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Let’s be honest, if you’re a software engineer, you know where all this compute and power consumption is going. While it’s popular to blame #LLMs, y’all know how much is wasted on #docker, microservices, overscaled #kubernetes, spark/databricks and other unnecessary big data tech. It’s long past time we’re honest with the public about how much our practices are hurting the climate, and stop looking for scapegoats https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/
"Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions."
That's actually much, much lower than I imagined. Considering how much use I get out of the internet, I find this almost a relief?
@TheServitor it does look different when put into perspective
Dear God, don't confront me with the footprint of the steak in my freezer. It's probably as much as my laptop's emissions in a year. Knowledge is power but self-awareness can be a tough row to hoe sometimes.
@kellogh I recently was in an experimental facility for data center design on one of the biggest cloud providers. They basically have functional prototypes to not need air cooling, but liquid cooling, and reuse the heat produced by the CPUs for the heating needs of the buildings, allowing reduce great qtys of necessary energy.
@mapache yeah, there’s really cool stuff you can do at high scale. someone else pointed out that the bigger problem is consumer devices, which i disagree with. i need all 12 of my personal computers devices
@kellogh You can easily warm your garage with those devices.
@oceaniceternity @kellogh haahahahahahahahahaha LOL
@kellogh @adamshostack If your finance team isn't able to reign in costs to benefit the company _today_ then we'll never get people to worry about the climate tomorrow.
@kellogh python. Just say it.
@kellogh fucking, this. Holy shit. Just.... have folks ever considered just running a db and a webserver on a Solaris box? on-prem?
@kellogh the first thing that I would do to cut those consumption would be to shut off all things blockchain. These really waste a lot of energy without providing proper value.
@kellogh Or both could be trrue.