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solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It is interesting they consider it a paradox. When the demand curves show it. As making something more efficient moves the supply curve around (and moves where MR=MC is). Or in econ 250 class speak 'shift the supply curve right'. I think the 'paradox' comes in where they do not consider there is more demand on the other side of lower prices? Not all goods goto infinity on cost vs demand curve. But some sure act like…

I guess the "paradox" or counterintuitive part comes in situations when the price elasticities are such that a 10% efficiency gain (or price cut) would result in >10% increase in demand and hence in final spending.

Another part may be that non-economists (and even lots of students who succesfully passed econ 101) don't think about shifting demand or supply curves. In my experience, most people who remember the textbook supply-demand curves only think about moving along the curves (which makes the classic diagrams pretty crappy pedagogical devices IMO).

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#342
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting they consider it a paradox. When the demand curves show it. As making something more efficient moves the supply curve around (and moves where MR=MC is). Or in econ 250 class speak 'shift the supply curve right'. I think the 'paradox' comes in where they do not consider there is more demand on the other side of lower prices? Not all goods goto infinity on cost vs demand curve. But some sure act like…

I guess the "paradox" or counterintuitive part comes in situations when the price elasticities are such that a 10% efficiency gain (or price cut) would result in >10% increase in demand and hence in final spending. Another part may be that non-economists (and even lots of students who succesfully passed econ 101) don't think about shifting demand or supply curves. In my experience, most people who remember the textbo…

agreed. 1 to 1 would be an interesting result and probably a linear set of curves. But some curves look more like log scales so the effect depending on the slope of the curve could be wildly more or less.

I agree the classic diagrams are kind of crappy. As usually they are very simple just for demonstration. But to make both of those curves is usually more like a N dimensional curve. But remembering back on my econ classes I took they were excited about point slope formulas and maybe a mix of linear algebra in the advanced classes. Which was amusing from the CS/Math background which was my major.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, the top of HN isn’t all that stress. It mostly comes down to disk I/O and efficiency of the language. I’ve been at the top of HN for extended hours a couple of times on just a Heroku hobby dyno with no caching at all, but I had Cloudflare out front absorbing all the traffic that would have come from serving static assets.

I know people who host a static website on a home dsl connection with 5Mbps upload, using Cloudflare. The CDN literally does all the work.

5Mbps when 56k would be more than enough.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#344

*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…

It seems like we have tons of room to make the internet more efficient even without Moore’s law - how many backends and clients are written in scripting languages (PhP, Node, Python, Ruby…) without a whole lot of thought put into energy use (even if they are carefully designed to be fast or “efficient” by some metrics)?

And how much of internet energy use is made of serving ads? It seems to be a growing share, and ads increasingly want to stream video, which puts things like PNG decoding & dithering in the margins of overall energy use.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#345
I hope tons of web developers see this project and take note. How much more enjoyable could the web be if it moved in this direction, cutting out the bloat in favor of dense, useful content.

I also find the whole site a trove of well-researched information and well-argued points of view on sustainability. Truly refreshing to find something that does the math instead of regurgitating the latest hype and buzzwords.

One thing I come away with, and have realized more and more lately, is just how much we are getting in our own way and preventing ourselves from getting on a sustainable path, continuously chasing "innovation" when so much of the technology we'd need has been around for a long time. I'm not too optimistic we can break our growth addiction before things get (much more) ugly.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve got a bunch of images and your site is running uncached with a clunky CMS behind it, it will probably strain you. The traffic is usually about 40k uniques over 24 hours. For reference, my uncached site is running on Elixir which is often better without caching.

It’s usually not images but rather the CMS making 100 read queries and 20 write queries per page load without any object caching that brings sites down. Even a slow uplink serving big image won’t bring an nginx server down, it’s all async.

Serving a lot of images at the same time will work the disk I/O up in many cases. Probably gotten a lot better with NVMe though.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#348

*located in Barcelona* I hugely admire this website and the tech/philosophy behind it. So much so that I decided to build one myself. But here's the problem: I live in Yorkshire (UK) where good weather usually means a thinner layer of cloud cover. I tried, I really did, but I'm not about to move to Spain :) Long may this project continue (while I dream of more sun).

Right?

> This is a forecast for the coming days, updated daily: > TODAY > Clear throughout the day. > TOMORROW > Clear throughout the day. > DAY AFTER TOMORROW > Clear throughout the day.

I get 62 hours of sunshine average in the entire month of December, looks like you're a couple degrees north of me and get slightly fewer (assuming our weather departments do their math similarly). This server is probably going to see more sun in the next three days than we'll see until the New Year.

I'm not about to move to Spain, but definitely thinking about it (or Cali, or Arizona, or the south of France, or...anywhere sunny, really) in a few years when my kids move out of the house.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#349
post #260
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can one client do the work and post back the final version to the server so the server sends that version to all the other clients?

Don't trust the client with that, or everybody is getting goatse'd.

A. Cryptographically verify the final version

B. Schedule the work to be performed on multiple clients in case some fail

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