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Top-level
 One of the most effective ways of reducing power usage of software would be to prohibit proof of work, and get rid of it. For the fucking love of god, and to save the planet, fix Bitcoin. The second most effective way to reduce power consumption of software is to get rid of generative AI (GenAI), specifically training (inference is largely harmless). And in fact everything else does not matter **AT ALL** in the grand picture, and is an utter waste of time. 33 comments
GenAI usage is a speculative at the moment, but then I used to plan data centers for a living and what I see going into the DC halls is consistent with these estimates. The question is mostly if the current hype turns into a business, or if it implodes the way NFTs did – let's hope for the planet that it's a hype and is gone in a few years time. Desktop machines use around 25W under full power (Mac mini M2pro running LLM inference) Laptops use 5W (Mac) to 20W (Lenovo Yoga with discrete Nvidia) Steam box uses 400W under full load, 70W idle (Ryzen, 4070Ti) but these are rare and off most of the time. They may be more that DC machines. But most people run on battery and no fans, that gives them 1W power budget sustained, and a TDP of 5W. It is useful to design for long battery runtime but it has no ecological impact. I used to plan data centers for booking.com and some special expert from Gartner or something asked how much CO2 we would save if booking was written in Golang instead of perl. Booking filled the equivalent of 40 jumbo jets per day with flights at that time. The combined daily data center energy use was a few hours of flight of one engine of one jet per day. I told them to go and stop flights to have an impact, they didn't. Hacking won't help the climate. Politics can. Tax billionaires. Ban Bitcoin. Prohibit GenAi. Limit data centers. Tax flight fuel fairly. Ban cars and build public transport. Stop using concrete. Demand heat pumps. That works.  @isotopp @vladh datacenters are converting electricity to heat. 100%. And are investing even more energy to get rid of the heat. We need to convert heating of buildings from fossil fuel to electricity. What, if we combine this two issues: a fridge sized blade center, running at 5kw, selling compute power for cloud-edge-compute, providing local heating/hot water energy. Maybe combined with a heat pump. Would that make any sense? There are attempts to use data center waste heat for domestic heating, but that is not easy at all. Data center waste heat is around 50 C at most, often less, so you can use it to drive a heat pump, but you can't transport it very well. If you transport it, it still has to be used very locally. Data centers are often not built on expensive ground close to where people live, though. People need heat in winter. Not in summer. What are you doing in summer? What are you doing in winter, if the need for this data center happens to be low and it does NOT produce sufficient waste heat? You just built a tight coupling of one piece of critical infra with another piece of critical infra. This is usually not a winning strategy. @isotopp @vladh not sure you can ban cars in the rural setting. Ultimately maybe self driving trams are the answer but that will take decades However I agree we need to change behaviours. Here in Scotland we can already produce 140% of electricity by renewables Why not make electricity free like water, ie included in council tax. Immediately electric heaters and immersion heaters would be used preferentially over fossil fuels. Electric cars would be much more attractive We need big changes https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Peter-Norton-ebook/dp/B09FH252GQ You can start by banning cars within city limits (use a P+R, then use public transport), and then extend from there as your public transport evolves. Making cars impossible to use conveniently outside of cities and banning them in cities is an excellent start. @isotopp @vladh as a start but we have houses (small holdings, farms etc) miles up gravel tracks. People will need some form of transport and public transport would need to be door to door to replace that. Having also lived in cities I do agree we don't need cars in cities. Good infrastructure would be so easy to put in without cars. We do also need better delivery services moving stuff about is a big use of cars. "Here in Scotland we can already produce 140% of electricity by renewables" Schleswig-Holstein, where I was born, similarly. Wind + Solar = literally energy too cheap to meter. The Netherlands, where I live, will be overprovisioned 2x or more by 2030 (that is around 21 GW of max power demand vs. > 21 GW of solar AND > 21 GW of wind). The next game is batteries for households and vehicle-to-grid in the 5-11 kW range (most existing cars taht do this do 2.2-3 kW) "Why not make electricity free like water, ie included in council tax." Water is metered where I live, but yes. Flatrates for power (You pay a base rate, or tax, it does not matter much) for the first 5 MWh/year are totally a thing that will be coming. The money is not for the energy, which is free, but for the reliabilty, which comes from having a grid and flexibility and energy storage in batteries. Watermanagement is very much NOT privatized in the Netherlands, and the structures that build dikes and manage water are older than any government and exist outside of the government and private industry. That is because 2/3 of the country are below sea level and without structures for water management, neither government nor private industry would even exist. Water is still metered (and that makes a lot of sense in many ways matter for NL geography and geology) @isotopp @vladh I moved from England to Scotland and the difference is night and day. England genuinely thinks that they get a better service in terms of customer care. Down south there was a leak in the street for about a month before it was dealt with. Here we had a leak and scottish water were here in 20 mins. In the Highlands. Its 15 mins one way to go and get a pint of milk. Can't fault them. @isotopp @vladh I grew up in an area of the UK very like the Netherlands and you are right we need individualised approaches. However we also need better international cooperation. Countries like Scotland that have ample ability for schemes like Ben Cruachan should be part of a network so that areas such as the Netherlands can use 'scottish" electricity at peak times. Better resilience all round. Global problems require global solutions "such as the Netherlands can use 'scottish" electricity at peak times." https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/NL Electricity maps is very nuclear centric, but the visualization is still useful. The EU is one grid, and countries regularly export and import energy dynamically. That keeps power prices low across all of the EU. Even GB is still part of that grid. @isotopp @vladh I'm not sure batteries in the conventional sense are the answer. Huge issues with mining the resources, lifespan and recycling. However there are other options on a bigger scale. Ideas like Ben Cruachan near Oban is in essence a huge battery. Pump after uphill when there is surplus electricity and let it flow downhill when there is high demand. No nasty lithium and its water based so infinitely recyclable with a long lifespan. They totally are. Around 5-10 kWh LFP per household that has solar, as a rough estimate the smaller of your daily usage after conversion to heat pumpt and electric car and the average solar yield in March or October. If you allow grid charging for the battery, double the size to 20 kWh LFP. https://www.zonneplan.nl/thuisbatterij (And the geography that enables Oban does not scale, otherwise it would win) @isotopp @vladh but I agree tax billionaires and flights should be taxed far more appropriately. And by that I mean stop subsidising and for each litre of fuel to be taxed higher than petrol. Why not also make public transport free? Make it cheaper and easier than owning a car. We also need more public transport infrastructure. My nearest station is an hours drive and a trip to the city is 2-4 hours quicker by car than train. |
Gregory's Server
@isotopp I agree that those things are destructive. But do you have any data regarding what percentage of emissions from software they cause? I think we would need that before concluding anything else is a waste of time.