heavily regulated in any sensible society.
- thinkloop 5y ago
  If only it were possible to adjust that number to better reflect these market failings through a shared elected body of some sort...
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> If there were only some way to allocate resources based on their most productive means. If that were the case, we'd have optimal formulas to allocate goods throughout the economy and market economics would be completely obsolete. Whatever your position on markets, the reason they exist is because we don't know how to most efficiently allocate goods a priori. Markets and prices offer us a mechanism, however imperfect and prone to externalities, to allocate resources efficiently. You'd also probably be able to solve the Knapsack problem and the Multi-Armed Bandit problem. I'd love something like this also, but I'm not holding my breath.

Ekaros 5y ago

How much resources we spend on adds and tracking? What is the footprint of all the extra code that gets downloaded each time we load some website? Could we do better?

dagmx 5y ago

I assume you're talking about training? But inference in turn can save many CPU cycles by reducing computation to get results.