7 ms·

> just to save some developer time That's actually the #1 reason to use any of these bloated development environments. And it's also the reason why it's so pop

> just to save some developer time That's actually the #1 reason to use any of these bloated development environments. And it's also the reason why it's so popular. But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs.

AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
Exactly this. I have a brand new laptop and I could swear I had much more responsiveness in any other chat app 15 years ago than I have now in MS Teams. Everything is delayed and "not immediate" while 15 years ago it was in Skype! How much power is being wasted, CO2 generated globally because of this?
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Microsoft Teams is a disaster and its slowness is not due to Electron but Angular.
  - AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
    Two crème de la crèmes of modern software.
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      Not really, Angular.js is obsolete technology.
      - EGreg 4y ago
        The new Angular which is based on Typescript is not
- papito 4y ago
  Computing resources were scarce, which made us better code-writers. We had to think about this. Scarcity leads to efficiency. Abundance leads to complacency. The new generation just assumes that all database/network calls and UI plumbing is magical and free.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Bitcoin / Ethereum will peak any device perform if the calculation such as an ASIC, CPU or GPU which is 200 watts or more. I don’t think that Discord or Slack aren’t even peaking CPUs or GPUs while they are running and also they don’t run 24 hours a day.
- AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
  Then again they run on magnitudes more computers.
  - zitterbewegung 4y ago
    ASICS can pull 3 kilowatts. A MacBook Air m1 pulls 15 watts and a gaming computer is around 750 watts.
  - dwohnitmok 4y ago
    WARNING: lots of handwaving arithmetic, but in the spirit of "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing with made-up statistics" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its...) I was curious so I checked on my computer. I don't have Discord, but I do have Slack on and use it all the time (calls, screen sharing, the whole shebang). All Slack-related processes in total have used about 0.6% of my total CPU time (a bit of a high estimate because of how that calculation takes into account things like wakeup, but let's go with it). My computer uses probably about 15 watts on average as a high-end estimate. That gets us to about 0.09, say 0.1 watts on average. My computer is on for about half the day, so let's say 0.05 watts. If we consider Slack's current active user stats (it looks like 10 million?) that gets us 500 kilowatts. It seems like most sources agree that Bitcoin's power usage is probably around 10 gigawatts. So based on Slack's current usage stats I'm guessing there's around 4-5 orders of magnitude in difference between Slack power usage and Bitcoin power usage.
EGreg 4y ago
The difference is that they handle 10,000,000 more transactions per second than Bitcoin. People are able to talk, have multi person voice and video conversations, even entire communities. On blockchains, no matter how many nodes join, it’s the same capacity. In fact it’s the only tech in history that promises to become slower and more expensive with time.
phaedrus 4y ago
And is the juice even worth the squeeze? We're using astronomically more computing power to enable developer conveniences that are (however you define or measure it) not astronomical improvements. I've heard the developer time argument since I started coding in the 90s and have been skeptical of it just as long. I think it's a post hoc justification for practices we already do. Software development is partly fad and fashion driven, is passed on by imitation, and code is often easier to write than to read. Almost all of the effort has gone towards expanding the numerator in that write/read ratio, and there's neither sufficient incentive to making tools to cut out layers nor widely accepted practices for how that works comparable to those we have for adding layers. All this adds up to a strong entropic gradient toward software inefficiency, independent of whether or not it actually makes developers more efficient, but leading to a worse experience for users either way. Bucking the trend to make software more efficient can also improve developer time, as Linus Torvalds' argument why it was worthwhile to make git fast. I contend the justification that producing bloated software saves developer time is only true when selectively applied. My axe to grind here is I question whether we wouldn't have similar improvements if we'd put the similar effort into making better tooling, education, and API design for native (and/or) compiled software ecosystems that we do towards things-that-we-use-because-they-are-there (whether or not they're the best tool for the job in a broader sense).
enlyth 4y ago
On Discord or Slack I can copy a screenshot and send it to loads of people with simply Ctrl-V, I don't have to manually upload to some random image host website and copy and paste links which usually link to some page with a thousand ads. I can join a voice channel seamlessly, talk to my friends, listen to music together, stream my screen, watch others streaming their screen, build custom interactive bots that manage rich media, send messages from my apps to a channel with webhooks which I can create in seconds, see what other people are playing or listening to, reply with custom emotes, create threads, add syntax highlighted code blocks, etc. I could go on for an hour. None of the old school 1998 irc channels had these capabilities and I'm sick of everyone on HN pretending like it's the same thing. If it was, people would use it.
- 1ark 4y ago
  You can do those things in Telegram, fast and efficient made with Qt.
horsawlarway 4y ago
> But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs. No. The answer is clearly no. Lets do some quick back of the napkin math to see why... Discord reports ~150 million monthly active users. Lets assume they're all on all the time. Lets assume most of these users are hardware that's running in the 50watt range (very high for mobile, high for a laptop, lowish for desktop) - Further lets assume that discord uses ALL of it (and we know this is false - it's likely under 5%). So we have 150 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~7500 megawatts of power for discord. Now we run the same numbers for Slack - we'll keep the hardware estimates the same, but use the latest slack numbers of ~12 million active users. So we have 12 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~600 megawatts of power for slack. So combined, for discord and slack, assuming they use the ENTIRE power budget of the machine they run on, they represent about 8100 Megawatts of power usage. The best number I can find for bitcoin puts the usage at about 150 terawatt hours a year. If we take our 8100 megawatts and run it for a year - we get... drumroll: 70.956 terawatt hours of annual consumption. Or roughly half the power consumption of bitcoin, even when we assume discord and slack are literally consuming the ENTIRE power budget of the machines they're running on, and that they're running literally all the time. A more realistic guess might be that slack and discord use roughly 1% of the electricity that bitcoin uses. And personally - I think they're providing a boat-load more value for the watts. Fair caution - All my numbers are back of the envelope, and I did the math quickly and without paper. Feel free to point out if I missed something or dropped a step in a calculation.
- TheMode 4y ago
  Agree that Discord & Slack alone are probably not the sole culprits. But if you expand this to all existing computers (including datacenters) and programs using unnecessary abstraction layers, I wouldn't be surprised if we heavily surpassed bitcoin. All that to say that IMO there is a fairly big incentive to re-think our software stack. Part of the issue is that it is hard to optimize software for all platform/hardware, therefore creating the need for abstraction. I wonder how this would all look if we suddenly stopped developing new hardware and put everyone on the same page, would software slowly become more efficient?

AndrewThrowaway 4y ago

Exactly this. I have a brand new laptop and I could swear I had much more responsiveness in any other chat app 15 years ago than I have now in MS Teams. Everything is delayed and "not immediate" while 15 years ago it was in Skype! How much power is being wasted, CO2 generated globally because of this?

speedgoose 4y ago
Microsoft Teams is a disaster and its slowness is not due to Electron but Angular.
- AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
  Two crème de la crèmes of modern software.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Not really, Angular.js is obsolete technology.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      The new Angular which is based on Typescript is not
papito 4y ago
Computing resources were scarce, which made us better code-writers. We had to think about this. Scarcity leads to efficiency. Abundance leads to complacency. The new generation just assumes that all database/network calls and UI plumbing is magical and free.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Bitcoin / Ethereum will peak any device perform if the calculation such as an ASIC, CPU or GPU which is 200 watts or more. I don’t think that Discord or Slack aren’t even peaking CPUs or GPUs while they are running and also they don’t run 24 hours a day.

AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
Then again they run on magnitudes more computers.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  ASICS can pull 3 kilowatts. A MacBook Air m1 pulls 15 watts and a gaming computer is around 750 watts.
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  WARNING: lots of handwaving arithmetic, but in the spirit of "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing with made-up statistics" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its...) I was curious so I checked on my computer. I don't have Discord, but I do have Slack on and use it all the time (calls, screen sharing, the whole shebang). All Slack-related processes in total have used about 0.6% of my total CPU time (a bit of a high estimate because of how that calculation takes into account things like wakeup, but let's go with it). My computer uses probably about 15 watts on average as a high-end estimate. That gets us to about 0.09, say 0.1 watts on average. My computer is on for about half the day, so let's say 0.05 watts. If we consider Slack's current active user stats (it looks like 10 million?) that gets us 500 kilowatts. It seems like most sources agree that Bitcoin's power usage is probably around 10 gigawatts. So based on Slack's current usage stats I'm guessing there's around 4-5 orders of magnitude in difference between Slack power usage and Bitcoin power usage.

EGreg 4y ago

The difference is that they handle 10,000,000 more transactions per second than Bitcoin. People are able to talk, have multi person voice and video conversations, even entire communities. On blockchains, no matter how many nodes join, it’s the same capacity. In fact it’s the only tech in history that promises to become slower and more expensive with time.

phaedrus 4y ago

And is the juice even worth the squeeze? We're using astronomically more computing power to enable developer conveniences that are (however you define or measure it) not astronomical improvements. I've heard the developer time argument since I started coding in the 90s and have been skeptical of it just as long. I think it's a post hoc justification for practices we already do. Software development is partly fad and fashion driven, is passed on by imitation, and code is often easier to write than to read. Almost all of the effort has gone towards expanding the numerator in that write/read ratio, and there's neither sufficient incentive to making tools to cut out layers nor widely accepted practices for how that works comparable to those we have for adding layers. All this adds up to a strong entropic gradient toward software inefficiency, independent of whether or not it actually makes developers more efficient, but leading to a worse experience for users either way. Bucking the trend to make software more efficient can also improve developer time, as Linus Torvalds' argument why it was worthwhile to make git fast. I contend the justification that producing bloated software saves developer time is only true when selectively applied. My axe to grind here is I question whether we wouldn't have similar improvements if we'd put the similar effort into making better tooling, education, and API design for native (and/or) compiled software ecosystems that we do towards things-that-we-use-because-they-are-there (whether or not they're the best tool for the job in a broader sense).

enlyth 4y ago

On Discord or Slack I can copy a screenshot and send it to loads of people with simply Ctrl-V, I don't have to manually upload to some random image host website and copy and paste links which usually link to some page with a thousand ads. I can join a voice channel seamlessly, talk to my friends, listen to music together, stream my screen, watch others streaming their screen, build custom interactive bots that manage rich media, send messages from my apps to a channel with webhooks which I can create in seconds, see what other people are playing or listening to, reply with custom emotes, create threads, add syntax highlighted code blocks, etc. I could go on for an hour. None of the old school 1998 irc channels had these capabilities and I'm sick of everyone on HN pretending like it's the same thing. If it was, people would use it.

1ark 4y ago
You can do those things in Telegram, fast and efficient made with Qt.

horsawlarway 4y ago

> But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs. No. The answer is clearly no. Lets do some quick back of the napkin math to see why... Discord reports ~150 million monthly active users. Lets assume they're all on all the time. Lets assume most of these users are hardware that's running in the 50watt range (very high for mobile, high for a laptop, lowish for desktop) - Further lets assume that discord uses ALL of it (and we know this is false - it's likely under 5%). So we have 150 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~7500 megawatts of power for discord. Now we run the same numbers for Slack - we'll keep the hardware estimates the same, but use the latest slack numbers of ~12 million active users. So we have 12 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~600 megawatts of power for slack. So combined, for discord and slack, assuming they use the ENTIRE power budget of the machine they run on, they represent about 8100 Megawatts of power usage. The best number I can find for bitcoin puts the usage at about 150 terawatt hours a year. If we take our 8100 megawatts and run it for a year - we get... drumroll: 70.956 terawatt hours of annual consumption. Or roughly half the power consumption of bitcoin, even when we assume discord and slack are literally consuming the ENTIRE power budget of the machines they're running on, and that they're running literally all the time. A more realistic guess might be that slack and discord use roughly 1% of the electricity that bitcoin uses. And personally - I think they're providing a boat-load more value for the watts. Fair caution - All my numbers are back of the envelope, and I did the math quickly and without paper. Feel free to point out if I missed something or dropped a step in a calculation.

TheMode 4y ago
Agree that Discord & Slack alone are probably not the sole culprits. But if you expand this to all existing computers (including datacenters) and programs using unnecessary abstraction layers, I wouldn't be surprised if we heavily surpassed bitcoin. All that to say that IMO there is a fairly big incentive to re-think our software stack. Part of the issue is that it is hard to optimize software for all platform/hardware, therefore creating the need for abstraction. I wonder how this would all look if we suddenly stopped developing new hardware and put everyone on the same page, would software slowly become more efficient?