I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?
/Devil's Champion Argument Incoming/: Facebook's part in effectively coordinating most people in most parts of the world to stay home during the pandemic has probably weighted their carbon ledger forever into the black. Or at least 5 years of dedicated bitcoin mining.
These green engineering ideas are interesting but taking them seriously would be the epitome of engineers optimizing the wrong thing.
Reading through this thread has me damn well convinced that most folks have zero idea how much power things in their homes use.
Frankly - Using my kettle to make coffee twice a day (~15 minutes of runtime) is the same as running my laptop at full power draw for 5 hours.
Just switching a single lightbulb in your house from standard (~100w) to LED (~20w) more than offsets your whole laptop's power usage, assuming you have lights on while working.
Lastly, the battery power consumption varied from about 5 Watts during idling and when the screen was automatically dimmed to as high as 40 Watts under the most grueling benchmarks. On average through under load the power consumption was around 18.1 Watts.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dell-xps...
You'd still be better off turning off the lights in a single room, in most cases, or simply toggling the AC up literally 1 to 2 degrees.
I don’t think a commissar can correctly compute costs of design and implementation alternatives, and I think permitting an open market and letting prices sort this out is a more viable option.
As Denis Leary used to joke, we have exercise machines that mimic normal activities which we refuse to do, so we are all turning into hamsters. Maybe instead of a leaf blower I need a broom with a better design and just count the cardio I'm going go get against my budget for the week.
Maybe, as some people argue, getting down and looking at my plants closely avoids me having to spray fossil-derived chemicals on them based on incomplete information. It's a matter of perspective on whether that time is quality or just a chore. Some cultures elevate certain chores to an art form. Japanese gardening is but one example in one niche in one cultural group, but there are many others.
However, there is also the cost of consumers needing to upgrade hardware when things start getting slow again because of these developer choices.
There’s a figure floating around that if consumers kept their phone for 1 more year, that is the equivalent of taking 100,000s of cars off the road. Not sure how reputable that study was though.
Anything you do to have even the tiniest effect on the consumption of nearly the entire world's population is going to have a large impact.
I still think it applies mostly to graphics apps and things like blockchain though. As bad as electron is... would be interesting to measure it with those tools the website lists, though.
https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1440295741835014149
"Something that stood out: TSMC (with 55% of the global market share, per https://theregister.com/2021/06/01/q1_2021_foundry_revenue_t...) uses 5% of all Taiwan's electricity, which is approx 12TWh/yr. Bitcoin's electricity footprint is… 13 times that, at 164TWh/yr (https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)"
But maybe my next web app I'll take that into consideration.
CPU usage is a very accurate proxy of energy usage. Second to that, network traffic.
Simply ignore pages that use poor metrics.
> Whereas, say, Visual Studio for instance is on my screen 6+ hours a day.
...and some people have private jets, but this is whataboutism.
> But maybe my next web app I'll take that into consideration.
Your whataboutism comment is also off base since the comment you were replying to was asking about bloated non-browser desktop apps so my comment is very much relevant. And the parent to that comment was about software efficiency. If anything you're the one off topic.
It's fair to say: well actually they are very accurate because of CPU usage. You don't have to agree with me. But to result to ad hominem is unnecessary. Let's keep it civil.
Whataboutism is a logical fallacy where a person tries to frame the other as a hypocrite for supporting one view when another view exists.
You probably already knew that but stating it for the sake of anyone who may not.
It is used pretty exclusively by dishonest people and people who have a poor grasp of the topic. Also, to add to it, the car vs plane example is extreme to the point of being condescending. He completely dismissed my point and went straight to assuming I must be either being dishonest or ignorant.
So yes, I took that personal. Especially when my comment was not whataboutism at all, it was actually directly related to the discussion in the parent comment about desktop apps. I apologize for not just letting it go/slide.