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Comment by orangepurple | Hacker News Reader

Opening the menu launches a WebAssembly virtual machine for their Docker images to build and run to return the appropriate options /s

In all seriousness though, the tech industry is an immense contributor to global warming because of inefficient software which uses large quantities of energy and necessitates the creation of massive quantities of e-waste as older machines are unable to provide an adequate user experience for extremely computationally heavy designs.

Extremely inefficient software which is necessary for everyday tasks also means only the latest hardware from China/Taiwan is competitive. Bad software is a geopolitical and national security risk.

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> the tech industry is an immense contributor to global warming because of inefficient software

A quick Google search reveals that different sources suggest data centers are responsible for something between 0.2% and 3% of global CO2 emissions. (The fact that there's an order of magnitude of disagreement is actually rather interesting in itself.)

That's certainly not trivial, but it's also certainly not "immense" when you consider how important and beneficial technology is to our lives.

Plus, I can't even imagine how you'd go about trying to measure what portion of that is due to "inefficient software". Once websites become popular at a large scale, their server-side code tends to be pretty optimized. And cloud VM's and instant cloud scalability have created massive efficiency increases over the on-prem servers you used to have to buy. And newer ARM chips are so much more energy-efficient than Intel.

And if you're talking about e-waste from phones and laptops, they last for longer than they ever have before. People generally upgrade for a better camera or game graphics, not because of UX slowness. Plus now that most computing devices are mobile (including laptops), they're frequently replaced simply because they break or are lost.

In this context we're talking about client-side waste, right? Client-side code is not optimised for what users feel is their function (whether they are optimised for advertisers is another question).

The rise of webtech-for-"apps" is the only reason I can't still work on a 4GB laptop and feel like that's a luxurious amount of memory (8 feels cramped now, in fact), so wasteful software drives e-waste and higher resource use in computer manufacturing, too.

> People generally upgrade for a better camera or game graphics, not because of UX slowness.

Not my experience. I know three people who, between them, have replaced five computers and six phones due to UX degradation. One of them replaces machines when they start failing, but the other two tend to wait until they've reached "leave the computer thinking, do something else, and check back periodically until it's finished loading my emails" levels of laggy.

Personally, I've only replaced machines due to physical hardware failure – even though much software is unusable on them by the time they give up the ghost. (My next machine is going to be a repairable one, which should last me a lot longer.) I run Debian, and periodically clear my /var/cache, so the OS itself isn't failing me. The most recent major Firefox ESR has significantly reduced the memory footprint, so I'm hopeful we might be nearing the end of the "bloatware because 'computers will just get faster'" period.

> I can't even imagine how you'd go about trying to measure what portion of that is due to "inefficient software". Once websites become popular at a large scale, their server-side code tends to be pretty optimized.

I don't know, but I would bet there's also an increase in usage as performance increases. When software is fast you use it more frequently and for more things.

reminded me of this article that talks about the environmental cost of bloated mobile apps: https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/CostOfAByte

I hate inefficient software for its human cost. Add up the wasted human time and it's whole lifetimes lost to thoughtless software.

I'll bet if you calculated the carbon "cost" of a human life and did the math on the wasted human time it would be higher than the incremental electricity cost of the datacenter or amortized manufacturing cost of the phone or whatever else you're worried about. But I feel much worse about the wasted life for its own sake, personally.

This seems so out of left field to me. Geopolitics and global warming are so far down the list of concerns from inefficient and slow software.

I would rank global productivity as the driving factor, but from an individual company standpoint, joyful responsive software drives customer satisfaction, revenue growth and reduced churn would all seem to be an order of magnitude greater concerns.

Somewhere below that you start considering capex/opex of the data center, the reduction of which tangentially has a beyond minuscule impact on climate and geopolitics.

Remote communication allows people to avoid car trips and burning gasoline. I'm pretty sure that it's positive contribution.

It's negative compared to a hypothetical situation where the software exists, but isn't unnecessarily bloated.

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