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solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#301
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you've heard the old joke about gamer college students using their fancy graphics cards to heat their rooms. :)

I did this last winter. Mining 24/7 on my personal rig noticeably took a bit of load off the heater and made a modest amount of ethereum. I stopped once the weather warmed as it seemed like a waste of energy.

I did the same, then my graphics card died and it was a net loss :-(

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#302
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Significantly, shifting the image calculations from the server to the client means the work is duplicated for every client. While it saves energy for the server, it increases the overall energy consumption required to deliver the content.

False. Energetic costs of distributing duplicate information is significantly more expensive than local computation. Eg: measuring joules spent for decompression vs transmission is orders of magnitude over the n duplication.

You seem to not realize that moving the calculation client-side means to send a JavaScript implementation, which for all sensible implementations would be significantly larger than the pre-computed result.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#305
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point was that "ready and waiting" is valuable to the end customer, even if it only makes a different later when they are doing something. It's kind-of like how firemen are valuable even when they are not getting calls, because they are available for low latency response instead of busy doing something else. The idea that this is just wasted computation is therefore somewhat disingenuous.

Oh, but it could be improved. Linux can cold boot under 300ms (easier if you control the BIOS and can tune it for speed, like coreboot can), faster if resuming from RAM. That should allow you to perform load-balancing while powering off the extra capacity (using wake-on-lan). If load becomes too important for the SBC or close to capacity, wake the server, and perform a handover once it's up. You can either hold the p…

Totally agreed that 100w is a waste at idle, but I don’t think that’s what the parent was talking about. My read was that the parent comment was responding to capacity planning tending towards reducing the number of servers (without building out low latency cold boot infra) in the name of cost/energy savings, and that resulting in higher latency request latency. Anecdotally this seems plausible, but I don’t have metrics to back it up.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. Energetic costs of distributing duplicate information is significantly more expensive than local computation. Eg: measuring joules spent for decompression vs transmission is orders of magnitude over the n duplication.

You seem to not realize that moving the calculation client-side means to send a JavaScript implementation, which for all sensible implementations would be significantly larger than the pre-computed result.

The way the image is colored on the client is just some CSS (mix-blend-mode). Check it in the inspector.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#308
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you've heard the old joke about gamer college students using their fancy graphics cards to heat their rooms. :)

I did this last winter. Mining 24/7 on my personal rig noticeably took a bit of load off the heater and made a modest amount of ethereum. I stopped once the weather warmed as it seemed like a waste of energy.

How were your electric bills?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#309

*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…

> This is why technology is brilliant. It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation.

But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox, the name of which I forget, which says that the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we introduced household appliances or when productivity went up. Cars became both more fuel-efficient but also heavier, so we burn more fuel. Smartphones have gotten really good at managing power, making them a viable choice for plenty of activities throughout the day, thus increasing their total energy consumption.

Personally, I just don't believe more efficient tech will help reduce our power consumption. It will require either a completely different tech that doesn't require electricity or fuel to run, or a change in societal habits.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#310

*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…

> This is why technology is brilliant. It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation. But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox, the name of which I forget, which says that the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we introduced household appliances or when p…

> There is this paradox, the name of which I forget

It's called the Rebound Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

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