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Everyone in the comments wants to blame JavaScript for the world’s ills. That is both stupid and grossly uninformed. When you live next to a Google or Facebook
by austin-cheney 2y ago
Everyone in the comments wants to blame JavaScript for the world’s ills. That is both stupid and grossly uninformed.
When you live next to a Google or Facebook data center some reality starts to set in. They easily consume most of the output of a single small urban power plant on their own. It’s nuts. I didn’t realize how nuts it is until someone explained it to me, in my part time job I work with a Houston based power company lawyer that specializes in contracts for data centers. I doubt those massive data centers are reliant on JavaScript.
As for JavaScript there is a simple solution that works wonders in every other industry: licensing and liability. The code is bad because the developers that write it are shit. That’s never going to change until businesses have a financial incentive to train for competence. All the wishful thinking about less JavaScript is just more virtue signaling.
- eadmund 2y agoThe client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the server-side efficiency problem is Python?
- ori_b 2y agoThe server side efficiency problem is running advertising.
- Drakim 2y agoThe some of the brightest minds of our generation has been wasted on optimizing how to deliver personalized advertisements in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and the true tragedy is that they didn't have a more efficient language than JavaScript to do it.
- austin-cheney 2y agoIt really doesn't matter. Advertisement is the debt collection of software. Its this shit nobody wants to do. As a result these people tend to make more, be pampered, and the output is generally still garbage and the developers are still depressed. Compare that with gaming where the developers are worked to death and generally underpaid, but they love what they do and have a great time building amazing things.
- prox 2y agoIt’s funny you mention this, because I just visited space.com for the black hole article (no adblocker on this device) and I could feel the device becoming warm and literally lost 3% on my battery level.
- crabbone 2y agoWell, Google does a lot more than Web... so, it's hard to tell what you are seeing in those datacenters. It could be that specifically next to where you live is a GCP datacenter or whatever other division in Google that has nothing to do with Web (Google has its fingers in cyber-security, television, maps, cellular phones, general electronics, ML and much, much more...) So, measuring their power consumption isn't going to indicate anything unless you know what exactly does that datacenter support.
- austin-cheney 2y agoFacebook. Its estimated at 22 million sqft.
- crabbone 2y agoIt's the same thing honestly. Facebook has a boatload of projects that have nothing to do with Web. They probably spend more on their ML stuff than any other department in terms of infrastructure / resources. At one point I ran across the statistic that said that Facebook's internal network had more IP addresses than the entire public Internet. Maybe whoever claimed that exaggerated, but all the Web stuff Facebook has to offer doesn't need even a single percent of IP addresses of the entire Internet. Also, as far as I know, Facebook has its own h/w ambitions. It builds its own h/w and equips its own datacenters with it. While this is definitely not their main business, h/w development is a lot more resource-intensive than s/w development when it comes to datcenter usage (when it's about developing datacenter h/w).
- austin-cheney 2y agoThat completely misses the point. The point is about lowering electricity consumption.
- crabbone 2y agoFor Web... If the datacenter in question isn't involved in Web at all, why would it be of any interest how much power it consumes?