- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6839374
Fad or relevant?
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The idea of holding individuals and small organizations responsible for their carbon use is a deliberate eco-fakery invented by the fossil fuel industry. It does nothing, except in cases where it leads to purchasing “carbon offsets,” in which case it does nothing and also makes some scammer somewhere some money.
Most big changes that need to happen are on the industrial level (switching to different sources of electrical power or changing pollution regulations). They may have some impact on the end-user consumer, but mostly not. Mostly what it would mean is that some obscenely rich person still gets to be obscenely rich but not as much as they want to be.
(AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions where the power consumption is actually pretty significant and you can make a case that the individual involved in it bears some responsible for the impact. But again, the strategy should be for the individual to advocate for changing regulations, not for the individual to look inward towards themselves but turn a blind eye to everyone else who decides to murder the planet, if they want to because there’s some money in it for them.)
AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions
Crypto yes, AI does not come even close to 1% of that.
Hm, I was a little bit wrong about it – you’re right, AI is basically nothing right now. Here’s a report with more.
- All data centers put together use about 2% of global electricity demand
- Cryptocurrency is almost a quarter of that
- AI is basically none of that right now, but likely to rise to be competitive with cryptocurrency in the pretty near future as it gets wider and wider adoption.
AI isn’t inherently more energy demanding than any other program, most crypto is designed to be as inefficient as possible.
It is, though. Most computer tasks that a company does on behalf of their customers can be done with a little handful of web servers, all the way up until you get to Google’s scale of operations or something. The reason is that the actual computation the computers are doing is measured in milliseconds on one share of the multicore CPU. AI requires dedicated computing hardware and runs for much longer than that, which means the investment in equipment and how much of it you have to have is orders of magnitude larger. And training the model often takes a whole cluster or data center if you’re going to be a serious AI company. You go from needing 10-20 computers even at Reddit’s scale or something, to needing hundreds or thousands.
You’re right that it’s not some sort of magic computation that’s harder or more expensive than other computation, it’s just that it’s unusual (until now) to build out a whole data center that’s devoted to doing expensive pure computations on specialized hardware on behalf of your customers, and that’s gonna have an impact on how much power your operation consumes.
From the POV of doing literally anything for the environment, yeah it’s just trash. If we’re going to bash websites for being overly complicated and costing their organizations millions a month on EC2 Bezos Bucks, making the web unusable for people with screen readers, password managers, RSS feeds, web archives etc then yeah, be my guest. Destroy it all.
That’s a good point, usually accessibilty code and other components will make the website heavier, I suppose
Yeah generally simper web pages are much better for people with accessibility issues. When everyone adds tons of weird JavaScript garbage on top then it’s very hard to make tools that work reliably on the pages
Pretty meaningless since it doesn’t capture server side footprint which can easily be much larger
How would they even know how carbon intensive slrpnk.net is? All they can do is measure some page loading speed and maybe do some very general assumptions about how much energy the lemmy-ui needs to be rendered in a browser.
While lightweight websites in terms of browser usage are nice for battery use on mobile devices, it says very little about the overall energy use of a website, or where that energy is sourced from (which makes a big difference for the carbon foot-print).
i dont think it particularly effective for environment, but if helps make web lighter and more accessible thats a good things meowz
To counter all the negative comments, I think the idea of making websites low energy (think solar.lowtech as an extreme example) is a good design principle. Yeah, in the big scheme of things it means not much but something is better than nothing.
https://www.websitecarbon.com/
This has been discussed before a while back. When it came up, I measured my page that is an environmental site and blog and it got an A+ rating. My intent in choosing the theme was to make it low data as possible (with my technological illiteracy) and I think the rating reflects that. No one wants or needs heavy webpages for a majority of them, of course exceptions apply. In this day and age, the heavier they are, the more data they are actively stealing.
Inconvenient truth: the location of your website matters more than its content in terms of footprint. Hosting in on a VPS at Amazon probably has a lower footprint than a raspberry pi in your garage. And overall, it is really, really small.
I’m not saying it isn’t but like said, something is better than nothing. The doomerism involved in saying the individual can’t make any choices doesn’t make me feel solarpunk.
Everyone should be aware of the bleeding obvious but if individuals want to make changes, then let them? I like to plant thousands of trees each year and I definitely know that isn’t going to save the planet but I still do it because it makes me feel good.
Hell yes. I’m glad to see someone get it. Every little bit counts! Something is better than nothing. Even if it’s tiny. It all adds up.
You totally rock.
Your comment is more succinct than mine but that was my intent.
If your webpage doesn’t need to load things for any important purpose, then actively make it lighter. It doesn’t hurt anyone and is one simple act that adds to the whole.
As for eco-certification, at least someone is trying to make it obvious. Good for them.
Individuals can make a ton of choices and impact! But don’t make them believe that some things are impactful when they are not. Changing the way you move around, insulating your home, changing your diet, improving your recycling, all these have an impact. Making your webpage 50K lighter? That’s good design sure, but not an environmental action.
Insulate your water heater before worrying about the few mW a website could save!
Only recycle metal and electronics, plastic recycling is a scam. Best case is plastic recycling goes directly into a landfill, worst case it’s bundled and shipped half way around the world and dumped on the beach.
I get you but I’ve already done all those things.
Ordering them by priority is fine but this is more of an ethos than a checklist. Everything that one could do could follow the same philosophy by shaving off energy usage where one can. Doesn’t matter if it’s a hot water tap, a walk to the shops instead of driving, sitting under a tree instead of aircon, or designing a website to send less data. They are all the same because the goal is use less and they all matter. Does that make sense?
At one point then the goal is not to lower your impact, it is to make it positive: don’t lower your energy use anymore, become a net producer. We just moved in a house so the insulation and switch to heat pump is our priority but at one point I want solar panels. I want guilt-free air conditioning in summer
Already done. Plus all the tree planting and biochar I do.
Perhaps your argument is a foundational one whereas other people are already chasing the diminishing returns. As an ethos, I feel that everything one should do is striving to that lower goal but there is no shame in attacking your agenda as a priority checklist, it makes sense financially.
I still don’t know why we can’t have low energy websites as the norm but certainly there are low-hanging fruit to grab elsewhere. Definitely not denying any of that.
Somewhat related anecdote: When I do my environmental work in the field and biomass needs to be moved, most people tend to move it downhill as that’s easier. I always move biomass uphill as I introduce energy into the system rather than the usual entropy (nutrients flow downhill). Most people don’t understand that argument, it’s beyond them, they think “it doesn’t matter”. Just like low energy websites, it’s the little things…
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good reasons to do lighter websites. Environmental impact is not one of them. Either your electricity usage emits CO2, in which case you have more urgent things to do, or your electricity does not, and you don’t care about the additional microwatthour loading a js library took.
10000% this, make the web lighter an smaller and use less energy mrowr !!
The machine it is hosted on can have more than a 10x impact on its electricity use.
I’d say just a fad, but even if it doesn’t have a significant change environmentally, it can still have other positive effects I suppose
Sounds like some sort of carbon credit style LARP.
Because of the data efficiency thing. I think even when the saved CO2 is very minimal I think it is still better for people where the infrastructure is not as good or for people who can’t access the free net. The Tor network for example is run by volunteers and is not nearly so fast nor has the same capacity than the clear net. So keeping the traffic interactions but decreasing the data needed by the websites could benefit the Network.
