this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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What are your thoughts on website eco certification? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 10 months ago by jonuno to c/technology
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6839374

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[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 35 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The idea of holding individuals and small organizations responsible for their carbon use is a deliberate eco-fakery invented by the fossil fuel industry. It does nothing, except in cases where it leads to purchasing "carbon offsets," in which case it does nothing and also makes some scammer somewhere some money.

Most big changes that need to happen are on the industrial level (switching to different sources of electrical power or changing pollution regulations). They may have some impact on the end-user consumer, but mostly not. Mostly what it would mean is that some obscenely rich person still gets to be obscenely rich but not as much as they want to be.

(AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions where the power consumption is actually pretty significant and you can make a case that the individual involved in it bears some responsible for the impact. But again, the strategy should be for the individual to advocate for changing regulations, not for the individual to look inward towards themselves but turn a blind eye to everyone else who decides to murder the planet, if they want to because there's some money in it for them.)

[–] keepthepace 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions

Crypto yes, AI does not come even close to 1% of that.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Hm, I was a little bit wrong about it -- you're right, AI is basically nothing right now. Here's a report with more.

  • All data centers put together use about 2% of global electricity demand
  • Cryptocurrency is almost a quarter of that
  • AI is basically none of that right now, but likely to rise to be competitive with cryptocurrency in the pretty near future as it gets wider and wider adoption.
[–] Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

AI isn't inherently more energy demanding than any other program, most crypto is designed to be as inefficient as possible.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 10 months ago

It is, though. Most computer tasks that a company does on behalf of their customers can be done with a little handful of web servers, all the way up until you get to Google's scale of operations or something. The reason is that the actual computation the computers are doing is measured in milliseconds on one share of the multicore CPU. AI requires dedicated computing hardware and runs for much longer than that, which means the investment in equipment and how much of it you have to have is orders of magnitude larger. And training the model often takes a whole cluster or data center if you're going to be a serious AI company. You go from needing 10-20 computers even at Reddit's scale or something, to needing hundreds or thousands.

You're right that it's not some sort of magic computation that's harder or more expensive than other computation, it's just that it's unusual (until now) to build out a whole data center that's devoted to doing expensive pure computations on specialized hardware on behalf of your customers, and that's gonna have an impact on how much power your operation consumes.

[–] potatopotato@sh.itjust.works 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

From the POV of doing literally anything for the environment, yeah it's just trash. If we're going to bash websites for being overly complicated and costing their organizations millions a month on EC2 Bezos Bucks, making the web unusable for people with screen readers, password managers, RSS feeds, web archives etc then yeah, be my guest. Destroy it all.

[–] jonuno 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's a good point, usually accessibilty code and other components will make the website heavier, I suppose

[–] potatopotato@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah generally simper web pages are much better for people with accessibility issues. When everyone adds tons of weird JavaScript garbage on top then it's very hard to make tools that work reliably on the pages

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

Pretty meaningless since it doesn't capture server side footprint which can easily be much larger

[–] poVoq 8 points 10 months ago

How would they even know how carbon intensive slrpnk.net is? All they can do is measure some page loading speed and maybe do some very general assumptions about how much energy the lemmy-ui needs to be rendered in a browser.

While lightweight websites in terms of browser usage are nice for battery use on mobile devices, it says very little about the overall energy use of a website, or where that energy is sourced from (which makes a big difference for the carbon foot-print).

[–] kittykittycatboys@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 10 months ago

i dont think it particularly effective for environment, but if helps make web lighter and more accessible thats a good things meowz

[–] keepthepace 4 points 10 months ago

The machine it is hosted on can have more than a 10x impact on its electricity use.

[–] OleoSaccharum@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

Sounds like some sort of carbon credit style LARP.

[–] Lordbaum@mander.xyz 1 points 10 months ago

Because of the data efficiency thing. I think even when the saved CO2 is very minimal I think it is still better for people where the infrastructure is not as good or for people who can't access the free net. The Tor network for example is run by volunteers and is not nearly so fast nor has the same capacity than the clear net. So keeping the traffic interactions but decreasing the data needed by the websites could benefit the Network.