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Comment by carlio | Hacker News Reader

Significantly, shifting the image calculations from the server to the client means the work is duplicated for every client. While it saves energy for the server, it increases the overall energy consumption required to deliver the content.

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Apparently the mix-blend-mode for images on the client is noticable performance-wise: https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6

False. Energetic costs of distributing duplicate information is significantly more expensive than local computation. Eg: measuring joules spent for decompression vs transmission is orders of magnitude over the n duplication.

But surely the orders of magnitude thing factors in when you can have orders of magnitude more clients than servers? I think you'd need to run more specific numbers to lean either way on this.

You seem to not realize that moving the calculation client-side means to send a JavaScript implementation, which for all sensible implementations would be significantly larger than the pre-computed result.

The way the image is colored on the client is just some CSS (mix-blend-mode). Check it in the inspector.

No useless JavaScript in this case.

Can one client do the work and post back the final version to the server so the server sends that version to all the other clients?

Don't trust the client with that, or everybody is getting goatse'd.

A. Cryptographically verify the final version

B. Schedule the work to be performed on multiple clients in case some fail

> A. Cryptographically verify the final version

How?

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