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by friend_and_foe 1175 days ago
No.

It's lipstick on a pig, it's a way of feeling important while making no difference. The way you combat climate change is by reducing carbon dioxide output and increasing biomass creation and therefore uptake and sinking. You can't write code that does that.

Adding complexity to everything is what software developers do best, only the most skilled ones manage to reduce complexity, and adding complexity to this situation isn't going to help anyone. Don't stick your fingers in the pie, this one's not for you unless you want to build some different skills.
3 comments
thebenedict 1175 days ago
There's plenty of greenwashing in tech, but I don't think it's hopeless. On an ops call this morning I heard about a team switching to a server type that saves ~40% on power, and their fleet is ~50k instances. Opportunities exist if you have the skills and this is an issue you care about.
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doitLP 1175 days ago
But the net effect is usually not less is it? Management will find a new way to spend that money or the team will realize they can now run 40% more instances on the same budget.
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juancn 1175 days ago
Well you could be efficient with your code so it doesn't waste CPU cycles, since CPU cycles == Energy, and if your algorithms use less energy, in all likelihood you'll emit less CO2. Specially if they're widely deployed.
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friend_and_foe 1175 days ago
Well we gave developers that job and they failed miserably. We have orders of magnitude more compute and orders of magnitude more bandwidth and things are getting slower. If developers were going to solve that problem they would've done it already.
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CapstanRoller 1175 days ago
The best way to save CPU cycles is to not write or deploy that code at all
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wnkrshm 1175 days ago
There are some endeavours I feel that could have an impact, but it's always a clever protocol in combination with the right hardware, like solar-powered mesh-networks or just solar-powered servers with 24h availability due to mirrors on the other side of the planet [0].

[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2022/09/27/solar-protocol-network-exp...

Edit: What I want to say is, that the good that is possible is mostly small tech, not big tech.

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