Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s on the HN front page, I don’t think I’d extrapolate anything from its current power usage.
Ha. We better read it while we can!
Maybe this should have been posted on a sunny summer's day.
This website has 81% battery power remaining
311–320 of 365 posts
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#312*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…
Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked.
I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#313*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…
"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked. I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.
"I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time spent.
20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a regular basis now and a bigger share of the population worldwide has access to similar services
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#315*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…
> but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption
Except that data bloat grows at a steady rate, and you only take advantage of Moore once you discard your old equipment and replace it with newer silicon. That generates ewaste, which is counterproductive to ecologically aware projects.
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.
I don't know, we're currently rewriting our UI from the classic "PHP renders everything with almost zero JS" to the more modern "single page application with a crap ton of JS" and the new UI feels much faster to me. The old way was to resend and rerender everything on each click, which is problematic for complex UIs with a lot of data.
On a modest 3 year old phone running Firefox, such websites are excruciating.
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#317we need this but for storage space usage. i can't even imagine the insane amounts of storage used to host useless livestreams of gamers gaming.
today's profit oriented economic system causes alienation and loneliness for many people, which leads to various coping mechanisms (such as watching other people playing games).
the streams are only valuable as content because the working class is heavily alienated and therefore our attention can be bought by capitalists as 'audience commodity': https://youtu.be/CK319sIWwbA?t=519
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#318*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…
I'm not sure about your general point - people definitely use more things as they become cheaper, which is a good thing IMO, but you're right that this means power consumption doesn't necessarily go down with lowering costs.
But just to add another dimension to the discussion, there's an interesting book I've heard about, the thesis of which is basically that technology has made a lot of material goods much more efficient. E.g. they give the example of aluminum soda cans - nowadays, the cans themselves use much less material than 50 years ago - using modern production technology, using CAD systems to design them better, etc. has led to a lot less material wastage (I think it was like 25% or something like that, but I'm not sure).
And in general, from the point of view of the companies selling material goods, the less material and more efficiently produced materials the better, since that's a direct cost, meaning they are in general working to make everything a lot more efficient.
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#319Earlier 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.
No useless JavaScript in this case.
Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining
#320*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…
With a lot of these arguments (including for example the Unabomber manifesto), I wonder if we're not projecting our own behavior on technology, because we see the effects so easily when looking outward rather than inward.
Technology just is. How it's used makes the difference, and that stems from our way of living in the world. Any tool can be used for both "good" and "bad", however you define those.
I think we tend to prioritize our own desires above anything else, because "someone else" might do that and gain an advantage over "us". We're largely stuck in survival mode, rather than an abundance mindset where we take a step back and reflect on what the goal is, and what is needed to achieve that goal.