This is really cool. As a high-performance computing professional, I've often wondered how much energy is wasted due to inefficient code and how much that is a problem as planetary compute scales up. For me, it feels like a moral imperative to make my code as efficient as possible, especially when a job will take months to run on hundreds of CPU.
Absolutely. It is unfortunate that many software engineers continue to dismiss this as "premature optimization". But as soon as I see resources or server costs gradually rising every month (even on idle usage) costing into the tens of thousands which is a common occurrence as the system scale, then it becomes unacceptable to ignore.
I was working with a peer on a click handler for a web button. The code ran in 5-10ms. You have nearly 200ms budget before a user notices sluggishness. My peer "optimized" the 10ms click handler to the point of absolute illegibility. It was doubtful the new implementation was faster.