HN Explorer

Ask HN: Shouldn't we be turning an eye to power consumption?

79 points by Damogran6 ↗ HN
Our corporate policy is to fully scan our Hard Disks with AV weekly. It never finds anything. That's 22,000 systems using a full CPU core every week...adding wear and heat and power consumption.

Likewise, marketing for this fastest hardware generally consists of a product that's 140% the cost, 110% of the performance, and 120% of the power consumed due to processor binning and supply/demand curves.

SaaS is a bottomless hole where you throw your processing without thought of power consumption, just write a check and make it go away.

Flight Simulator 2020 requires a 250gb download, every couple of months. Every endpoint, every cable modem, every Akamai cache.

I don't know how to even formulate the statement: Maybe consider your carbon footprint when performing that next full code compile?

88 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] thread
kleer001
> Maybe consider your carbon footprint when performing that next full code compile?

Why "Carbon footprint" is a lie. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AKR2j4CymosDtmfEoDt2geSC...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE

https://medium.com/woodworkers-of-the-world-unite/your-carbo...

That said being efficient is not a bad idea. There is a market for chips with less power consumption. A 250GB seasonal DL is kinda wasteful. But the solution to climate change (and it's not a crisis) is not atoning for our eco-sins. That's a misapplication of the JudeoChristian myth of sin/salvation.

Damogran6
I'm thinking Carbon footprint is shorthand for other wasteful consumption behaviors. Likewise, things like trading carbon-credits is also a boondoggle. Keep doing what you're doing, so long as someone else uses less carbon and can trade.
brimble
Implemented correctly, a carbon credit market ought to be putting economic pressure on everyone to use power more efficiently, or to switch to renewables. It's supposed to be the market-based conservative approach to regulating externalities in a commons—allow companies to do what they like, but make them pay for it, while encouraging others who can cut back or switch to do so in order to sell credits on the market, or at least to stop paying for their own.

Doesn't mean a particular implementation of it will be any good, but the idea is sound.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
ruined
as the people who build the tools, tech workers have sightly more responsibility here than any random individual
kleer001
I would say that the managers and business owners have that power you're pointing at. IMHO the code monkey implementing solution XYZ could use more power efficient solution ABC, but it'd take 20% longer or cost 10% more and Manager/Owner doesn't want to pay that as its an externalized cost and will cut into their profits this year.

This is the essence of the tragedy of the commons.

Solution? Price everything. EVERYTHING.

tonyedgecombe
I've seen much more sloppy programming because the individual programmer didn't care compared to a manager demanding it.
kleer001
Ok. That's not what I'm pointing towards. But I see your point.

My point is that a manager and/or own would need to demand power efficient code and processes and the normal day to day business (like normal day to day nature) would be happy with code-that-does-the-job-just-good-enough-not-to-melt-down.

wmf
I worked on server power efficiency for ten years and I don't think it's too bad. It's true that people are doing vastly more with computers than we used to and thus more energy is being consumed, but efficiency has also increased. Total energy consumption per capita is flat or going down in the developed world. Mainstream laptops and phones get better battery life than ever before yet batteries have gotten smaller. In the cloud, there's a correlation between cost and resource consumption so incentives to reduce cost also reduce energy.
mikewarot
It's hobby horse of mine, so I may be wrong, but I believe with a capability based operating system, you'd never have to blindly trust an executable ever again, and thus could completely get rid of virus scanning as a process.

Genode and Fuchsia can't get here soon enough for me.

tenebrisalietum
The challenge will be in defining the user data model with the correct amount of detail and granularity such that capability requests are meaningful. Also, there will always be lazy users.

For example, on the Outlook app for iOS - when attaching a picture to an email from your Photos - you can provide permission for the Outlook app to see just the pictures you select, all pictures, or deny permission completely. Awesome - but how many just share everything?

How many users really look at the permissions requested by the Android apps they install?

But it does make anything that goes wrong completely the user's fault, though.

taeric
Yeah... no. This is basically a non-starter. You are hoping to solve a social problem with technology. And all evidence is pointing that things are getting more and more expansive, not less.

Specifically, we had perfectly capability based devices for a long time. VCRs, TVs, game consoles, mp3 players, etc. I see no reason to think a larger convergence isn't on the way. I think we /may/ see some advance to protect account access. But, I just can't buy that it will be groundbreaking anytime soon. At least, no better than the yubikey access I already have setup.

closeparen
That is not what capability based security means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
taeric
My point was the single function devices had no way of getting permission outside their function. As things converge, this becomes a problem. And unless you are going to force some permissions to be exclusive of others... you have a trap.

I should say I will be delighted to be proven wrong. If things really become more secure, that can only be good. My assertion is still that this is largely a non technological problem, and throwing more technology at will only make it different, at best.

closeparen
It feels like I’m reading GPT-2. Malware isn’t a social problem, and there is no relationship between capability-based security architecture at the operating system level and the number of different functions a device can perform.
taeric
Fair, social is not the correct choice of word here. Really just "not-technological."

If I were to fish for a better word, I'd probably shoot for literacy/education. I have seen far more successful and smarter (and trained) people fall for phishing attempts than makes sense. Such that, as long as we keep putting more and more capability into our devices, expect people to allow use of that to malicious software. That is, as long as the device is capable of doing something, expect that it will be exploited.

To your point, though, I could also have claimed that poor driving was an education problem. We certainly used to spend more time in educational classes to learn to drive. And yet, I have no doubt that my children will be better/safer drivers than I am with virtually no classes. Mostly thanks to technological improvements.

So, please show some charity in how you read my criticisms of the idea here. I'm not trying to defend some paper with iron clad logic. Just expressing my doubts. And hoping the other side actually proves me wrong. :D

HWR_14
You've never had to remove a malware extension to Chrome an elderly relative installed?
jrockway
I've definitely done this. The malware extensions are an unstoppable force. I reported every single one I found (I worked at Google at the time) and where 1 fell, 2 would pop back up.

This is probably our fault as "geeks" or whatever. If a browser can't run uBlock Origin or DarkReader, I would never use it. Unfortunately, the technology and hooks you need to implement those two things are also the technology you need to implement "replace all images with my company's ads" or "siphon your bank account details to $COUNTRY_WITHOUT_LEGAL_SYSTEM". If "we" didn't want those things, then users would be more secure. (But you can pry them from my cold, dead hands. So here we are.)

kodah
I think Linux is well on it's way to fitting in well with a zero trust framework. systemd's homed makes the user portion of the OS very portable (with other systemd installations) alongside device and user home encryption.

Running SecComp or SELinux on a developers machine probably comes with years of growing pains, but I imagine that's the last step in getting away from virus scanners.

File scanners and companies doing things like Netskope are monitoring for data exfiltration though, and it's using this usecase that some of the most pervasive anti-privacy tools get employed. In fact, Netskope (and products like it) are so invasive that in order to basically function they need to take over your root trust chain.

chillacy
Amdahl's law suggests that "we" (assuming readers here are monolithic enough to call a collective) would have more effect optimizing the dominant power consumers, and I would guess that would be some sort of industrial process or electric heating as opposed to consumer electronics.
zaroth
Energy is the key driver of productivity in this world. Now, energy costs money, which incentivizes people to try to use it efficiently to achieve whatever their goal or whatever it is they’re trying to produce.

The question isn’t quite “should we worry about power consumption” because the market already does that pretty efficiently. Generally speaking people will try not to just throw away money if they can think of a better way to spend it.

So let’s assume we’re not talking about eliminating pure waste, because that’s an obvious answer. There are a lot of companies that focus on identifying and eliminating energy waste actually.

But I think what you’re asking is, to what extend should we actually limit marginally productive uses of energy in order to reduce overall consumption, even when the value of the end-product exceeds the cost of the energy?

My personal answer to that is… not at all. In fact, I think energy is way too expensive overall currently, and we need to be working very hard as a society to drive down the cost of energy, and in turn, increase per-capita energy usage significantly.

Energy usage is directly correlated with standard of living, health, and economic output / productivity. Increasing energy costs or throttling energy usage is a regressive tax and ultimately stymies economic growth.

I would guess that the next great human accomplishments in my lifetime will be a human on Mars, abundant clean energy on Earth, and cheap/practical immunotherapy to cure cancer and auto-immune diseases at low cost.

I doubt it will be quite a “Mr. Fusion” on the Tesla I can toss breakfast scraps into and then drive 300 miles, but for example, solar panels and battery system efficient and cheap enough to give me all the energy I could need for something on the order of $1-$2 a day (current electric bill is more like $12-$15 / day).

agumonkey
The physical aspect seems drowned in human group chaos. Slight example: public sector agencies can be so inefficient, people have to come multiple times for almost no reasons, that's useless transportation. I've witnessed it in a courthouse. Rethinking our workflows, leveraging more IT (proper IT) here would help I believe.
tonyedgecombe
>Generally speaking people will try not to just throw away money if they can think of a better way to spend it.

Actually I think that is exactly what we do. My neighbours buy bigger and bigger cars which have very little extra utility for them. The same for their houses. Conspicuous consumption is a thing.

>Energy usage is directly correlated with standard of living, health, and economic output / productivity.

Energy use in the UK has declined over the last twenty years whilst the economy has been growing.

Health is largely a function of clean water, good diet and exercise. Food in particular has been consuming a decreasing part of the economy for a century.

We can go a long way by being a lot smarter, the laptop I'm typing this on consumes a fraction of the energy of the one I used twenty years ago. The new houses near me use heat pumps vs the resistive heating in my house.

>I doubt it will be quite a “Mr. Fusion” on the Tesla I can toss breakfast scraps into and then drive 300 miles, but for example, solar panels and battery system efficient and cheap enough to give me all the energy I could need for something on the order of $1-$2 a day (current electric bill is more like $12-$15 / day).

I can remember when we were promised energy too cheap to meter. It didn't happen and I doubt it ever will. Wishful thinking isn't going to get us out of the mess we have created.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
lokimedes
I don’t see this as a problem that can be solved by markets. Energy is a very asymmetric utility - its cost may define whether people can heat og cool their homes, pump water or uphold other essential functions. That cheap power can be misused for crypto mining does not make raising prices the answer. That is what legislation is for, ban or tax antisocial use of a shared resource. Having multiple mega constellations in low earth orbit is an excellent example of how we misuse scarce resources in the name of free markets.
DocTomoe
We must be careful not to go into the other direction, leading to a single source of truth of what is acceptable behaviour, which would be easily corruptable, and undermining consumer choice by only having singular service providers (which kills innovation).

If you go the market approach, people are going to change consumption patterns (see: higher gas prices in Europe leading to more sensible cars on the road as compared to the States). If you roll that out for industrial consumers, large gains can be made.

And us, IT people? Maybe it is time to stop solving every mundane problem by having 200 mb of external JS libraries being included into your code. Maybe processor cycles DO matter, and being wasteful with them SHOULD be publicly named and shamed. But we won't save the world by shutting down a flight simulator.

valbaca
Premature optimization....compared to the energy a single shipping tanker, long-haul truck, car, or even microwave compute energy is microscopic. Might as well worry about how much air you breathe is contributing to global CO2 levels.

That said, I think there's also some gains to be had at the top of the stream: tool-builders and with projects. It's all a numbers game.

Video games and simulators are an incredible waste of energy at every step of the way. New graphics cards require tons of engineers to design, simulate and that's before the silicon's even been bought. Next is creation, boxing, and shipping. Then RUNNING it. I guarantee that playing the simulator for 5 mins uses more energy than a dozen downloads.

But it's all a numbers game. How many people are running high end graphics cards? How many are playing that simulator? etc.

All that said, I'm also thinking about this. I wonder how much I could save by, say, switching from JS/Java to Rust. I don't know the answer. I'm mostly musing and it's probably naive or grasping at what little I can do as an individual to help the climate crisis.

It's so big, we have to do something, but at the same time, there's nothing we can do? Attempts could have negative consequences? Hell, even typing this on my giant monitor probably spent more energy than I could ever hope to save in my life.

onlyrealcuzzo
At 270 watts, your graphics card is using less energy in a day than it takes to drive your 2k pound car down the street to buy a coffee at Starbucks.

A gallon of gas is ~33kWh. A mile is ~1kWh.

Damogran6
Looking at what it takes to replace a gas fueled generator with solar, it's easy to overlook how much power is in gas. The one upside to permanent solar is that it's always producing when there's enough sun...unlike a generator that needs to be using fuel to make power.
dahfizz
Yeah, gasoline is incredibly energy dense. Unfortunately, internal combustion engines are also really inefficient.

The Tesla battery pack weighs over 1000lbs, but only carries the same energy as 3 gallons of gas.

CyanLite2
You're probably off by an order of magnitude. But your point is valid nonetheless.

Average Tesla can do nearly 300 miles per charge. A gallon of gas can do about 30 miles per gallon in a similar sedan.

svnt
If you did some more math instead of assuming you were right you would see that their numbers are actually right, and so are yours.
dahfizz
What am I wrong about?

A Tesla gets ~130 mpg equivalent [1]. This means that if you put a gallon of gas worth of electricity into a tesla, the Tesla can go 130 miles.

On that same page you can see the Tesla is rated for ~350 miles of range. So the Tesla battery pack carries less energy than 3 gallons of gas.

Let's phrase it this way: if you had a 100% efficient generator, you would need less than 3 gallons of gas to fully charge a 1000lb Tesla battery pack. The Tesla could then travel 350 miles with that energy.

[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=43401

onlyrealcuzzo
I think it's easier to say:

A Tesla long range battery is 82 kWh.

A gallon of gas is ~33.7 kWh.

So even in a Tesla, 1 mile of driving = 1 hour of gaming = it's not worth talking about gaming as a cause of global warming.

inglor_cz
He is right. Electromotors are way more efficient than ICEs.

That is why many of the world's railways run on electricity, at least on the main lines: it costs something to set up all the catenary wires etc., but the operational savings are huge.

ianai
and of course ICE doesn't come close to efficiently converting the energy in burning fuel to kinetic motion.
Someone
> compared to the energy a single shipping tanker, long-haul truck, car, or even microwave compute energy is microscopic.

I don’t think that ever is a good argument. Efficiency improvements likely will come from thousands of small steps, and it’s not a given (but still fairly likely) that the cheapest (in kWh decrease/$ spent) improvements can be made by cutting down on the largest spenders.

The good news is that data centers have become much more efficient over time. The bad news is that demand has about kept up for that. Data centers used about 1% of global electricity in 2018 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba3758, https://datacenters.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/Masanet_et_a...)

Damogran6
There's some work to improve shipping container ships (https://www.equinor.com/en/magazine/battery-hybrid-supply-sh...) but to not look at anything else because shipping containers pollute so much is...folly. It's a logical fallacy that keeps the entirety from improving just because the worst one is just _so_bad_.

ETA:And it's not like the pollution is evenly distributed...

feoren
> compared to the energy a single shipping tanker

Isn't a cargo freighter one of the biggest efficiency gains humanity has ever produced? It's hundreds of times more efficient than moving the same weight of goods any other way, except by train (after the rail has been laid). Not to detract from your main argument, but using a cargo ship as an example of an energy hog is really badly missing the point.

xboxnolifes
Even if it's the most efficient energy improvement in history, it can still be best thing to focus on making more efficient. The best thing to target for improvement is that which has the best output from a function of highest impact and lowest effort. Making cargo ships 0.5% more efficient could still be the lowest effort, highest impact returns on energy (hypothetically, I don't actually know).
codingdave
It would be better to not ship those goods in the first place. That is one reason for buying local and regional where possible. And as you said - we already have rail laid to get it around countries and continents.

There are far more complexities than that, of course. Our economy is global, not every country can be self-sufficient, and dialing back our current logistics is a huge task that few people are ready for.

But no, saying "cargo ships are efficient" feels like a limiting perspective on this problem.

yjftsjthsd-h
In general, computers just aren't that bad. Yes, it's wasteful, but... even pegging a CPU core for a few hours just doesn't use that much electricity. If you drove a car into the office and then turned off every computer in the building and drove home for the weekend, the commute burned more energy than you saved. I used to play with my laptops trying to get power use down, but eventually realized that I could turn off a light or lower the heat 1 degree and save at least as much power.

> SaaS is a bottomless hole where you throw your processing without thought of power consumption, just write a check and make it go away.

On the contrary, this is the best case - energy is priced in, you pay by the CPU-second, all the incentives are perfectly aligned. That it's so cheap probably demonstrates that it just isn't that big a deal (we can argue about effective subsidies, but at least Google is using enough renewable power that I doubt it).

epgui
You could say the same about individual cars (they don't use that much energy/hydrocarbons/electricity), but in aggregate, just like cars, compute is extremely expensive in terms of energy.

Edit: note that I'm not trying to compare an individual car to an individual computer, or even aggregate cars to aggregate computers... My point was merely that aggregate compute is very energy intensive. :)

agumonkey
90hp (an average car I believe) is 70kW, that's 1000 gaming rigs (700W) in max consumption, but I assume it would still be 1000 more under small loads. And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think.
yjftsjthsd-h
> And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think.

Mine were actually closer to 30W, even under load (realizing this is when I stopped caring:]).

EDIT: This does seem to vary a lot by device, though; I may just happen to have owned really low-power devices.

agumonkey
Yeah I know that's why I quoted larger numbers for safety, some atom laptops were 15W max I believe, I remember thinkpad X using around 25W on average. Some beefy laptops might go above 150W, some use external gpus. But on average 100W seems the ballpark.

And smartphones are even lower.. the energy requirement of advanced computing are ridiculously low.

Apple did help a lot here:

> 2021 — Anandtech found in its analysis that power consumption for the Mac mini M1 averaged 26.5 watts at the wall, assuming a multi-threaded workload.

Wifi is choppy I can't dig about iphone power usage but well, it's surely below.

epgui
As I tried to clarify in the edit (which preceded your comment), my point was merely that in the aggregate, compute is very energy intensive.

Just for a ballpark sense of scale:

> "Computers, data centers and networks consume 10% of the world’s electricity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_energy_management

agumonkey
Yeah I understood, I just thought that even planet wide, it would require each car owner to have 1000 computers to sum to the same kind of figure.

I'm also saying this because some people in the energy / climate change sector said that computing electronics were insignificant (the usual suspects being heating, transportation etc)

jstarfish
> I used to play with my laptops trying to get power use down, but eventually realized that I could turn off a light or lower the heat 1 degree and save at least as much power.

You're ignoring the practical benefits of engineering power-efficient software for the mass audience of mobile devices with limited energy storage to begin with.

It's not just about carbon footprint. Battery life matters.

yjftsjthsd-h
Oh sure; I'm 100% in favor of obsessing over power efficiency in the name of keeping your device running cool or making the battery last longer. I intended only to say that at least phones and laptops are, as far as I can see, basically irrelevant for climate/grid-power purposes.
bsder
> In general, computers just aren't that bad.

As long as you aren't part of the crypto ecosystem.

The crypto stuff, OTOH, burns an enormous amount of energy--by design.

adhesive_wombat
The other thing about it is that if you could make it use radically less energy, it wouldn't save a joule: the same amount of energy would be used to just mine more of it.
taeric
This same thought experiment used to crack me up with lights. Folks would think "just turn your lights off earlier to save energy." This really fit in the mentality of "you have to suffer to gain."

The math isn't even hard. Switching from 60W bulbs down to an LED, which is ~9W, any effort to save energy on the old lights by turning them off is laughably misguided.

aspenmayer
This kind of thinking comes from a scarcity mindset that is overly concerned with efficiency, when we already have record-breaking efficiency in many domains compared to only 5 or 10 years ago. What was the point of those efficiency gains and engineering efforts and research expenditures, if we can’t even use the toys we made with the cool tech we invented? What’s the point of doing better if we’re shamed for the enterprise itself, after outdoing ourselves?
CyanLite2
I think an easier answer for all of this with a more direct impact to consumers wallets and carbon consumption is to use more DC wiring inside homes.

Those big ugly power supply bricks that we all carry around for our laptops... it converts AC power to DC power that's used by your device. Your cell phone adapter, your Xbox/PS5, etc..etc.. Nearly every one of our electronic devices require converting AC input to DC so you can plug into a standard wall outlet.

You can expect about a 5-20% on average power loss just to do the conversion. With alternative energies coming online from DC sources, the power loss is starting to get pretty bad.

DC Input (solar/wind) -> High-Voltage AC (for transmission lines) -> Low-Voltage AC (240v coming into your home) -> Power Brick -> DC Output (just so you can charge your phone).

5-20% power loss each time that's converted just to pull 5 volts @ 3 amps just to charge a cell phone.

ianai
It'd be really cool if something like USB-C were fleshed out enough to really "deserve" to be added as an outlet option alongside the usual. Maybe in a few revisions (aka a decade or two?) a successor to USB-C will finally nail this unambiguously.
sp332
You can buy outlets with USB ports built in. Long-distance USB would probably have issues with voltage dropping unless you used some beefy cable. Also, USB PD negotiates between individual devices, so you need some extra logic per port instead of just stringing them up in parallel like normal power outlets.
CyanLite2
Those outlets have an internal AC-DC converter in them.

I can't find the link/product, but Matt Reiseinger (youtube superstar home builder) showcased a distribution box where he ran USB-like cables in the bedroom/living areas. There was a main DC distribution box that delivered power to those places. You could plug in a standard Macbook Pro USB-C cable directly into the wall and get DC power. No conversion (except what was done by the distribution box). The AC-DC converter in the distribution box could be directly bypassed if you were running on solar/battery/wind sources.

samtho
The power loss is definitely on the higher side (> 20%) but if we were to run DC within the home, we’d probably be better off using 48v. Higher voltage means resistance matters less and conductors can be smaller (less current) but still be low enough to convert efficiently.
nebula8804
Do these newfangled GaN power supplies improve this metric somewhat?
CyanLite2
Nope, still does AC-to-DC conversion
stocknoob
Everyone should shave their head to lower their collective weight and save energy on transportation costs. That’s what this line of thinking is.
asasidh
Consuming power is not a thing to apologize for.
epgui
IMO it's not about how much you use, it's about what you do with what you use. Efficiency is a virtue.
asasidh
You are more than incentivized to make most with any of your resources. The push towards fragile energy and greenwashing is bad as Europe just realized.
nebula8804
Problem with this line of thinking is that you are not really paying the full cost of most energy sources but the cost is evidently forced to be paid either in the form of degraded environment or issues in your country down the road(refugee crisis, nuclear failures, etc.) There is never a free lunch.
dabinat
I think Bitcoin does a lot more damage than your AV scan does. At least you are incentivized for profit reasons not to let your energy bill get too out of control, whereas Bitcoin flips those incentives and actively rewards energy wastage.

But if your company is serious about reducing emissions, they could consider solar/storage or carbon offsets. I think what hardware you buy and where the energy comes from is more important than how you actually use it.

giraffe_lady
Yeah or take the case recently where airlines were flying empty planes around europe to keep their airport slots or something.

You could spend years overhauling efficiency in the entire global tech industry and succeed and it would be undone by a couple cases like that. Cases like that happen all the time: we mostly consider acting on economic incentives valid unless it's specifically illegal.

Which is not to say this isn't a thing we should do eventually, or maybe even start thinking about now. I haven't done the math on this but my guess is we could balance out the carbon cost of all datacenters by shutting down a few dozen coal power plants. We are building new coal power plants.

giantg2
The things you describe are likely nothing compared to the HVAC, hot water, commute, etc energy requirements that companies are creating by forcing people back into the office.

I don't really see a problem with a weekly scan. Then again, that would be a massive step forward for my company. We have switched mostly to laptops. But until recently most people had a desktop at work and it stayed on continously (per the company policy). I tried suggesting wake on LAN a decade ago. My suggestion was ignored.

prostoalex
Shouldn't we be turning an eye to power generation?

From infrastructure perspective, rather than chase millions of consumption endpoints, it's just more efficient to replace polluting generating facilities with nuclear, wind, solar, or even newer gas-burning plants with carbon capture.

legalcorrection
Whenever I've had unmetered electricity, I've left the air conditioner running all day at a very low temperature. It's really nice when it's 90 degrees out and you walk into your home and it's 68 degrees. Truly incredible.

I also bought incandescent bulbs because they're cheaper (again, not paying electricity) and look so much nicer.

I take very long hot showers all the time.

I love to get in my car and go for long drives. Just for fun.

Paper plates because I can just throw them away.

Flush early and flush often.

I set my work desktop to stay on all night so I can RDP in without trouble.

For every self-flagellating member of the church of environmentalism, there are ten people like me.

tonyedgecombe
You are going to find it so painful when change is forced on you.
legalcorrection
Not really. If the environmentalists ever take over, it's poor people who will be forced to sacrifice their comforts. The middle class will have to take a bit of a financial hit. And the wealthy will carry on like nothing changed.
tonyedgecombe
Not really, poor people aren't causing this problem. In fact they stand to gain from many of the changes. It's the rich who have most to lose.
legalcorrection
Spoken with the confidence of ignorance of economics.
tonyedgecombe
Not really, it's not the poor who are taking flights to Bali or buying new SUV's. Climate change is driven by consumption and the poor don't consume much. They also benefit when you start putting in changes like better public transport, cycle paths, etc.
danamit
Wanna be power efficient? be poor.

You will consume less meat, won't buy needless consumer electronics, and won't change your PC/phone as often, won't buy energy waste hobbies things, won't waste gas, won't travel in planes.

eternityforest
I still think file serving should be done by dedicated cache hardware. If a gigabit ethernet switch is tiny, and ram and SSDs are pretty low power, we should be able to make a low powered cache box that can serve tens of gigabits on a few watts.

We really should think of optimization from the start if we want to do it at all. How much of that 250GB actually changes between updates? What kind of changes would be needed to be able to only scan changed files?

Some of that stuff is easier to address at the start.

But all in all, computers seem to almost always be more efficient than whatever analog thing they replaced, even if they are occasionally slightly less enjoyable(see Blockbuster vs Netflix)