8 ms·

Technically, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an elegant work of art. Pragmatically, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on the about p

*Technically*, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an elegant work of art. *Pragmatically*, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on the about page): >> "The entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production with traffic doubling roughly every 2 years" I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption. *This is why technology is brilliant.* It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation. >> " These black-and-white images are then coloured according to the pertaining content category via the browser’s native image manipulation capacities" This essentially shifts some of the burden of computation from the server (PNG compression) to the browser (dithering interpretation). This may save some energy, or it may increase energy as most personal computer processors are much less efficient than server processors, and don't benefit from energy savings from caching. I'm not sure where it nets out, but just solely focusing on reducing server compute time isn't necessarily a path toward sustainability if it shifts more computation to the client. Very happy to hear if I've misinterpreted the thesis. Again, I commend the technical work itself.

randombits0 5y ago
The state of Missouri pushes SSN sorting to the browser. I’ll allow it.
- ozzmith 5y ago
  This guy fucks.
wnkrshm 5y ago
That is entirely forgetting that you throw away and replace hardware in that timeline - what happens to the old hardware?
dahart 5y ago
It seems like we have tons of room to make the internet more efficient even without Moore’s law - how many backends and clients are written in scripting languages (PhP, Node, Python, Ruby…) without a whole lot of thought put into energy use (even if they are carefully designed to be fast or “efficient” by some metrics)? And how much of internet energy use is made of serving ads? It seems to be a growing share, and ads increasingly want to stream video, which puts things like PNG decoding & dithering in the margins of overall energy use.
y4mi 5y ago
Check out the upcoming ATX power consumption and compare it to what we're using currently... What you said was true for a very long time, but Moore's law has slowed down a lot over the last 5yrs and power consumption has increased significantly, and is about to become unreasonable in my opinion. Maximum power draw of 2.4 kw for about to 10% of the uptime is ... sadly going to be reality soon.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  > power consumption has increased significantly, and is about to become unreasonable in my opinion It is not the first time it has happened, and then went down again. It's just one of the usual "cycles".
  - y4mi 5y ago
    I don't think we've went through a circle of more then doubling the power consumption before, but I've only been paying attention to it since shortly before 2010, as I was using prebuilt systems before that. Maybe you're right and more then doubling the power consumption is a normal thing that just occasionally happens.
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      Precisely it was with Core that I think the previous "nuclear power CPUs" cycle ended.
jcoder 5y ago
I thought Moore’s Law is about the density of components on an IC—what about it suggests a constant energy usage of IC as it gets denser?
- Smithalicious 5y ago
  I believe ICs are limited by how fast you can cool them. All that energy goes into heat eventually, so temperature is going to depend only on total energy / area
  - varenc 5y ago
    Digression: Is it true that every single watt my CPU/server/electronics consume is ultimately turned into heat? To put it another way, does a server under a constant 500W produce the exact same amount of heat as a dumb 500W electric space heater? Excluding things like the tiny amount of energy that gets sent out on CAT5 cables, which I believe still gets turned into heat just elsewhere. I think this is true, but it’s still counterintuitive. Makes me think there’s something more useful we could make electric space heaters do with their energy and still produce the same amount of heat.
    - wyager 5y ago
      The only other places the energy could go are small - LED light, radio waves, sound. Almost all of it will go to heat.
      - tempestn 5y ago
        And all of those things will go to heat eventually too, as will all other energy!
    - BubbleRings 5y ago
      > something more useful... Ha! A space heater with bitcoin mining coils. Call them "bitcoils".
crazypython 5y ago
Don't forget the reduced bandwidth usage- the energy used to transport the data across the entire internet.
carlio 5y ago
Significantly, shifting the image calculations from the server to the client means the work is duplicated for every client. While it saves energy for the server, it increases the overall energy consumption required to deliver the content.
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  Apparently the mix-blend-mode for images on the client is noticable performance-wise: https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6 https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6
- soheil 5y ago
  Can one client do the work and post back the final version to the server so the server sends that version to all the other clients?
  - an_ko 5y ago
    Don't trust the client with that, or everybody is getting goatse'd.
    - soheil 5y ago
      A. Cryptographically verify the final version B. Schedule the work to be performed on multiple clients in case some fail
      - ihattendorf 5y ago
        > A. Cryptographically verify the final version How?
- united893 5y ago
  False. Energetic costs of distributing duplicate information is significantly more expensive than local computation. Eg: measuring joules spent for decompression vs transmission is orders of magnitude over the n duplication.
deanCommie 5y ago
I feel like it's a very useful metaphor for the work ahead in dealing with energy production, consumption, storage, efficiency, etc. Layer 1: We must think of clever solutions to reduce our energy footprint where possible and shifting typical energy uses around is one way to do so Layer 2: But we must also be conscious and aware of economies of scale, and shifting the burden of energy usage from one central server to N clients is ultimately not a good answer for NET energy consumption. Layer 3: But for some constrained resources, that might be worthwhile, depending on the magnitude: The incremental cost of extra rendering on the client is a rounding error. But on a solar-powered low-energy server, it MIGHT be meaningful, and be the difference between something working and not. This is a lens we must apply to everything: * Logging * Battery technology * Buying locally vs economies of scale * International shipping * Container ships * etc.
- fastball 5y ago
  I'd rather avoid all these layers and just build so much nuclear we get to a future where electricity is too cheap to meter.
  - 8bitsrule 5y ago
    Current world power consumption is about 15 terawatts. That's 15,000 gigawatts. [0] One gigawatt takes about 1 nuke. So, 15,000 nukes. Round that down to 10,000 nukes; ignore demand from new electric cars and cooling, and required downtime. On a very good day, a new nuke rounds down to $10 billion. 10^4 x 10^10 = $ 100 trillion. Not to mention mining, operating, disposal, and environmental costs. Or tsunamis, or profits, or interest. In other units (Q = 10^18 joules) Total world energy consumption per year: 400 Q. Total solar power striking the Earth each year: more than 4 x 10^6 Q.[1] Catch 1/10,000 of that. [0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/world-power-consumption.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc... [1] http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~hetheriw/energy/topics/doc/intro/total_solar_power_over_earth.pdf http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~hetheriw/energy/topics...
  - ratsforhorses 5y ago
    But isn't one of the problems of global warming (ie where humans have a "future") the amount of waste heat we are producing? https://environmentalsystemsresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40068-020-00169-2 https://environmentalsystemsresearch.springeropen.com/articl...
Thorrez 5y ago
While I agree with most of your points, I think that these dithering images use less client-side power than a regular image compression (e.g. JPEG or PNG). The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  > The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG. Just try substituting something else in that statement and see if it makes sense. “The lzma-compressed files are smaller than the raw test files, so opening them in an editor shouldn’t use more cpu” or “HEVC-compressed videos are smaller than DivX videos, so shouldn’t they be more efficient to decode and play (sans hardware acceleration)?”
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    The examples you give compare new/good compression (lzma, HVEC) with old/bad compression (uncompressed, DivX). Yes the new/good compression uses more CPU per byte. I see no reason to believe their website uses a compression scheme that uses more CPU per byte than PNG or JPEG. I don't think they're using anything advanced. Actually I just checked, and their website is using PNG.
lapinot 5y ago
> This essentially shifts some of the burden of computation from the server (PNG compression) to the browser (dithering interpretation). This may save some energy, or it may increase energy as most personal computer processors are much less efficient than server processors, and don't benefit from energy savings from caching. I believe doing image color setting is already eaten up inside the cost of doing png decompression: the client is already doing image manipulation, this is just doing an additional multiplication, so i believe it is minimal additional cost on the client (i may be wrong tho, never wrote a png decoder). > I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption. We're not doing more with the same amount of energy, we're doing much more with more energy. This is always the same energy efficiency fallacy: being more efficient (in percent "out/in") usually requires having bigger "in" (bigger scale). And you know, the thing that capitalistic companies always seek to get bigger no matter what. There's no incentive to maintain you current consumption. See https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energ... for more details by same source.
cseleborg 5y ago
> This is why technology is brilliant. It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation. But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox, the name of which I forget, which says that the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we introduced household appliances or when productivity went up. Cars became both more fuel-efficient but also heavier, so we burn more fuel. Smartphones have gotten really good at managing power, making them a viable choice for plenty of activities throughout the day, thus increasing their total energy consumption. Personally, I just don't believe more efficient tech will help reduce our power consumption. It will require either a completely different tech that doesn't require electricity or fuel to run, or a change in societal habits.
- bocytron 5y ago
  > There is this paradox, the name of which I forget It's called the Rebound Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
- Closi 5y ago
  Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked. I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.
  - ElKrist 5y ago
    "I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time spent. 20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a regular basis now and a bigger share of the population worldwide has access to similar services
    - 5y ago
selfhoster11 5y ago
> but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption Except that data bloat grows at a steady rate, and you only take advantage of Moore once you discard your old equipment and replace it with newer silicon. That generates ewaste, which is counterproductive to ecologically aware projects.

*Technically*, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an elegant work of art. *Pragmatically*, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on the about p

randombits0 5y ago

The state of Missouri pushes SSN sorting to the browser. I’ll allow it.

ozzmith 5y ago
This guy fucks.

wnkrshm 5y ago

That is entirely forgetting that you throw away and replace hardware in that timeline - what happens to the old hardware?

dahart 5y ago

It seems like we have tons of room to make the internet more efficient even without Moore’s law - how many backends and clients are written in scripting languages (PhP, Node, Python, Ruby…) without a whole lot of thought put into energy use (even if they are carefully designed to be fast or “efficient” by some metrics)? And how much of internet energy use is made of serving ads? It seems to be a growing share, and ads increasingly want to stream video, which puts things like PNG decoding & dithering in the margins of overall energy use.

y4mi 5y ago

Check out the upcoming ATX power consumption and compare it to what we're using currently... What you said was true for a very long time, but Moore's law has slowed down a lot over the last 5yrs and power consumption has increased significantly, and is about to become unreasonable in my opinion. Maximum power draw of 2.4 kw for about to 10% of the uptime is ... sadly going to be reality soon.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
> power consumption has increased significantly, and is about to become unreasonable in my opinion It is not the first time it has happened, and then went down again. It's just one of the usual "cycles".
- y4mi 5y ago
  I don't think we've went through a circle of more then doubling the power consumption before, but I've only been paying attention to it since shortly before 2010, as I was using prebuilt systems before that. Maybe you're right and more then doubling the power consumption is a normal thing that just occasionally happens.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    Precisely it was with Core that I think the previous "nuclear power CPUs" cycle ended.

jcoder 5y ago

I thought Moore’s Law is about the density of components on an IC—what about it suggests a constant energy usage of IC as it gets denser?

Smithalicious 5y ago
I believe ICs are limited by how fast you can cool them. All that energy goes into heat eventually, so temperature is going to depend only on total energy / area
- varenc 5y ago
  Digression: Is it true that every single watt my CPU/server/electronics consume is ultimately turned into heat? To put it another way, does a server under a constant 500W produce the exact same amount of heat as a dumb 500W electric space heater? Excluding things like the tiny amount of energy that gets sent out on CAT5 cables, which I believe still gets turned into heat just elsewhere. I think this is true, but it’s still counterintuitive. Makes me think there’s something more useful we could make electric space heaters do with their energy and still produce the same amount of heat.
  - wyager 5y ago
    The only other places the energy could go are small - LED light, radio waves, sound. Almost all of it will go to heat.
    - tempestn 5y ago
      And all of those things will go to heat eventually too, as will all other energy!
  - BubbleRings 5y ago
    > something more useful... Ha! A space heater with bitcoin mining coils. Call them "bitcoils".

crazypython 5y ago

Don't forget the reduced bandwidth usage- the energy used to transport the data across the entire internet.

carlio 5y ago

Significantly, shifting the image calculations from the server to the client means the work is duplicated for every client. While it saves energy for the server, it increases the overall energy consumption required to deliver the content.

edflsafoiewq 5y ago
Apparently the mix-blend-mode for images on the client is noticable performance-wise: https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6 https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6
soheil 5y ago
Can one client do the work and post back the final version to the server so the server sends that version to all the other clients?
- an_ko 5y ago
  Don't trust the client with that, or everybody is getting goatse'd.
  - soheil 5y ago
    A. Cryptographically verify the final version B. Schedule the work to be performed on multiple clients in case some fail
    - ihattendorf 5y ago
      > A. Cryptographically verify the final version How?
united893 5y ago
False. Energetic costs of distributing duplicate information is significantly more expensive than local computation. Eg: measuring joules spent for decompression vs transmission is orders of magnitude over the n duplication.

deanCommie 5y ago

I feel like it's a very useful metaphor for the work ahead in dealing with energy production, consumption, storage, efficiency, etc. Layer 1: We must think of clever solutions to reduce our energy footprint where possible and shifting typical energy uses around is one way to do so Layer 2: But we must also be conscious and aware of economies of scale, and shifting the burden of energy usage from one central server to N clients is ultimately not a good answer for NET energy consumption. Layer 3: But for some constrained resources, that might be worthwhile, depending on the magnitude: The incremental cost of extra rendering on the client is a rounding error. But on a solar-powered low-energy server, it MIGHT be meaningful, and be the difference between something working and not. This is a lens we must apply to everything: * Logging * Battery technology * Buying locally vs economies of scale * International shipping * Container ships * etc.

fastball 5y ago
I'd rather avoid all these layers and just build so much nuclear we get to a future where electricity is too cheap to meter.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  Current world power consumption is about 15 terawatts. That's 15,000 gigawatts. [0] One gigawatt takes about 1 nuke. So, 15,000 nukes. Round that down to 10,000 nukes; ignore demand from new electric cars and cooling, and required downtime. On a very good day, a new nuke rounds down to $10 billion. 10^4 x 10^10 = $ 100 trillion. Not to mention mining, operating, disposal, and environmental costs. Or tsunamis, or profits, or interest. In other units (Q = 10^18 joules) Total world energy consumption per year: 400 Q. Total solar power striking the Earth each year: more than 4 x 10^6 Q.[1] Catch 1/10,000 of that. [0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/world-power-consumption.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc... [1] http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~hetheriw/energy/topics/doc/intro/total_solar_power_over_earth.pdf http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~hetheriw/energy/topics...
- ratsforhorses 5y ago
  But isn't one of the problems of global warming (ie where humans have a "future") the amount of waste heat we are producing? https://environmentalsystemsresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40068-020-00169-2 https://environmentalsystemsresearch.springeropen.com/articl...

Thorrez 5y ago

While I agree with most of your points, I think that these dithering images use less client-side power than a regular image compression (e.g. JPEG or PNG). The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
> The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG. Just try substituting something else in that statement and see if it makes sense. “The lzma-compressed files are smaller than the raw test files, so opening them in an editor shouldn’t use more cpu” or “HEVC-compressed videos are smaller than DivX videos, so shouldn’t they be more efficient to decode and play (sans hardware acceleration)?”
- Thorrez 5y ago
  The examples you give compare new/good compression (lzma, HVEC) with old/bad compression (uncompressed, DivX). Yes the new/good compression uses more CPU per byte. I see no reason to believe their website uses a compression scheme that uses more CPU per byte than PNG or JPEG. I don't think they're using anything advanced. Actually I just checked, and their website is using PNG.

lapinot 5y ago

> This essentially shifts some of the burden of computation from the server (PNG compression) to the browser (dithering interpretation). This may save some energy, or it may increase energy as most personal computer processors are much less efficient than server processors, and don't benefit from energy savings from caching. I believe doing image color setting is already eaten up inside the cost of doing png decompression: the client is already doing image manipulation, this is just doing an additional multiplication, so i believe it is minimal additional cost on the client (i may be wrong tho, never wrote a png decoder). > I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption. We're not doing more with the same amount of energy, we're doing much more with more energy. This is always the same energy efficiency fallacy: being more efficient (in percent "out/in") usually requires having bigger "in" (bigger scale). And you know, the thing that capitalistic companies always seek to get bigger no matter what. There's no incentive to maintain you current consumption. See https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energ... for more details by same source.

cseleborg 5y ago

> This is why technology is brilliant. It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation. But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox, the name of which I forget, which says that the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we introduced household appliances or when productivity went up. Cars became both more fuel-efficient but also heavier, so we burn more fuel. Smartphones have gotten really good at managing power, making them a viable choice for plenty of activities throughout the day, thus increasing their total energy consumption. Personally, I just don't believe more efficient tech will help reduce our power consumption. It will require either a completely different tech that doesn't require electricity or fuel to run, or a change in societal habits.

bocytron 5y ago
> There is this paradox, the name of which I forget It's called the Rebound Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
Closi 5y ago
Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked. I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.
- ElKrist 5y ago
  "I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time spent. 20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a regular basis now and a bigger share of the population worldwide has access to similar services
  - 5y ago

selfhoster11 5y ago

> but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption Except that data bloat grows at a steady rate, and you only take advantage of Moore once you discard your old equipment and replace it with newer silicon. That generates ewaste, which is counterproductive to ecologically aware projects.