Clean code won't save the planet

It might not save the planet, but I sure do prefer a website that doesn't need five seconds to load.

I don't feel like I'm asking that much but for some reason websites insist on using HD videos as site background, autoplaying livestreams, newsletter popups and more.

No need to argue about saving the climate - not using Netflix or YouTube would indeed make a much larger difference - but just do it for our sanity. I swear the only reason I'm not clinically insane yet is because browsers have tabs which let me load websites in the background. And that's with an internet connection that, while not the fastest, is far beyond anything certain remote regions have access to.

How about we keep sites lightweight so more people around the world have access to information and education, in turn improving more than just the climate.

Multiple people here are disagreeing and saying no, if everyone does what they can it does make a difference.

I think a better perspective is this: the impact per time unit of clean code is vanishingly tiny.

If you actually care about the environment, then it's orders of magnitude more effective to write "dirty" code, and then use the free time it gives you to do things that actually make a difference: volunteering, lobbying, raising awareness, writing to representatives, working and donating the $ to environmental groups, etc.

The question isn't about whether something is a net positive or not, it never has been. The question is, is it the biggest positive you can achieve with your limited time/resources.

Which is where the author is right -- focusing on clean code (unless you're Netflix-scale) is a massive time and energy suck away from action that can make a much larger difference.

This totally misses the boat. No one is claiming a small httpd server or a minimal website is saving the earth. But it's important to start thinking about these things and try to do our part when possible to reduce unnecessary code.

Not caring about things like these leads to modern websites using 10s or 100s of megabytes of data and considerably more cpu cycles for no real reason aside from ads, analytics, and developer friendliness, resulting in degraded performance on older laptops and mobile networks, etc.

Things like optimizing and caching docker builds do make a difference at scale for organizations.

No, it won't save the planet.

But millions of people making millions of small changes might save the planet. Refusing to do anything at all unless it makes a huge change is not helpful.

Random thought, but why don't Windows & Apple just download all of Google fonts and serve them with Windows/Mac.

The amount of bandwidth saved just from having those set indexed locally is most likely worth it.

Or why doesn't Chrome upon install locally cache all of Google fonts and maybe a few other key CDN files (jquery, etc)?

Just thinking out-loud.

I understand the author's point and I agree with it globally.

However, two major points are forgotten:

1/ clean code is about downsizing huge websites with millions or hundred of millions of users. Starting with your side-projects is a good way to learn to code clean.

2/ electricity consumption is not the right metric: the devices' time of life is. The heavier the code, the sooner we need to replace our hardware to keep up. It's both true on the front and the back sides.

Most of the CO2 and damages to biodiversity come from the hardware. The life time of a computer ought to be 15/20 years. With choice of high durability of components, repairs made easy, upgrades as well, plus second-hand markets: a gaming computer bought today ought to be an quite decent office computer in 15 years.

On the data centers' side, economic incentives are huge for operators to reduce energy consumption, both on servers and bandwidth. The gains have been incredible in the last ten years.

Maybe a server that Google wants to replace because its datacenter is full could be resold, maybe not to a competitor but to a family as a home central server. Running the family's NAS, media server and IoT hub.

To code clean is mainly a fight against hardware obsolescence.

Electricity consumption matters only for hugely used websites PLUS hugely-used frameworks like WordPress that run tens of millions of websites of smaller audience.

Here's my explanation (partially touched on by the OP, but not quite covered):

Programmers, broadly, tend to be people who like simple metrics of success that require complex solutions to achieve, and they deeply enjoy optimizing the hell out of those solutions ("optimizing", here, applying to anything from speed to memory usage to expressivity to safety). This is well and good: for the most part, it makes us good at our jobs.

But this feeling of "strict improvement" can be so intoxicating as to take on the sensation of being a moral virtue. It can feel like a universal imperative. So instead of admitting that the code most of us write has no moral bearing whatsoever (beyond basic professional integrity), and that for the code that does have moral bearing, the way it's used is more relevant than how well it's crafted, we rationalize our feelings by contriving an argument for why these things that feel like they matter so much to us, actually matter to the world.

In my experience the healthier mindset is to detach that pleasure of craft from any kind of real-world meaning. If it's meaningful to you, that's enough. You don't need to justify it beyond that.

I've never been able to understand why so many people push so hard for explicitly inefficient code. If you're competent and you actually know what you're doing and how computers work, it takes just as long to write efficient code as it does to write inefficient code.

Well then we must kill the ad and analytics industries for that spyware surely must waste a lot of electricity and bandwidth, hence be a polluter.

End of the day, while I could make an argument that my job (working on testing tools for safety critical software) makes things better in the grand scheme of things, I know that it doesn’t have a direct human impact like my wife’s nursing or even an impact through society like my parents’ scientific research.

In the end that’s fine, there was a point in my life when I had to prioritize things, and I chose to prioritize making money to support a family. It’s not my absolute priority job wise but it’s the reason I keep working whenever I get discouraged.

And I have a good family, and while I might get a chance to make some other legacy someday, I am pretty happy with my legacy being my family.

But I do try to keep some sight of the good of the wider world, and so I try to be generous as much as I can.

This doesn’t necessarily maximize my impact, I think the swirling tides of history make any long term impact calculations a bit arbitrary, but it gives me a life that most of the time I can be proud of, and that is more than enough

Lots of poor reasoning in this article - where to start?

So the author, by switching to local fonts, reduced the carbon emissions of the Internet by 0.000000056%.

Well yeah, one person switching to low-impact techniques on a low-traffic site won't change much. But (as with any other positive intervention), if lots and lots of people (say 50 percent of website owners, by traffic volume) reduce their footprint by 40 percent of so -- then that's a different story now, isn't it?

According to the Carbon Fund you can offset your CO2 emissions for $10 per metric ton.

Red herring, different topic. It's agreed by now that, whatever benefits offsets may bring (and this is hotly debated) -- we absolutely have to reduce emissions at the source as well.

If that point isn't 100 percent clear by now - then there's not much left to talk about, now is there.

Code probably won't help that much, but using green hosting providers is very helpful. Think of all those servers drawing power 24x7, that are powered by burning coal.

Does anyone have a list of carbon-neutral VPS hosts?

Is it possible to build a carbon-neutral SaaS app, given all the dependencies we have on SaaS providers these days?

I'm gonna watch porn in 144p. For the planet!

I think not using cloud computing and servers when not strictly necessary is more planet friendly. For example using decentralized p2p technologies like WebRTC is a good way to not use servers I know you still need servers for peer indexing etc but I argue that this is more green, we should start thinking in terms of offline first software where the user owns his data locally so it does not live on a server somewhere because the more data a server has the more compute power it will use to work with the data.

Edit: Typo

I think that this article correctly identifies the root issue here: naive application of utilitarianism. All of these "write better code to save the planet" blogs are an unavoidable symptom of that naivete. If you take this perspective seriously, it's clear that anything can become a moral issue. Buying an iphone, driving a car, drinking coffee, eating chicken, writing inefficient code, laughing at Dave Chapelle and so on. It's also clear that there's no genuine rationality behind this: no one really knows which actions increase or decrease utility, the people who go for this stuff are just expressing their interests and emotions under an extremely thin veneer of rationality.

While utilitarianism can be useful -- of course we should consider the outcome a policy -- I think it's a dead-end as a replacement for a bedrock moral philosophy. Utilitarians answer the question of "what is the good?" with "whatever maximizes the good". Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me.

Hannah Arendt:

> This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen—like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The "in order to" has become the content of the "for the sake of"; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.

You can think about moral actions like a vector, they have both a magnitude and a direction. If the magnitude is small enough the action is negligible, regardless of direction. If the article’s figures are accurate, you can optimise away 100% of emissions from the internet - that’s the whole thing - and it would represent a reduction of 0.6% of global emissions. That just makes any individual action inside that space negligible.

No matter how bad websites get, tech has a net positive carbon footprint by far. Just the number of conferences that went online this year has saved megatons of CO2 already. And the shift to remote work will save tons more. Let's focus on the things that matter. It s ridiculous to argue about fractions of a percent of emissions when it can save so much

One thing to keep in mind is developer time. If you can finish your personal website without learning about font delivery and then use the remaining time to phonebank for anti-pipeline candidates or get involved in your local government's transportation subcommittee and work to incentivize public transit and biking, that's probably more effective.

Well of course that would be the view point of someone whose text-only article can't be viewed without javascript.

But think about the gigawatt hours that could be saved if ML Python code was ported to Julia.

People are arguing outcomes here and I think that ignores an element that seems to be highly prevalent among society, especially these days.

These are my own thoughts and observations based on watching a litany of issues play out in tech and in the public from 2016-2020.

There are three types of arguments you can make: moral, descriptive, and normative. I won't dive too deep into these but if you're unfamiliar you should look at how these compare. The gist of it is that descriptive arguments talk about the state of things but don't attempt to produce a direction or judgement. Normative and moral both establish intended direction. Normative seeks to compare against the status quo, or a baseline that is widely accepted. Moral issues require no baseline for comparison and are most often phrased as "ought to be" and attempt to infer some things about people and things on both ends of the problem.

If you haven't noticed by now, the only thing that actually seeks to cast judgement on people are moral issues. Moral issues have a side effect of producing "oh, I'm/you're a bad person if I/you don't do/agree with this". These moral arguments are extremely useful in drumming up support for short term change, but are often fraught with grandiose language and extrapolation that aim to smooth over where people could object. Combining that with the intentional fallout of objecting, it makes moral arguments increasingly difficult to refuse. The long term fallout of this is that people eventually realize that the language was grandiose and feel misled, especially as predictions don't come true.

In my own experience, the astro-turfing of net neutrality is a great example here. Almost none of the claims came true, even if they did it was in very limited contexts that even professional advocates have a hard time trying to extrapolate. Does this mean that the argument for a net neutrality spirited framework is totally debunked? No, it just means that people over-promised and under-delivered in business speak. Regular people probably call this lying, misinformation, etc but I hesitate to assign intent to the deception.

Moral arguments also have a side effect which is empathy exhaustion. If every issue is a moral issue then eventually you'll have to separate yourself from the constant aura of morality, especially if you occasionally or even regularly have to face times where you object to something that is presented as a moral issue.

Another side effect of moral issues is because they don't usually subscribe to a baseline, or they subscribe to a maximalist baseline, so they require a lot more debate to take effective action on. Worse, they aren't fully debated and then outcomes which were supposed to improve life "for all of us" begin negatively impacting people and our way to deal with that is to prioritize people and their pain. This churn I think produces a lot of the descent that you read on HackerNews.

I don't know where the lines or thresholds lie. It sucks that we're even here, but I think what I've learned is we need less moral arguments and more normative and descriptive. Unfortunately, both of our political parties, which are now entirely interwound into societal issues as well, have their own morality and advocate their positions as such. It looks like a game of tug of war, except that rope fraying in the middle is the people affected by a given issue.

Dim your monitor: save the world

I feel personally attacked, haha

Some pretty cool data in there :)