Shouldn't we be turning an eye to power consumption?

In 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).

Premature 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.

I 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.

It'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.

Shouldn'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.

I 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.

Everyone should shave their head to lower their collective weight and save energy on transportation costs. That’s what this line of thinking is.

> Maybe consider your carbon footprint when performing that next full code compile?

Why "Carbon footprint" is a lie. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AKR2j4CymosDtmfEoDt2geSC...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE

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.

Energy 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).

I 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.

Amdahl'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.

I thought this was going to be an argument for adopting Rust on the basis of power consumption.

Whenever 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.

I 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)

Wanna 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.

The 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.

Nah 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

Consuming power is not a thing to apologize for.