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Ask HN: Shouldn't we be turning an eye to power consumption?
Our corporate policy is to fully scan our Hard Disks with AV weekly. It never finds anything. That's 22,000 systems using a full CPU core every week...adding wear and heat and power consumption.
Likewise, marketing for this fastest hardware generally consists of a product that's 140% the cost, 110% of the performance, and 120% of the power consumed due to processor binning and supply/demand curves.
SaaS is a bottomless hole where you throw your processing without thought of power consumption, just write a check and make it go away.
Flight Simulator 2020 requires a 250gb download, every couple of months. Every endpoint, every cable modem, every Akamai cache.
I don't know how to even formulate the statement: Maybe consider your carbon footprint when performing that next full code compile?
- danamit 5y agoWanna be power efficient? be poor. You will consume less meat, won't buy needless consumer electronics, and won't change your PC/phone as often, won't buy energy waste hobbies things, won't waste gas, won't travel in planes.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoIt is true that climate change is a problem caused by the rich (whether they are in China or the US). The world's wealthiest 10% were responsible for around half of global emissions in 2015 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-climate-how-to-make-the-rich-pay-for-their-carbon-emissions https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-climate-how-to-m...
- kleer001 5y ago> Maybe consider your carbon footprint when performing that next full code compile? Why "Carbon footprint" is a lie. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AKR2j4CymosDtmfEoDt2geSCtk9QoyyXBb2QdBj4jkE/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AKR2j4CymosDtmfEoDt2geSC... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE https://medium.com/woodworkers-of-the-world-unite/your-carbon-footprint-is-a-lie-b5318ed65cfb https://medium.com/woodworkers-of-the-world-unite/your-carbo... That said being efficient is not a bad idea. There is a market for chips with less power consumption. A 250GB seasonal DL is kinda wasteful. But the solution to climate change (and it's not a crisis) is not atoning for our eco-sins. That's a misapplication of the JudeoChristian myth of sin/salvation.
- Damogran6 5y agoI'm thinking Carbon footprint is shorthand for other wasteful consumption behaviors. Likewise, things like trading carbon-credits is also a boondoggle. Keep doing what you're doing, so long as someone else uses less carbon and can trade.
- brimble 5y agoImplemented correctly, a carbon credit market ought to be putting economic pressure on everyone to use power more efficiently, or to switch to renewables. It's supposed to be the market-based conservative approach to regulating externalities in a commons—allow companies to do what they like, but make them pay for it, while encouraging others who can cut back or switch to do so in order to sell credits on the market, or at least to stop paying for their own. Doesn't mean a particular implementation of it will be any good, but the idea is sound.
- kleer001 5y agoCap and trade for sulphur dioxide and IMHO it worked pretty well (where's the acid rain anymore?) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnrFuat458g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnrFuat458g https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/us-sulphur-dioxide-cap-and-trade-programme-and-lessons-climate-policy https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/us-sulphur-dioxide-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ruined 5y agoas the people who build the tools, tech workers have sightly more responsibility here than any random individual
- kleer001 5y agoI would say that the managers and business owners have that power you're pointing at. IMHO the code monkey implementing solution XYZ could use more power efficient solution ABC, but it'd take 20% longer or cost 10% more and Manager/Owner doesn't want to pay that as its an externalized cost and will cut into their profits this year. This is the essence of the tragedy of the commons. Solution? Price everything. EVERYTHING.
- wmf 5y agoI worked on server power efficiency for ten years and I don't think it's too bad. It's true that people are doing vastly more with computers than we used to and thus more energy is being consumed, but efficiency has also increased. Total energy consumption per capita is flat or going down in the developed world. Mainstream laptops and phones get better battery life than ever before yet batteries have gotten smaller. In the cloud, there's a correlation between cost and resource consumption so incentives to reduce cost also reduce energy.
- ryanmcbride 5y agonot to mention that while the process is slow, renewable energy makes up a larger percent of the grid every year (okay some years are less than the previous year but it's still, just barely, trending upwards). https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
- burntoutfire 5y ago> Total energy consumption per capita is flat or going down in the developed world. That's probably because energy intensive activities, like e.g. actually producting stuff, are outsourced to the developing world.
- wmf 5y agoOutsourcing definitely needs to be considered, but even that is not bad: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring
- mikewarot 5y agoIt's hobby horse of mine, so I may be wrong, but I believe with a capability based operating system, you'd never have to blindly trust an executable ever again, and thus could completely get rid of virus scanning as a process. Genode and Fuchsia can't get here soon enough for me.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoThe challenge will be in defining the user data model with the correct amount of detail and granularity such that capability requests are meaningful. Also, there will always be lazy users. For example, on the Outlook app for iOS - when attaching a picture to an email from your Photos - you can provide permission for the Outlook app to see just the pictures you select, all pictures, or deny permission completely. Awesome - but how many just share everything? How many users really look at the permissions requested by the Android apps they install? But it does make anything that goes wrong completely the user's fault, though.
- taeric 5y agoYeah... no. This is basically a non-starter. You are hoping to solve a social problem with technology. And all evidence is pointing that things are getting more and more expansive, not less. Specifically, we had perfectly capability based devices for a long time. VCRs, TVs, game consoles, mp3 players, etc. I see no reason to think a larger convergence isn't on the way. I think we /may/ see some advance to protect account access. But, I just can't buy that it will be groundbreaking anytime soon. At least, no better than the yubikey access I already have setup.
- closeparen 5y agoThat is not what capability based security means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
- taeric 5y agoMy point was the single function devices had no way of getting permission outside their function. As things converge, this becomes a problem. And unless you are going to force some permissions to be exclusive of others... you have a trap. I should say I will be delighted to be proven wrong. If things really become more secure, that can only be good. My assertion is still that this is largely a non technological problem, and throwing more technology at will only make it different, at best.
- BenoitEssiambre 5y agoNah just make sure you have 660A power distribution cards on hand and CPU with garden size coolant hoses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtaanCENbc&t=629s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtaanCENbc&t=629s
- chillacy 5y agoAmdahl's law suggests that "we" (assuming readers here are monolithic enough to call a collective) would have more effect optimizing the dominant power consumers, and I would guess that would be some sort of industrial process or electric heating as opposed to consumer electronics.
- zaroth 5y agoEnergy is the key driver of productivity in this world. Now, energy costs money, which incentivizes people to try to use it efficiently to achieve whatever their goal or whatever it is they’re trying to produce. The question isn’t quite “should we worry about power consumption” because the market already does that pretty efficiently. Generally speaking people will try not to just throw away money if they can think of a better way to spend it. So let’s assume we’re not talking about eliminating pure waste, because that’s an obvious answer. There are a lot of companies that focus on identifying and eliminating energy waste actually. But I think what you’re asking is, to what extend should we actually limit marginally productive uses of energy in order to reduce overall consumption, even when the value of the end-product exceeds the cost of the energy? My personal answer to that is… not at all. In fact, I think energy is way too expensive overall currently, and we need to be working very hard as a society to drive down the cost of energy, and in turn, increase per-capita energy usage significantly. Energy usage is directly correlated with standard of living, health, and economic output / productivity. Increasing energy costs or throttling energy usage is a regressive tax and ultimately stymies economic growth. I would guess that the next great human accomplishments in my lifetime will be a human on Mars, abundant clean energy on Earth, and cheap/practical immunotherapy to cure cancer and auto-immune diseases at low cost. I doubt it will be quite a “Mr. Fusion” on the Tesla I can toss breakfast scraps into and then drive 300 miles, but for example, solar panels and battery system efficient and cheap enough to give me all the energy I could need for something on the order of $1-$2 a day (current electric bill is more like $12-$15 / day).
- agumonkey 5y agoThe physical aspect seems drowned in human group chaos. Slight example: public sector agencies can be so inefficient, people have to come multiple times for almost no reasons, that's useless transportation. I've witnessed it in a courthouse. Rethinking our workflows, leveraging more IT (proper IT) here would help I believe.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago>Generally speaking people will try not to just throw away money if they can think of a better way to spend it. Actually I think that is exactly what we do. My neighbours buy bigger and bigger cars which have very little extra utility for them. The same for their houses. Conspicuous consumption is a thing. >Energy usage is directly correlated with standard of living, health, and economic output / productivity. Energy use in the UK has declined over the last twenty years whilst the economy has been growing. Health is largely a function of clean water, good diet and exercise. Food in particular has been consuming a decreasing part of the economy for a century. We can go a long way by being a lot smarter, the laptop I'm typing this on consumes a fraction of the energy of the one I used twenty years ago. The new houses near me use heat pumps vs the resistive heating in my house. >I doubt it will be quite a “Mr. Fusion” on the Tesla I can toss breakfast scraps into and then drive 300 miles, but for example, solar panels and battery system efficient and cheap enough to give me all the energy I could need for something on the order of $1-$2 a day (current electric bill is more like $12-$15 / day). I can remember when we were promised energy too cheap to meter. It didn't happen and I doubt it ever will. Wishful thinking isn't going to get us out of the mess we have created.
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- lokimedes 5y agoI don’t see this as a problem that can be solved by markets. Energy is a very asymmetric utility - its cost may define whether people can heat og cool their homes, pump water or uphold other essential functions. That cheap power can be misused for crypto mining does not make raising prices the answer. That is what legislation is for, ban or tax antisocial use of a shared resource. Having multiple mega constellations in low earth orbit is an excellent example of how we misuse scarce resources in the name of free markets.
- DocTomoe 5y agoWe must be careful not to go into the other direction, leading to a single source of truth of what is acceptable behaviour, which would be easily corruptable, and undermining consumer choice by only having singular service providers (which kills innovation). If you go the market approach, people are going to change consumption patterns (see: higher gas prices in Europe leading to more sensible cars on the road as compared to the States). If you roll that out for industrial consumers, large gains can be made. And us, IT people? Maybe it is time to stop solving every mundane problem by having 200 mb of external JS libraries being included into your code. Maybe processor cycles DO matter, and being wasteful with them SHOULD be publicly named and shamed. But we won't save the world by shutting down a flight simulator.
- valbaca 5y agoPremature optimization....compared to the energy a single shipping tanker, long-haul truck, car, or even microwave compute energy is microscopic. Might as well worry about how much air you breathe is contributing to global CO2 levels. That said, I think there's also some gains to be had at the top of the stream: tool-builders and with projects. It's all a numbers game. Video games and simulators are an incredible waste of energy at every step of the way. New graphics cards require tons of engineers to design, simulate and that's before the silicon's even been bought. Next is creation, boxing, and shipping. Then RUNNING it. I guarantee that playing the simulator for 5 mins uses more energy than a dozen downloads. But it's all a numbers game. How many people are running high end graphics cards? How many are playing that simulator? etc. All that said, I'm also thinking about this. I wonder how much I could save by, say, switching from JS/Java to Rust. I don't know the answer. I'm mostly musing and it's probably naive or grasping at what little I can do as an individual to help the climate crisis. It's so big, we have to do something, but at the same time, there's nothing we can do? Attempts could have negative consequences? Hell, even typing this on my giant monitor probably spent more energy than I could ever hope to save in my life.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoAt 270 watts, your graphics card is using less energy in a day than it takes to drive your 2k pound car down the street to buy a coffee at Starbucks. A gallon of gas is ~33kWh. A mile is ~1kWh.
- Damogran6 5y agoLooking at what it takes to replace a gas fueled generator with solar, it's easy to overlook how much power is in gas. The one upside to permanent solar is that it's always producing when there's enough sun...unlike a generator that needs to be using fuel to make power.
- dahfizz 5y agoYeah, gasoline is incredibly energy dense. Unfortunately, internal combustion engines are also really inefficient. The Tesla battery pack weighs over 1000lbs, but only carries the same energy as 3 gallons of gas.
- mordechai9000 5y agoI thought this was going to be an argument for adopting Rust on the basis of power consumption.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoIn fairness, that is an argument that is made - https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-least-electricity/ https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-l... - although it's perhaps better put as "use basically any compiled language" (even Go, at 3x the energy use of C, pales before the 29x of PHP and 76x of Python).
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoIn general, computers just aren't that bad. Yes, it's wasteful, but... even pegging a CPU core for a few hours just doesn't use that much electricity. If you drove a car into the office and then turned off every computer in the building and drove home for the weekend, the commute burned more energy than you saved. I used to play with my laptops trying to get power use down, but eventually realized that I could turn off a light or lower the heat 1 degree and save at least as much power. > SaaS is a bottomless hole where you throw your processing without thought of power consumption, just write a check and make it go away. On the contrary, this is the best case - energy is priced in, you pay by the CPU-second, all the incentives are perfectly aligned. That it's so cheap probably demonstrates that it just isn't that big a deal (we can argue about effective subsidies, but at least Google is using enough renewable power that I doubt it).
- epgui 5y agoYou could say the same about individual cars (they don't use that much energy/hydrocarbons/electricity), but in aggregate, just like cars, compute is extremely expensive in terms of energy. Edit: note that I'm not trying to compare an individual car to an individual computer, or even aggregate cars to aggregate computers... My point was merely that aggregate compute is very energy intensive. :)
- agumonkey 5y ago90hp (an average car I believe) is 70kW, that's 1000 gaming rigs (700W) in max consumption, but I assume it would still be 1000 more under small loads. And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think. Mine were actually closer to 30W, even under load (realizing this is when I stopped caring:]). EDIT: This does seem to vary a lot by device, though; I may just happen to have owned really low-power devices.
- CyanLite2 5y agoI think an easier answer for all of this with a more direct impact to consumers wallets and carbon consumption is to use more DC wiring inside homes. Those big ugly power supply bricks that we all carry around for our laptops... it converts AC power to DC power that's used by your device. Your cell phone adapter, your Xbox/PS5, etc..etc.. Nearly every one of our electronic devices require converting AC input to DC so you can plug into a standard wall outlet. You can expect about a 5-20% on average power loss just to do the conversion. With alternative energies coming online from DC sources, the power loss is starting to get pretty bad. DC Input (solar/wind) -> High-Voltage AC (for transmission lines) -> Low-Voltage AC (240v coming into your home) -> Power Brick -> DC Output (just so you can charge your phone). 5-20% power loss each time that's converted just to pull 5 volts @ 3 amps just to charge a cell phone.
- nebula8804 5y agoDo these newfangled GaN power supplies improve this metric somewhat?
- CyanLite2 5y agoNope, still does AC-to-DC conversion
- ianai 5y agoIt'd be really cool if something like USB-C were fleshed out enough to really "deserve" to be added as an outlet option alongside the usual. Maybe in a few revisions (aka a decade or two?) a successor to USB-C will finally nail this unambiguously.
- sp332 5y agoYou can buy outlets with USB ports built in. Long-distance USB would probably have issues with voltage dropping unless you used some beefy cable. Also, USB PD negotiates between individual devices, so you need some extra logic per port instead of just stringing them up in parallel like normal power outlets.
- stocknoob 5y agoEveryone should shave their head to lower their collective weight and save energy on transportation costs. That’s what this line of thinking is.
- asasidh 5y agoConsuming power is not a thing to apologize for.
- epgui 5y agoIMO it's not about how much you use, it's about what you do with what you use. Efficiency is a virtue.
- asasidh 5y agoYou are more than incentivized to make most with any of your resources. The push towards fragile energy and greenwashing is bad as Europe just realized.
- nebula8804 5y agoProblem with this line of thinking is that you are not really paying the full cost of most energy sources but the cost is evidently forced to be paid either in the form of degraded environment or issues in your country down the road(refugee crisis, nuclear failures, etc.) There is never a free lunch.
- dabinat 5y agoI think Bitcoin does a lot more damage than your AV scan does. At least you are incentivized for profit reasons not to let your energy bill get too out of control, whereas Bitcoin flips those incentives and actively rewards energy wastage. But if your company is serious about reducing emissions, they could consider solar/storage or carbon offsets. I think what hardware you buy and where the energy comes from is more important than how you actually use it.
- giraffe_lady 5y agoYeah or take the case recently where airlines were flying empty planes around europe to keep their airport slots or something. You could spend years overhauling efficiency in the entire global tech industry and succeed and it would be undone by a couple cases like that. Cases like that happen all the time: we mostly consider acting on economic incentives valid unless it's specifically illegal. Which is not to say this isn't a thing we should do eventually, or maybe even start thinking about now. I haven't done the math on this but my guess is we could balance out the carbon cost of all datacenters by shutting down a few dozen coal power plants. We are building new coal power plants.
- giantg2 5y agoThe things you describe are likely nothing compared to the HVAC, hot water, commute, etc energy requirements that companies are creating by forcing people back into the office. I don't really see a problem with a weekly scan. Then again, that would be a massive step forward for my company. We have switched mostly to laptops. But until recently most people had a desktop at work and it stayed on continously (per the company policy). I tried suggesting wake on LAN a decade ago. My suggestion was ignored.
- hnplj 5y ago
- prostoalex 5y agoShouldn't we be turning an eye to power generation? From infrastructure perspective, rather than chase millions of consumption endpoints, it's just more efficient to replace polluting generating facilities with nuclear, wind, solar, or even newer gas-burning plants with carbon capture.
- legalcorrection 5y agoWhenever I've had unmetered electricity, I've left the air conditioner running all day at a very low temperature. It's really nice when it's 90 degrees out and you walk into your home and it's 68 degrees. Truly incredible. I also bought incandescent bulbs because they're cheaper (again, not paying electricity) and look so much nicer. I take very long hot showers all the time. I love to get in my car and go for long drives. Just for fun. Paper plates because I can just throw them away. Flush early and flush often. I set my work desktop to stay on all night so I can RDP in without trouble. For every self-flagellating member of the church of environmentalism, there are ten people like me.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoYou are going to find it so painful when change is forced on you.
- legalcorrection 5y agoNot really. If the environmentalists ever take over, it's poor people who will be forced to sacrifice their comforts. The middle class will have to take a bit of a financial hit. And the wealthy will carry on like nothing changed.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoNot really, poor people aren't causing this problem. In fact they stand to gain from many of the changes. It's the rich who have most to lose.
- legalcorrection 5y agoSpoken with the confidence of ignorance of economics.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoNot really, it's not the poor who are taking flights to Bali or buying new SUV's. Climate change is driven by consumption and the poor don't consume much. They also benefit when you start putting in changes like better public transport, cycle paths, etc.
- eternityforest 5y agoI still think file serving should be done by dedicated cache hardware. If a gigabit ethernet switch is tiny, and ram and SSDs are pretty low power, we should be able to make a low powered cache box that can serve tens of gigabits on a few watts. We really should think of optimization from the start if we want to do it at all. How much of that 250GB actually changes between updates? What kind of changes would be needed to be able to only scan changed files? Some of that stuff is easier to address at the start. But all in all, computers seem to almost always be more efficient than whatever analog thing they replaced, even if they are occasionally slightly less enjoyable(see Blockbuster vs Netflix)