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Comment by cjblack | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much excess energy has been consumed, and won't be consumed any longer, as a result of this improvement - even just limited to reduced CPU usage on Windows machines using Firefox to watch Youtube.

I love thinking about the impacts of tiny improvements at scale like this, might do some napkin math on it later and see if I can come up with something in the right order of magnitude.

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Now calculate the man years lost to fixing strings represented as exponents in excel.

firefox browser share is teeny tiny these days

Teeny tiny multiplied by 7 Billion by 365 days per year by 24 hours per day by a fraction of a kW does add up.

7B people are not watching youtube on Firefox 24/7 365 days a year.

But at any given moment someone is.

Correct. Some teeny tiny fraction of market share is. For the conceptual calculation, I refer you to my earlier comment.

*8 Billion sir

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Oh no! My mistake.

It's 200 million people, with 80% on Windows.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

Next: Canadian cars and their daytime running lights.

Running lights during daytime seems to reduce crashes by about 5-10%, and crashes consume a lot of energy. Depending on crash severity there's at a minimum the wasted time for all involved parties and frequently the necessity for repairs (including the production of replacement parts, paint etc), and at the high end the involvement of emergency personnel and their vehicles, hospital beds, doctors, the production of entire new cars as replacement for totaled ones, etc.

I'm not so sure that running lights isn't a net positive, especially with the introduction of LED lights.

On the other hand, crashes also kill people who will then stop be using any energy.

Even LED DLRs?

Next: internal combustion engines doing more heat than torque.

That's a feature in winter. Portable propane heaters for cars are a thing. I think they'll sell a lot for EV cars.

I don’t know. It’s not a thing in Norway and we have plenty of gaz, electric cars, and cold weather.

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