The problem is that a lot of people DO have their own websites for which they have some control over. So it's not like a million people optimizing their own websites will have any control over what Google does with YouTube for instance...
A million people is a very strong political force.
A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient.
I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms.
- Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse.
- Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off.
- Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
I sort of agree...but not really, because you'll never get a situation where a million people can vote on a specific law about making YT more efficient. One needs to muster some sort of general political will to even get that to be an issue, and that takes a lot more than a million people.
Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.
Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give a darn about even trying to send a signal.
I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load.
I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas).
This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally, but making your website smaller and "being vocal about it" (whatever you mean by that) doesn't make an iota of difference. It also only works if your site is basically just text. If your website uses other resources (images, videos, 3D models, audio, etc.), the impact of first load is just noise anyway.
You can have a bigger impact by telling 100,000 people to drive an hour less each month and if just 1% of your hypothetical audience actually does that, you'd achieve orders of magnitude more in terms of environmental and societal impact.
Perhaps you are right. But I do remember one guy who had a YouTube channel and he uploaded fairly low-quality videos at a reduced framerate to achieve a high level of compression, and he explicitly put in his video that he did it to save energy.
Now, it is true that it didn't save much because probably many people were uploaded 8K videos at the time, so drop in the bucket. But personally, I found it quite inspiring and his decision was instrumental in my deciding to never upload 4K. And in general, I will say that people like that do inspire me and keep me going to be as minimal as possible when I use energy in all domains.
For me at least, trying to optimize for using as little energy as possible isn't an engineering problem. It's a challenge to do it uniformly as much as possible, so it can't be subdivided. And I do think every little bit counts, and if I can spend time making my website smaller, I'll do that in case one person gets inspired by that. It's not like I'm a machine and my only goal is time efficiency....
Youtube's compression already butchers the quality of anything 1080p and below. Uploading in 1440p or 4K is the only way to get youtube to preserve at least some of the bitrate. There's a 1080p extra bitrate option available on some videos, but it's locked behind premium, so I'm not sure how well it works.
Depending on the type of video this may not matter, but it often does. For example, my FPS gaming and dashcam footage gets utterly destroyed if uploaded to youtube at 1080p. Youtube's 4K seems roughly equivalent to my high bitrate 1080p recordings.
Correct. It's even worse than that, they'll say they optimized the energy usage of their website by making it 1kb smaller and then fly overseas for holiday. How many billions of page loads would it take to approximate the environmental impact of a single intercontinental flight?
Realistically “my website fits in 14kb” is a terrible signal because it is invisible to 99.99% of the population. How many HNers inspect the network usage when loading a random stranger’s website?
Plus, trying to signal your way to societal change can have unintended downsides. It makes you feel you are doing something when you are actually not making any real impact. It attracts the kind of people who care more about signaling the right signals than doing the right thing into your camp.
You really don't know if it could become a trend or not. Certainly trends happen in the opposite direction, such as everyone using AI. I think every little difference you can make is a step in the right direction, and is not virtue signalling if you really apply yourself across all domains of life. But perhaps it is futile, given that there are so many defeatist individuals such as yourself crowding the world.
Absolutely agree with that. I recently visited the BBC website the other day and it loaded about 120MB of stuff into the cache - for a small text article. Not only does it use a lot of extra energy to transmit so much data, but it promotes a general atmosphere of wastefulness.
I've tried to really cut down my website as well to make it fairly minimal. And when I upload stuff to YouTube, I never use 4K, only 1080P. I think 4K and 8K video should not even exist.
A lot of people talk about adding XYZ megawatts of solar to the grid. But imagine how nice it could be if we regularly had efforts to use LESS power.
I miss the days when websites were very small in the days of 56K modems. I think there is some happy medium somewhere and we've gone way past it.
Let's take it further: That atmosphere of wastefulness not only concerns bandwidth and energy use but also architectural decisions. There's technology that punches far above its weight class in terms of efficiency and there's the opposite. It seems like a collective form of learned helplessness, on both sides, the vendors and users. IMHO, the only real reason for slow, JavaScript-heavy sites is surveillance and detailed, distributed profiling of users. The other would be animated UI giving dopamine hits, but that could totally be confined to entertainment and shouldn't be a cue for "quality" software.
I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions.
So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.
It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
People don't like revolutions, even if they are the one carrying it out. Revolutions are a last resort, mainly because of how uncertain it is what comes out at the end of it. So, an action calling for complete dismantling will never have large support. And everyone kind of knows where to go to. Th difficult thing is knowing how to get there in a piece by piece manner, one area of the social order at a time.
Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
> Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
True. But as Kaczynski rightly pointed out, you can't have a revolution out of thin air, and the seeds of distrust have to be sufficiently grown first before there is a critical mass of tension that can act as fuel for the fire. So the first step might just be to sow seeds of well-placed distrust against the modern tech oligarchs.
Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.
How would you prevent people from getting an H1-B visa for a job just for the sake of moving to a different job in a sector that doesn't need a lot of workers? And if they are going to start a business, they could start a business in tech that is actually successful, and then fill a few extra positions with friends/family/contacts/people willing to pay, and then those people could move on to other jobs for which they are more suited.
Fact is, immigration systems in all of the richest countries are already bursting with abuse from certain countries with very ingenious schemes and you gotta have some ways to protect it unless you want a free-for-all.
I would encourage you to actually read up about the hoops that people with H-1Bs have to jump through just to stay in the country. It is a demeaning and abusive process, and not usually one that people engage in frivolously.
Additionally, you can already today legally switch jobs as an H-1B, but it is a process that gives undue amounts of power to the employer, which makes switching difficult. Finally, regarding switching fields, it's not that easy. You have to show that your new field is related to your degree and experience.
So please, instead of making up imaginary bogeymen, learn more about the immigration system.
I never said it should be as difficult as it is, which you seem to imply that I did. I only said meant to say the system shouldn't be too easy, either.
> My instinct is to think that 16 year olds generally don't have the maturity to make these kinds of decisions.
My instinct is that people who are 40+ and who are financially secure shouldn't be voting either, because they will likely vote for tax breaks for the rich, and other things that help make their unsustainable lifestyle even easier/lazier.
It's a fair use of their vote if those are the issues most important to them. You can't disenfranchise people because they oppose your interests, not in a democracy.
In my opinion, the #1 way to make Gmail better is to enable forwarding. Then you don't have to deal with their ugly interface, login system, new features, weird compose window, etc....
Outlook is unusable but harmlessly so. What's worse is Microsoft 365. I simply can't find a way to configure 2FA in any kind of sensible way. Right now it's simply turned off, which makes me very nervous. Whatever I do, it is somehow overridden in other parts of their byzantine and always changing cat herd of admin sites. I'm waiting impatiently for our M365 subscription to expire so we can finally migrate off this nightmare.
Gmail has one killer feature which is the auto-acceptance of calendar invites. to put it better yet, it will put any and all invites and invite-looking things from emails into your Calendar. you still need to mark "yes i will attend" manually. that, as far as i am concerned, is the perfect UX for this workflow. i don't wanna have to create calendar items manually, feels very previous-century.
i tried to migrate from Workspace to iCloud but dealing with the insane OSX Calendar app which not only does not put anything into your itinerary automatically but is liable to just disappear items from the Calendar randomly, put me off so much i went right back to Workspace.
That's actually how I use that account, but this time I decided to check how it works with the iOS mail app on new iOS beta with that liquid glass interface.
I even dug out my computer that was logged in to this account in desktop browser, and it too blocks access. Crazy.
As a staunch AI critic, my opinion is that if you're on the fence about it, and just want to bring some realism into the discussion, you can't if you're talking about the future. Because eventually AI might indeed gain quite a lot of the hyped features that some are talking about. You can look in the academic papers on Google Scholar to find some cautionary tales, but in general with academia, most researchers want to get on the hype train to inflate their CVs.
The only way to truly be critical of AI is to be against it for other reasons, such as its damaging effects on society and its ability to aggregate wealth to the top without much serious life improvement for the average person. I think AI is really one of those things that you're either for or against and there's no middle ground.
