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The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

janavirgin.com

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Re: The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

#11

Post by ci5er »

ginko wrote: post #6

>The average amount of energy needed to load each of the twelve web interfaces, along with each one’s endless fragments of code, was 30 watts. What is that supposed to mean? A watt(= 1 J/s) is a measure power so energy per unit of time. Shouldn't this rather be given in joule?

Neither journalists nor USians are very careful with their use of units. Imagine my dismay to find a Nordic person (who are usually so careful, precise and diligent!) forgetting to make sure she (?) make sure that power and energy were each separately accounted for.

The good news is that in 4 billion years, the sun will explode, and we'll have to teach unit-accounting to sluggards in the dark. (Wait. That's the good news?)

Re: The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

#13

Post by Reelin »

ginko wrote: post #6

>The average amount of energy needed to load each of the twelve web interfaces, along with each one’s endless fragments of code, was 30 watts. What is that supposed to mean? A watt(= 1 J/s) is a measure power so energy per unit of time. Shouldn't this rather be given in joule?

Yes, watt hours or joules would work there but not watts. In general the figures all seem to assume 30 watts of power consumption at near-idle, which is completely ridiculous unless you happen to be using either a high end workstation or an antique.

The first page states an estimate of 50g of CO2 per visit, but I'm pretty sure reality is nowhere near that. At ~1000lbs CO2 per MWh for home electricity in the US (https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...), that's ~0.45g per Wh. My laptop only has a ~40 Wh battery, so I can't even be using anywhere near that - and that's already two orders of magnitude smaller.

Accessing from a phone it would be even less significant - for example, this S7 replacement battery only holds 12.7 Wh (https://www.amazon.com/Galaxy-Battery-Replacement-Samsung-Co...).

Scrolling down the project page about half way, it's displaying 0.15 kcal for me. That's ~0.17 Wh, which would equate to only being able to do that ~235 times on a single charge for my laptop. That's very obviously nowhere near reality.

Re: The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

#17

Post by yowlingcat »

zarkov99 wrote: post #15

Life has to be pretty great when people have to go to such extraordinary contortions to find something to complain about.

Are you sure the subject is a complaint and not an exploration? It seemed more to be an exploration of the energetic and computational cost of serving an average Amazon user. I found it fascinating. 30 watts and 88MB to load a page of otherwise static content does seem a little ludicrous, and I've definitely thought the same thing about much of the content I see on the internet that loves loading a bunch of crap that slows my machine down to a halt.

Re: The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

#18

Post by jschwartzi »

yowlingcat wrote: post #17
zarkov99 wrote: post #15

Life has to be pretty great when people have to go to such extraordinary contortions to find something to complain about.

Are you sure the subject is a complaint and not an exploration? It seemed more to be an exploration of the energetic and computational cost of serving an average Amazon user. I found it fascinating. 30 watts and 88MB to load a page of otherwise static content does seem a little ludicrous, and I've definitely thought the same thing about much of the content I see on the internet that loves loading a bunch of crap that…

It explains why their Android app was so incredibly slow and burned through so much battery power.

Re: The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

#19

Post by tempguy9999 »

aberforth123 wrote: post #14

Great project! The energy footprint of the internet is huge and should be addressed. For example: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/

True. And you can address it yourself by blocking JS mainly, and ads, and be amazed at how snappily a web page renders (when it does, which is often but not always sans JS).

Re: The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

#20

Post by zarkov99 »

yowlingcat wrote: post #17
zarkov99 wrote: post #15

Life has to be pretty great when people have to go to such extraordinary contortions to find something to complain about.

Are you sure the subject is a complaint and not an exploration? It seemed more to be an exploration of the energetic and computational cost of serving an average Amazon user. I found it fascinating. 30 watts and 88MB to load a page of otherwise static content does seem a little ludicrous, and I've definitely thought the same thing about much of the content I see on the internet that loves loading a bunch of crap that…

Yes, it seems pretty clear that the author feels oppressed by Amazon: "To put it bluntly, the user is not just exploited by means of their free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation."
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