[neon5077]

This is something I've been thinking about for a long time. How many gigawatts are electron discord clients using right now? How many are being wasted transmitting a 200MB jpeg to render into a 2" square on your phone?

Your "eh, good enough" code costs your users collectively hundreds or thousands of dollars in electricity. Your galaxy brain insane shit stupid application packaged as 40 docker images instead of a 200kb binary has caused millions of dollars in hardware upgrades. Uncountable amounts of e-waste and pollution.

It's really just absolutely staggering to think about. The ever-plummeting quality and performance of software is snowballing into an energy and ecological catastrophe that we are all very studiously ignoring.

And you know what? We can draw a single straight line from this problem back to capitalism. Capitalism fundamentally cannot consider externalities. So we shit out the cheapest software that technically does the job because there's no profit incentive to do otherwise. If we could all slow down and write decent software, the world would be a better place. But no, that's not profitable enough.