3 ms·

It can be a bit dangerous (especially to your employer) to continue that line of thinking, though. How many pieces of software do we collectively work on which

• asoneth 4y ago
  Is that really a downside? In some cases you convince your organization to shift focus onto more useful products, and that can be a really great feeling. In other cases (company is too large, management too committed) it helps you confront exactly who you're working for. Because if you're going to sell your soul, you should at least make sure you're getting a good price.
• i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
  Meh. I feel like there needs to be an active movement to assess programs that have huge scale (>10m users) to identify unnecessary power usage - whether it be because of a bug, because of unused functionality that nonetheless takes resources, or intermediate steps that take unnecessary power. Perhaps I’m getting into a bit of a niche here, but the rise of stringy formats for data transfer concerns me. There are many-stage pipelines on machines that agree on what a 64 bit integer is, yet each stage performs encoding and decoding of JSON twice (decoding upon receipt, encoding to pass it on to the right place, decoding the response, encoding it in another manner to reply to the original sender). Sounds like a minor concern, but the scale of this instinctively feels like it’d dwarf 250MW globally.
• hinkley 4y ago
  Oh no! … anyway…
• josephg 4y ago
  If your job and your conscience disagree, quit your job. You only get one life and we have so many options as engineers. Why make the world worse for ourselves and our children when you have other options?