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Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

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Re: Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

#2
This is not a code issue, everything that use power is harming the planet, but the solutions listed there are not to write better/different code but simply switch the times and other things that only mitigate the problem.

Anyway better than nothing.

Re: Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

#3
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533028.3533308 A paper where the authors use machine learning (ML) to optimize latency and hardware usage of Apache Flink dataflow programs. There's a paper in preparation from the same authors where they're looking at ML to reduce energy usage.

Re: Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

#5
As another poster said, that isn't a code issue.

You know what is a code issue though? "I dun need no optimazashun, I'm a faithful beleevur in Moore's Law, in the fuchur ppl will run my junk XD". Every single of those needless operations that your software does consumes electricity, without actually improving the life of anyone. Those will pile up because it isn't just you, it's software developers from the whole world doing this kind of stuff, with software run by almost everyone in the world.

It's fine to not care too much about efficiency when you're just solving some local issue with a dirty bash script, that you'll run exactly once and forget about it. However, software developers should have a bit more insight that needlessly wasting everyone's electricity.

Re: Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

#6

This is not a code issue, everything that use power is harming the planet, but the solutions listed there are not to write better/different code but simply switch the times and other things that only mitigate the problem. Anyway better than nothing.

People who decide to write big web applications that run on the cloud using Python instead of basically any language should be harshly censured.

Re: Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

#8
post #6

This is not a code issue, everything that use power is harming the planet, but the solutions listed there are not to write better/different code but simply switch the times and other things that only mitigate the problem. Anyway better than nothing.

People who decide to write big web applications that run on the cloud using Python instead of basically any language should be harshly censured.

I'm not sure about "harshly censured", but I have actually started looking at Python alternatives with the explicit goal of energy efficiency.

Another route I've been keenly pursuing is aggressively reducing download sizes in web apps I build: JS, images, HTML, CSS, the lot. No web fonts. I'm exploring Svelte as a means to reduce the JS component too, so client energy consumption due to JS ops is reduced.

These can all seem like trivial micro-optimisations, but "cloud computing" is a bloated monster. Billions of web app interactions per day and a few kB here and there soon add up.

Re: Our Code Is Harming the Planet, We Need Carbon Aware Design Patterns

#10

This is not a code issue, everything that use power is harming the planet, but the solutions listed there are not to write better/different code but simply switch the times and other things that only mitigate the problem. Anyway better than nothing.

I disagree. It doesn’t take 10mb of code to put a few lines of text to the screen. This occurs because:

1. Site owners want to track everything with really aggressive spyware.

2. Many developers are grossly incompetent and will blatantly tell you a few lines of text cannot be written to screen for less than a billion dependencies riding on the largest most trendy frameworks (plural).

That is millions of wasted CPU cycles per millions of users per day, which doesn’t also include the data centers than consume more power and water than the nearby city where people live.

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