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Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

You know, if you wanted to improve carbon footprint, a better place to look might be at software bloat. The sheer number of times things get encoded and decoded to text is mind boggling. Especially in "typical node, Java loads".

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Logging and Cybersecurity are bloaty areas as well. I've seen plenty of AWS cost breakdowns where the cybersec functions were the highest percentage of spend. Or desktops where carbon black, or windows defender were using most of the CPU or IO cycles. And networks where syslog traffic was the biggest percentage of traffic.

Norton, Symantec, and McAfee contribute greatly to global warming in the financial services sector. At least half of CPU cycles on employee laptops are devoted to them.

But do they actually work? For years I've been of the opinion that most anti-virus solutions don't actually stop virusses, instead they give you a false sense of security and their messaging is intentionally alarmist to make individuals and organizations pay their subscription fees.

In my limited and sheltered experience, the only viruses I've gotten in the past decade or so was from dodgy pirated stuff or big "download" button ads on download sites.

At best they don’t work, in reality they are an attack vector themselves and a performance nightmare. They should (mostly) not exist.

Presumably then they're knocking hours off the laptops' battery lives?

As AWS doesn't price services based on carbon footprint, you can't infer the carbon footprint from the cost.

I agree however that certain AWS services are disproportional expensive.

Presumably the price provides some sort of bounds.

(Unless they are doing something like putting profits towards some sort of carbon maximization scheme)

Well and a fair amount of cybersec oriented services are a pattern of "sniff and copy every bit of data and do something with it" or "trawl all state". Which is inherently heavy.

This has been looked at; the electricity savings of more efficient programming are too small to be worth it with a fixed compute capacity. However, if you can reduce the amount of machines or machine-time you require, that can become material.

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