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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#271

Post by Nextgrid »

unionpivo wrote: post #214
RussianCow wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

Really ? Take for instance news sites or blogs: When I read news article, what I want is mostly (there are some great interactive infographics, but those are tiny minority) text and few images, that are static. And it's not like that as a consumer I get anything extra. The text and images are still static, for the most part. Except that now its makes 20 separate requests to load it all up. Hell, pages are usually eve…

I don't believe the bloat of modern websites is because of ad-tech of dark patterns - all of these can still be done with an otherwise lightweight website. If anything, ads (excluding intentional resource usage such as crypto-miners) would be much lighter than what a typical SPA website like Reddit or Twitter is.

I believe what's happening is a broader trend in the industry of building engineering playgrounds and doing engineering purely for engineering's sake to benefit one's career - a positive feedback loop where not participating puts developers at a disadvantage as they won't gain over-engineering skills that companies now require (they require them because their developers or managers want them for the same reason).

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#272

Post by tgtweak »

1cvmask wrote: post #2

It’s at 76% now. In 53 minutes since the post it has gone down 4%. So say roughly 5% per hour as a back of the envelop calculation. That’s roughly 20 hours on a full charged cycle. It would be good to know if there is a fast charge capability of the battery and how long would that be. An hour of full sun a day? Or two hours of partial sun?

A 30W panel would need about 6 full hours of sun to fully charge that battery from 0-100. Lead acid can charge fairly quickly and can suck up that 30W input pretty easily.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#273

Post by Nextgrid »

can16358p wrote: post #223
Nextgrid wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core concept of it hasn’t changed, it still just has to display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML and a simple form POST. I don’t have the numbers for the page back then but I’d estimate it at 100KB - nowadays it’s a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails at its primary purpose of…

Reddit web is incredibly sluggish. I open the app to browse which is a smooth experience (putng aside dark patterns). Same for Twitter. Maybe it's intentional to move users into the app, where ads are more likely to be actually seen (e.g. Many web users have ad blockers) and in app purchases are frictionless.

Just FYI, for Reddit there's an amazing third-party client called Apollo on iOS, and I'm sure there are others too, same on Android.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#274

Post by sriacha »

rvense wrote: post #136
tzury wrote: post #104

When the server is down you can get the offline version of it. AKA the Printed Website. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/12/printed-website-thir...

I bought both volumes last year and made a point of only reading them outside by sunlight. It's great stuff, very thought provoking. One of the many points that has really stuck with me is how the invention of the typewriter allowed us to write five times faster... and as a result we now spend most of our time typing, somehow.

Sounds similar to Jevon's Paradox [1], where consumption rises with increasing energy efficiency.

Also, as transportation gets faster, commutes don't get shorter, people just move farther and farther from their workplace.

I'm sure there are lots of other parallels too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#275

Post by ComputerGuru »

varenc wrote: post #235
Smithalicious wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe ICs are limited by how fast you can cool them. All that energy goes into heat eventually, so temperature is going to depend only on total energy / area

Digression: Is it true that every single watt my CPU/server/electronics consume is ultimately turned into heat? To put it another way, does a server under a constant 500W produce the exact same amount of heat as a dumb 500W electric space heater? Excluding things like the tiny amount of energy that gets sent out on CAT5 cables, which I believe still gets turned into heat just elsewhere. I think this is true, but it’s…

> I think this is true, but it’s still counterintuitive. Makes me think there’s something more useful we could make electric space heaters do with their energy and still produce the same amount of heat.

Indeed: people have experimented with mining during the winter to recoup electric heating costs, which makes sense but only if you ignore the (expensive and getting more expensive by the day) cost of procuring the original mining hardware (aka GPU).

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#276

Post by united893 »

carlio wrote: post #220
obblekk wrote: post #168

*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…

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.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#277

Post by ComputerGuru »

Thorrez wrote: post #264
obblekk wrote: post #168

*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…

While I agree with most of your points, I think that these dithering images use less client-side power than a regular image compression (e.g. JPEG or PNG). The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG.

> The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG.

Just try substituting something else in that statement and see if it makes sense. “The lzma-compressed files are smaller than the raw test files, so opening them in an editor shouldn’t use more cpu” or “HEVC-compressed videos are smaller than DivX videos, so shouldn’t they be more efficient to decode and play (sans hardware acceleration)?”

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#278

Post by ComputerGuru »

onion2k wrote: post #180
chakkepolja wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is talking about badly written JS code serving the APIs and the overhead of it. Of course it's hard to debate whether JS, Java or PHP is most inefficient in that regard.

I strongly believe that the efficiency of an API is 1% down to the language it's coded in, and 99% down to who coded it.

I think that’s true if you take a no dependencies approach but as soon as you tap into the ecosystem the argument is lost.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#279

Post by ComputerGuru »

unionpivo wrote: post #214
RussianCow wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

Really ? Take for instance news sites or blogs: When I read news article, what I want is mostly (there are some great interactive infographics, but those are tiny minority) text and few images, that are static. And it's not like that as a consumer I get anything extra. The text and images are still static, for the most part. Except that now its makes 20 separate requests to load it all up. Hell, pages are usually eve…

Text-only NPR: https://text.npr.org/

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#280

Post by ComputerGuru »

brightball wrote: post #226
aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do people talk about the "HN hug of death"?

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.
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