> a low power machine (a human) to reduce significantly the long-term power usage of a high-powered machine (a computer or cluster thereof).

That seems a sad view on the value of a person.

Shouldn't the whole point of technology and infrastructure be to allow a person to use more resources so as to better[0] allocate their limited time?

A lot of people tend to not consider time invested as a measurable resource, and that is a sad thing indeed, as that is one resource that can only be spent.

You're entirely missing the point. If I'm spending a month to optimize some code so that it is 25% faster, these gains don't go away again once I'm done optimizing. They stay in the product for months or years. And this is where the effort pays off.

...

1 kwh on the power grid produces 0.9884 lbs of greenhouse gas: https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/

0.1163 kWh of human energy produces 0.64 lbs of greenhouse gas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/runni...

If we even humor this sentiment (I don't buy that we should, 5$ vs 50$ of compute is not why we're struggling with climate change. Compute period is 10% of all electricity production, we're not going reduce that with a few hours of optimization here and there.. It's way too late to be taking such half-measures seriously), the math doesn't work out.

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Thinking about climate change on a personal level is positive, but I also feel our efforts should be grounded in reality, not just things that feel good.

The hours you spend optimizing your bootstrapped service to reduce it's CO2 footprint... could be spent in plenty of other activities that actually reduce your carbon footprint.

The level of misinformation, misplaced priorities and uninformed conclusions in climate change has reached staggering levels.

We have people who don't believe it's real (which is silly) and, at the other end of the scale, people who believe we can actually fix it in 50 years (which is just as silly, even 100 years is silly). People are convinced they "know" the "truth" without even bothering to throw a few numbers at a spreadsheet to see if what they think they know aligns with any imaginable version of a non-science-fiction reality.

I am very concerned that politics and ignorance is driving this far more than real science.

What are you trying to get at with these numbers? By themselves, they mean absolutely nothing! It all depends on the impact you're having. If you're optimizing code running on a server that's mostly idle, then you'll not see a big reduction in energy use. If the result of your optimization is that you can shut down 10 servers because of overall load reductions, the time invested suddenly has a very real benefit.

They mean plenty, they just require you apply some critical thinking...

5$ to 50$ is not 10 servers on Heroku. In fact, it's not even one server, you'll be sharing resources at that price point.

Let's say you generate approx. 500 lbs of CO2 a year (based of figures for a half desktop PC running 24/7 because you're only getting 2 cores and 1GB of ram)

At this point you're thinking, 500lbs?! That's insane!

But 40 hrs (1 week) is a lot of time, and 500lbs of CO2 is less than it seems.

If you spent 40hrs spread out over an entire year air drying your clothes a total of 20 times, you'd save over 2 Tons of CO2 a year. (You can do the math for a dishwasher if air drying doesn't work where you are)

If you live in a cold climate, the EPA estimates you can save 15%, or almost 1000 lbs of CO2, by weather proofing your home, easily accomplished in 40hrs

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You might say "I already do all these things!", but the point is there are so many ways to convert time to CO2 savings.

We spend a lot of CO2 trying to save time you could say.

Optimizing your bootstrapped service is not one of the places I would use CO2 expenditure as reasoning in the slightest.

Uhm... isn't that exactly what I wrote? Besides, the CO2 that we humans exhale doesn't count towards global warming because the carbon in it is part of the natural carbon cycle. That's roughly the same amount that gets reabsorbed into plants that are grown for next year's food. What really matters is the carbon that is added to that cycle from sources outside this biological cycle. In other words, the 1kWh of electical power is strictly worse than the 1kWh of human power as long as some fraction of it comes from non-renewable sources. At best, if it were sourced purely regeneratively, it would be exactly even.

If you think my comment is saying what yours said, kindly read both again.

This comment reads you didn't read my reply, humans could make 0 CO2 and spending a week optimizing 10 servers and not make a dent compared to simple lifestyle changes.

I used 1 server because that's the scale thread was about ( saving <50$ of spend on Heroku)

I know you tried to make it about 10 servers to force a point, doesn't end up changing much though...

* Compute period is 10% of all electricity production*

You found stats on that? I’m surprised

Actually the figure I found was for "all ICT", if we mean compute to be data centers (I did) , it's even lower:

2% projected to reach 8% in a decade (https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-ce...)

The best way to reduce usage is to not build and run what people do not want.

Sure but now you are wasting significant human capital reinventing the wheel with substantially worse results.

So using your math, you’ve got humans, which have high environmental costs in order to... well... live... wasting their life and consuming tons of resources doing something that was done better for cheaper.

Humans cost tons of money to operate. More than data centers or anything else. Don’t waste them on stupid projects like writing shitty versions of AWS.

Your own logic should lead you to conclude all the people wasting expensive human lives reinventing javascript frameworks, deployment systems, cloud orchestration systems, database systems and AWS... these are the folks doing true harm to the environment. It is much better for the planet to lock yourself into AWS, Azure, or google cloud and exploit the shit out of everything they do than it is to piss away incredibly expensive resources building your own.

And I am more than happy to boldly assert if you are working on a project that aims to re-invent AWS for your company... you are a waste of human capital.

As someone who sort of held the view that the incredible inefficiencies in modern computing and 'cloud stuff' was a net negative on the environment, thanks for this comment. I still don't think mindlessly throwing extremely inefficient stuff into a datacenter for no reason is a great thing to do but this gives me a lot better perspective as to why it isn't so black and white of a thing. I forget sometimes that humans have a very high cost to operate too.