5 ms·

Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environme

by simgt 1y ago

Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of reducing the energy consumption to be mentioned

qayxc 1y ago
It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give a darn about even trying to send a signal.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    So, literally virtue signaling? And no, a million small sites won't "become a trend in society".
    - vouaobrasil 1y ago
      You really don't know if it could become a trend or not. Certainly trends happen in the opposite direction, such as everyone using AI. I think every little difference you can make is a step in the right direction, and is not virtue signalling if you really apply yourself across all domains of life. But perhaps it is futile, given that there are so many defeatist individuals such as yourself crowding the world.
  - qayxc 1y ago
    I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load. I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas). This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally, but making your website smaller and "being vocal about it" (whatever you mean by that) doesn't make an iota of difference. It also only works if your site is basically just text. If your website uses other resources (images, videos, 3D models, audio, etc.), the impact of first load is just noise anyway. You can have a bigger impact by telling 100,000 people to drive an hour less each month and if just 1% of your hypothetical audience actually does that, you'd achieve orders of magnitude more in terms of environmental and societal impact.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - vouaobrasil 1y ago
      Perhaps you are right. But I do remember one guy who had a YouTube channel and he uploaded fairly low-quality videos at a reduced framerate to achieve a high level of compression, and he explicitly put in his video that he did it to save energy. Now, it is true that it didn't save much because probably many people were uploaded 8K videos at the time, so drop in the bucket. But personally, I found it quite inspiring and his decision was instrumental in my deciding to never upload 4K. And in general, I will say that people like that do inspire me and keep me going to be as minimal as possible when I use energy in all domains. For me at least, trying to optimize for using as little energy as possible isn't an engineering problem. It's a challenge to do it uniformly as much as possible, so it can't be subdivided. And I do think every little bit counts, and if I can spend time making my website smaller, I'll do that in case one person gets inspired by that. It's not like I'm a machine and my only goal is time efficiency....
      - Mawr 1y ago
        Youtube's compression already butchers the quality of anything 1080p and below. Uploading in 1440p or 4K is the only way to get youtube to preserve at least some of the bitrate. There's a 1080p extra bitrate option available on some videos, but it's locked behind premium, so I'm not sure how well it works. Depending on the type of video this may not matter, but it often does. For example, my FPS gaming and dashcam footage gets utterly destroyed if uploaded to youtube at 1080p. Youtube's 4K seems roughly equivalent to my high bitrate 1080p recordings.
  - whoisyc 1y ago
    Realistically “my website fits in 14kb” is a terrible signal because it is invisible to 99.99% of the population. How many HNers inspect the network usage when loading a random stranger’s website? Plus, trying to signal your way to societal change can have unintended downsides. It makes you feel you are doing something when you are actually not making any real impact. It attracts the kind of people who care more about signaling the right signals than doing the right thing into your camp.
- timeon 1y ago
  Sure there are more resource-heavy places but I think the problem is general approach. Neglecting of performance and overall approach to resources brought us to these resource-heavy tools. It seems just dismissive when people pointing to places where there could be made more cuts and call it a day. If we want to really fix places with bigger impact we need to change this approach in a first place.
  - qayxc 1y ago
    Sure thing, but's not low-hanging fruit. The impact is so miniscule that the effort required is too high when compared to the benefit. This is micro-optimisation for a valid use case (slow connections in bandwidth-starved situations), but in the real world, a single hi-res image, short video clip, or audio sample would negate all your text-squeezing, HTTP header optimisation games, and struggle for minimalism. So for the vast majority of use cases it's simply irrelevant. And no, your website is likely not going to get 1,000,000 unique visitors per hour so you'd have a hard time even measuring the impact whereas simply NOT ordering pizza and having a home made salad instead would have a measurable impact orders of magnitude greater. Estimating the overall impact of your actions and non-actions is hard, but it's easier and more practical to optimise your assets, remove bloat (no megabytes of JS frameworks), and think about whether you really need that annoying full-screen video background. THOSE are low-hanging fruit with lots of impact. Trying to trim down a functional site to <14kB is NOT.
- quaintdev 1y ago
  LLM companies should provide how much energy got consumed processing users request. Maybe people will think twice before generating AI slop
- simgt 1y ago
  Of course, but my point is that it's still a constraint we should have in mind at every level. Dupont poisoning public water with pfas does not make you less of an arsehole if you toss your old iPhone in a pond for the sake of convenience.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  On the other hand - its kind of like saying we dont need to drive env friendly cars because it is a drop in the bucket compares to containerships etc
vouaobrasil 1y ago
Absolutely agree with that. I recently visited the BBC website the other day and it loaded about 120MB of stuff into the cache - for a small text article. Not only does it use a lot of extra energy to transmit so much data, but it promotes a general atmosphere of wastefulness. I've tried to really cut down my website as well to make it fairly minimal. And when I upload stuff to YouTube, I never use 4K, only 1080P. I think 4K and 8K video should not even exist. A lot of people talk about adding XYZ megawatts of solar to the grid. But imagine how nice it could be if we regularly had efforts to use LESS power. I miss the days when websites were very small in the days of 56K modems. I think there is some happy medium somewhere and we've gone way past it.
- raekk 1y ago
  Let's take it further: That atmosphere of wastefulness not only concerns bandwidth and energy use but also architectural decisions. There's technology that punches far above its weight class in terms of efficiency and there's the opposite. It seems like a collective form of learned helplessness, on both sides, the vendors and users. IMHO, the only real reason for slow, JavaScript-heavy sites is surveillance and detailed, distributed profiling of users. The other would be animated UI giving dopamine hits, but that could totally be confined to entertainment and shouldn't be a cue for "quality" software.
FlyingAvatar 1y ago
The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  The problem is that a lot of people DO have their own websites for which they have some control over. So it's not like a million people optimizing their own websites will have any control over what Google does with YouTube for instance...
  - jychang 1y ago
    A million people is a very strong political force. A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient. I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms. - Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse. - Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off. - Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
    - vouaobrasil 1y ago
      I sort of agree...but not really, because you'll never get a situation where a million people can vote on a specific law about making YT more efficient. One needs to muster some sort of general political will to even get that to be an issue, and that takes a lot more than a million people. Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.
sylware 1y ago
Country where 10 millions people play their fav greedy-3D game in the evening, with state-of-the-art 400W GPUs, all at the same time...
presentation 1y ago
Or we can just commit to building out solar infrastructure and not worry about this rounding error anymore
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
Do we? Let's compare some numbers. Creating an average hamburger requires an input of 2-6 kWh of energy, from start to finish. At 15¢ USD/kWh, this gives us an upper limit of about 90¢ of electricity. The average 14 kB web page takes about 0.000002 kWh to serve. You would need to serve that web page about 1-300,000 times to create the same energy demands of a single hamburger. A 14 mB web page, which would be a pretty heavy JavaScript app these days, would need about 1 to 3,000. I think those are pretty good ways to use the energy.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  Now open an average news site, with 100s of request, tens of ads, autoplaying video ads, tracking pixels, etc., using gigabytes of ram and a lot of cpu. Then multiply that by the number of daily visitors. Without "hamburgers" (food in general), we die, reducing the size of usesless content on websites doesn't really hurt anyone.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
    Now go to an average McDonalds, with hundreds of orders, automatically added value meals, customer rewards, etc. consuming thousands of cows and a lot of pastureland. Then multiply that by the number of daily customers. Without web pages (information in general), we return to the Dark Ages. Reducing the number of hamburgers people eat doesn't really hurt anyone.
    - ajsnigrutin 1y ago
      Sure, but you've got to eat something. Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.
      - hombre_fatal 1y ago
        You don't need to eat burgers though. You can eat food that consumes a small fraction of energy, calorie, land, and animal input of a burger. And we go to McDonalds because it's a dopamine luxury. It's just an inconvenient truth for people who only care about the environmental impact of things that don't require a behavior change on their part. And that reveals an insincere, performative, scoldy aspect of their position. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
spacephysics 1y ago
This is one of those things that is high effort, low impact. Similar to recycling in some cities/towns where it just gets dumped in a landfill. Instead we should be looking to nuclear power solutions for our energy needs, and not waste time with reducing website size if its purely a function of environmental impact.
zigzag312 1y ago
So, anyone serious about sustainable future should stop using Python and stop recommending it as introduction to programming language? I remember one test that showed Python using 75x more energy than C to perform the same task.
- mnw21cam 1y ago
  I'm just investigating why the nightly backup of the work server is taking so long. Turns out python (as conda, anaconda, miniconda, etc) have dumped 22 million files across the home directories, and this takes a while to just list, let alone work out which files have changed and need archiving. Most of these are duplicates of each other, and files that should really belong to the OS, like bin/curl. I myself have installed one single package, and it installed 196,171 files in my home directory. If that isn't gratuitous bloat, then I don't know what is.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    Conda is its own beast tbf. Not saying that Python packaging is perfect, but I struggle to imagine a package pulling in 200K files. What package is it?
noduerme 1y ago
Yeah, the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant. Are you seriously telling me now that if my website is 256k or 1024k I'm responsible for destroying the planet? Take it out on your masters. And no, reducing resource use to the minimum in the name of sustainability does not scale down the same way it scales up. You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful. It's never clear to me whether people who push this line are doing so because they're bitter and want to punish other humans, or because they hate themselves. Either way, it evinces a system of thought that has already relegated humankind to the dustbin of history. If, in the long run, that's what happens, you're right and everyone else is wrong. Congratulations. It will make little difference in that case to you if the rest of us move on for a few hundred years to colonize the planets and revive the biosphere. Comfort yourself with the knowledge that this will all end in 10 or 20 thousand years, and the world will go back to being a hot hive of insects and reptiles. But what glory we wrought in our time.
- simgt 1y ago
  > the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant Whataboutism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism > You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful. Strawmaning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Every bloody mention of the environmental impact of our activities gets at least a reply like yours that ticks one of these boxes.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    > the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant (this was actually stated in agreement with the original poster, who you clearly misunderstood, so there's no "what-about" involved here. They were condemning all kinds of consumption, including the frivolous ones I mentioned). But I'm afraid you've missed both my small point and my wider point. My small point was to argue against the parent's comment that >>reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future I disagree with this concept on the basis that nothing can be accomplished on a large scale if the primary concern is simply to reduce resource consumption to a minimum. If you care to disagree with that, then please address it. The larger point was that this theory leads inexorably to the idea that humans should just kill themselves or disappear; and it almost always comes from people who themselves want to kill themselves or disappear.
iinnPP 1y ago
You'll find that people "stop caring" about just about anything when it starts to impact them. Personally, I agree with your statement. Since a main argument is seemingly that AI is worse, let's remember that AI is querying these huge pages as well. Also that the 14kb size is less than 1% of the current average mobile website payload.
lpapez 1y ago
Being concerned about page sizes is 100% wasted effort. Calculate how much electricity you personally consume in total browsing the Internet for a year. Multiply that by 10 to be safe. Then compare that number to how much energy it takes to produce a single hamburger. Do the calculation yourself if you do not believe me. On average, we developers can make a bigger difference by choosing to eat salad one day instead of optimizing our websites for a week.
- Mawr 1y ago
  Or how much energy it took to even get to work by car that day.
- timeon 1y ago
  What if I already eat salad?

by simgt 1y ago

qayxc 1y ago

It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give a darn about even trying to send a signal.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  So, literally virtue signaling? And no, a million small sites won't "become a trend in society".
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    You really don't know if it could become a trend or not. Certainly trends happen in the opposite direction, such as everyone using AI. I think every little difference you can make is a step in the right direction, and is not virtue signalling if you really apply yourself across all domains of life. But perhaps it is futile, given that there are so many defeatist individuals such as yourself crowding the world.
- qayxc 1y ago
  I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load. I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas). This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally, but making your website smaller and "being vocal about it" (whatever you mean by that) doesn't make an iota of difference. It also only works if your site is basically just text. If your website uses other resources (images, videos, 3D models, audio, etc.), the impact of first load is just noise anyway. You can have a bigger impact by telling 100,000 people to drive an hour less each month and if just 1% of your hypothetical audience actually does that, you'd achieve orders of magnitude more in terms of environmental and societal impact.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    Perhaps you are right. But I do remember one guy who had a YouTube channel and he uploaded fairly low-quality videos at a reduced framerate to achieve a high level of compression, and he explicitly put in his video that he did it to save energy. Now, it is true that it didn't save much because probably many people were uploaded 8K videos at the time, so drop in the bucket. But personally, I found it quite inspiring and his decision was instrumental in my deciding to never upload 4K. And in general, I will say that people like that do inspire me and keep me going to be as minimal as possible when I use energy in all domains. For me at least, trying to optimize for using as little energy as possible isn't an engineering problem. It's a challenge to do it uniformly as much as possible, so it can't be subdivided. And I do think every little bit counts, and if I can spend time making my website smaller, I'll do that in case one person gets inspired by that. It's not like I'm a machine and my only goal is time efficiency....
    - Mawr 1y ago
      Youtube's compression already butchers the quality of anything 1080p and below. Uploading in 1440p or 4K is the only way to get youtube to preserve at least some of the bitrate. There's a 1080p extra bitrate option available on some videos, but it's locked behind premium, so I'm not sure how well it works. Depending on the type of video this may not matter, but it often does. For example, my FPS gaming and dashcam footage gets utterly destroyed if uploaded to youtube at 1080p. Youtube's 4K seems roughly equivalent to my high bitrate 1080p recordings.
- whoisyc 1y ago
  Realistically “my website fits in 14kb” is a terrible signal because it is invisible to 99.99% of the population. How many HNers inspect the network usage when loading a random stranger’s website? Plus, trying to signal your way to societal change can have unintended downsides. It makes you feel you are doing something when you are actually not making any real impact. It attracts the kind of people who care more about signaling the right signals than doing the right thing into your camp.
timeon 1y ago
Sure there are more resource-heavy places but I think the problem is general approach. Neglecting of performance and overall approach to resources brought us to these resource-heavy tools. It seems just dismissive when people pointing to places where there could be made more cuts and call it a day. If we want to really fix places with bigger impact we need to change this approach in a first place.
- qayxc 1y ago
  Sure thing, but's not low-hanging fruit. The impact is so miniscule that the effort required is too high when compared to the benefit. This is micro-optimisation for a valid use case (slow connections in bandwidth-starved situations), but in the real world, a single hi-res image, short video clip, or audio sample would negate all your text-squeezing, HTTP header optimisation games, and struggle for minimalism. So for the vast majority of use cases it's simply irrelevant. And no, your website is likely not going to get 1,000,000 unique visitors per hour so you'd have a hard time even measuring the impact whereas simply NOT ordering pizza and having a home made salad instead would have a measurable impact orders of magnitude greater. Estimating the overall impact of your actions and non-actions is hard, but it's easier and more practical to optimise your assets, remove bloat (no megabytes of JS frameworks), and think about whether you really need that annoying full-screen video background. THOSE are low-hanging fruit with lots of impact. Trying to trim down a functional site to <14kB is NOT.
quaintdev 1y ago
LLM companies should provide how much energy got consumed processing users request. Maybe people will think twice before generating AI slop
simgt 1y ago
Of course, but my point is that it's still a constraint we should have in mind at every level. Dupont poisoning public water with pfas does not make you less of an arsehole if you toss your old iPhone in a pond for the sake of convenience.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
On the other hand - its kind of like saying we dont need to drive env friendly cars because it is a drop in the bucket compares to containerships etc

vouaobrasil 1y ago

Absolutely agree with that. I recently visited the BBC website the other day and it loaded about 120MB of stuff into the cache - for a small text article. Not only does it use a lot of extra energy to transmit so much data, but it promotes a general atmosphere of wastefulness. I've tried to really cut down my website as well to make it fairly minimal. And when I upload stuff to YouTube, I never use 4K, only 1080P. I think 4K and 8K video should not even exist. A lot of people talk about adding XYZ megawatts of solar to the grid. But imagine how nice it could be if we regularly had efforts to use LESS power. I miss the days when websites were very small in the days of 56K modems. I think there is some happy medium somewhere and we've gone way past it.

raekk 1y ago
Let's take it further: That atmosphere of wastefulness not only concerns bandwidth and energy use but also architectural decisions. There's technology that punches far above its weight class in terms of efficiency and there's the opposite. It seems like a collective form of learned helplessness, on both sides, the vendors and users. IMHO, the only real reason for slow, JavaScript-heavy sites is surveillance and detailed, distributed profiling of users. The other would be animated UI giving dopamine hits, but that could totally be confined to entertainment and shouldn't be a cue for "quality" software.

FlyingAvatar 1y ago

The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
The problem is that a lot of people DO have their own websites for which they have some control over. So it's not like a million people optimizing their own websites will have any control over what Google does with YouTube for instance...
- jychang 1y ago
  A million people is a very strong political force. A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient. I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms. - Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse. - Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off. - Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    I sort of agree...but not really, because you'll never get a situation where a million people can vote on a specific law about making YT more efficient. One needs to muster some sort of general political will to even get that to be an issue, and that takes a lot more than a million people. Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.

sylware 1y ago

Country where 10 millions people play their fav greedy-3D game in the evening, with state-of-the-art 400W GPUs, all at the same time...

presentation 1y ago

Or we can just commit to building out solar infrastructure and not worry about this rounding error anymore

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago

Do we? Let's compare some numbers. Creating an average hamburger requires an input of 2-6 kWh of energy, from start to finish. At 15¢ USD/kWh, this gives us an upper limit of about 90¢ of electricity. The average 14 kB web page takes about 0.000002 kWh to serve. You would need to serve that web page about 1-300,000 times to create the same energy demands of a single hamburger. A 14 mB web page, which would be a pretty heavy JavaScript app these days, would need about 1 to 3,000. I think those are pretty good ways to use the energy.

ajsnigrutin 1y ago
Now open an average news site, with 100s of request, tens of ads, autoplaying video ads, tracking pixels, etc., using gigabytes of ram and a lot of cpu. Then multiply that by the number of daily visitors. Without "hamburgers" (food in general), we die, reducing the size of usesless content on websites doesn't really hurt anyone.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  Now go to an average McDonalds, with hundreds of orders, automatically added value meals, customer rewards, etc. consuming thousands of cows and a lot of pastureland. Then multiply that by the number of daily customers. Without web pages (information in general), we return to the Dark Ages. Reducing the number of hamburgers people eat doesn't really hurt anyone.
  - ajsnigrutin 1y ago
    Sure, but you've got to eat something. Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.
    - hombre_fatal 1y ago
      You don't need to eat burgers though. You can eat food that consumes a small fraction of energy, calorie, land, and animal input of a burger. And we go to McDonalds because it's a dopamine luxury. It's just an inconvenient truth for people who only care about the environmental impact of things that don't require a behavior change on their part. And that reveals an insincere, performative, scoldy aspect of their position. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

spacephysics 1y ago

This is one of those things that is high effort, low impact. Similar to recycling in some cities/towns where it just gets dumped in a landfill. Instead we should be looking to nuclear power solutions for our energy needs, and not waste time with reducing website size if its purely a function of environmental impact.

zigzag312 1y ago

So, anyone serious about sustainable future should stop using Python and stop recommending it as introduction to programming language? I remember one test that showed Python using 75x more energy than C to perform the same task.

mnw21cam 1y ago
I'm just investigating why the nightly backup of the work server is taking so long. Turns out python (as conda, anaconda, miniconda, etc) have dumped 22 million files across the home directories, and this takes a while to just list, let alone work out which files have changed and need archiving. Most of these are duplicates of each other, and files that should really belong to the OS, like bin/curl. I myself have installed one single package, and it installed 196,171 files in my home directory. If that isn't gratuitous bloat, then I don't know what is.
- sgarland 1y ago
  Conda is its own beast tbf. Not saying that Python packaging is perfect, but I struggle to imagine a package pulling in 200K files. What package is it?

noduerme 1y ago

Yeah, the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant. Are you seriously telling me now that if my website is 256k or 1024k I'm responsible for destroying the planet? Take it out on your masters. And no, reducing resource use to the minimum in the name of sustainability does not scale down the same way it scales up. You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful. It's never clear to me whether people who push this line are doing so because they're bitter and want to punish other humans, or because they hate themselves. Either way, it evinces a system of thought that has already relegated humankind to the dustbin of history. If, in the long run, that's what happens, you're right and everyone else is wrong. Congratulations. It will make little difference in that case to you if the rest of us move on for a few hundred years to colonize the planets and revive the biosphere. Comfort yourself with the knowledge that this will all end in 10 or 20 thousand years, and the world will go back to being a hot hive of insects and reptiles. But what glory we wrought in our time.

simgt 1y ago
> the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant Whataboutism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism > You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful. Strawmaning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Every bloody mention of the environmental impact of our activities gets at least a reply like yours that ticks one of these boxes.
- noduerme 1y ago
  > the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant (this was actually stated in agreement with the original poster, who you clearly misunderstood, so there's no "what-about" involved here. They were condemning all kinds of consumption, including the frivolous ones I mentioned). But I'm afraid you've missed both my small point and my wider point. My small point was to argue against the parent's comment that >>reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future I disagree with this concept on the basis that nothing can be accomplished on a large scale if the primary concern is simply to reduce resource consumption to a minimum. If you care to disagree with that, then please address it. The larger point was that this theory leads inexorably to the idea that humans should just kill themselves or disappear; and it almost always comes from people who themselves want to kill themselves or disappear.

iinnPP 1y ago

You'll find that people "stop caring" about just about anything when it starts to impact them. Personally, I agree with your statement. Since a main argument is seemingly that AI is worse, let's remember that AI is querying these huge pages as well. Also that the 14kb size is less than 1% of the current average mobile website payload.

lpapez 1y ago

Being concerned about page sizes is 100% wasted effort. Calculate how much electricity you personally consume in total browsing the Internet for a year. Multiply that by 10 to be safe. Then compare that number to how much energy it takes to produce a single hamburger. Do the calculation yourself if you do not believe me. On average, we developers can make a bigger difference by choosing to eat salad one day instead of optimizing our websites for a week.

Mawr 1y ago
Or how much energy it took to even get to work by car that day.
timeon 1y ago
What if I already eat salad?