*Technically*, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an elegant work of art. *Pragmatically*, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on the about page): >> "The entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production with traffic doubling roughly every 2 years" I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on appro…
I believe doing image color setting is already eaten up inside the cost of doing png decompression: the client is already doing image manipulation, this is just doing an additional multiplication, so i believe it is minimal additional cost on the client (i may be wrong tho, never wrote a png decoder).
> I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption.
We're not doing more with the same amount of energy, we're doing much more with more energy. This is always the same energy efficiency fallacy: being more efficient (in percent "out/in") usually requires having bigger "in" (bigger scale). And you know, the thing that capitalistic companies always seek to get bigger no matter what. There's no incentive to maintain you current consumption. See https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energ... for more details by same source.