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by perilunar 15 days ago
Save a few watts per device making the client-side code a bit more efficient.

Spend Gigawatts running data centres for LLMs.

4 comments

Share this article on LinkedIn and you'll have countless managers talking about how they initiated a company wide policy to convert all Python scripts into Lua using Claude
As Earth stakeholders, saving watts is not just good business sense—it’s a Kantian imperative.
1) Power saved scales with # of devices. Even modest savings can have a massive effect if it's software that runs on billions of devices.

2) There exist many, many more client devices than datacenters. And

3) Expect software on client devices to be generally less optimized than software deployed in datacenters.

In other words: measure, and do the math. And ofc Jevons' paradox may apply.

Most environmental chatter in a nutshell.
Isn't this a Goomba fallacy? The people trying to conserve energy and the people who are using vastly more energy than before are different individuals, no singular person is contradicting their values.
I'd label it as more related to Jevon's paradox. They arent saying they're the same individual. Just that this is very quickly undone by other developments.

But anyway it'll devolves pretty quickly into a fallacy where you shouldn't do anything because your neighbour is a bigger problem (forget the name).