pg-gadfly

And why is that? Would bringing water into your house by a bucket also be a great idea? Unlikely, unless it serves another, non-obvious point.

Waste is very subjective. When you have 100x the supply of something, it becomes cheaper to do stuff, which means other more valuable resources can be saved instead.

We don't manage "information" as much as we do abstract objects. You can have a 5 mebibyte, gibibyte or tebibyte objects, and they will still consume the same amount of mental capacity.

The switch to a new wireless standard is not a cliff, it will happen gradually, there is no need to throw away everything at once. Energy per bit transferred is lower for 5G devices, which makes them more efficient in the future to compensate the need to transfer more bits.

I don't think there is a problem with the former statement at all:

Amplifying stupidity must mean it can solve problems without external intelligence. If it required more intelligence, you'd have a less useful machine.

As I've been saying, you don't know the point at which there is no more to learn. Even minor things can have major impact when combined with further research.

Things like "enormous" are subjective, and it's indeed not impossible to get such amounts cheaply in the future, even if you can't at the time reduce it's need.

It's easy to look in the past and point out the obvious when you already have all the answers, but trying to divine something that changes the way you think about current physics is not as simple.

I think the author is giving lots of value to computation itself, which is not how humans generally allocate it. It's results are seen just as another generic resource.

What do people do when clean water becomes nearly free? They do ridiculously inefficient things. It's easy, efficient use of truly limited resources, like _time_.

There is a reason we don't optimize things beyond their economic value; because it was designed to optimize total resource use.

>There is no efficiency

There is certainly efficiency to consider when making energy. We can't tap into the full potential of any source, there are "hard limits" to many of our current methods, but that doesen't stop a paradigm shift from happening and making it so.

Many things studied before had no "tangible" use then, it doesen't come like that. It's iteration upon iteration, using previous work to achieve a little bit of something new. You cannot foresee the future beforehand.

It isn't "exactly impossible" though, it never is. You can find out a more efficient way to create it, or you might have more power available in the future.

All manmade elements have been extremely expensive to make the first ti-me, and that hasn't stopped them from being constantly used.

The word "auto"(oneself), often used with meaning to do by itself.

Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of.

Anything that moves work from human to other forces is automation, having a thing do things by itself. An automobile is the automating of our movement.

The simpler the task seems, the harder it must be. It's exactly why the task exists at all, it could not have been improved on before either and stopped there

In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.

It should be noted that as efficiency increases, the company can compete and lower prices, meaning people don't _have to_ go to work as much to achieve the same level of living.

Provided there is competition

All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency.

There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which have exactly the same amount of work left, only who works it is a different person.

Any load balancer will let you do that. Scaling is a few lines of scripts to do on any platform, and well worth the couple minutes, you don't even need a tool for just that.

No tool "works the rest out". It's _always_ a compromise, because inherent complexity can never be removed, only moved. What you gain in one area, encumbers another.

You may freely use k8s, but it's not magical nor easier to use than any existing systems. In fact adopting it often takes non-trivial time and the web is full of failure stories with very benign warnings and catastropic results.

_any_ non-proprietary tool is "cloud agnostic". Kubernetes is bundled software, and achieves the things those pieces achieve. There is nothing holy about k8s specifically, the tools you train with are easy, and it's very easy to get skewed opinions on that.

For example a lot of people would find writing scripts cumbersome, but not a person who's written a lot of them. They're not any more fragile than other logic error capable software is

>It’s really bizarre to me that THIS is the aspect of consumerism that people go after for energy use

It's more common than you think. In fact it's so common that it has it's own Wikipedia page(s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Observing complex reactions with chemicals requires much longer study than simply beaming things with microwaves. Results are nearly immediate, and any long term effect would have to be shared with everything else that warms things.

Increasing attention available should be good regardless of how it would be used, even the worst-case scenario would be where we are now, only we get more done

Increasing the responsiveness of everything should have the exact opposite effect, because attention is most affected by latency. If you're always immediately getting what you're looking for immediately you can't be distracted either.

Depending on how many people a single point serves, it can imply a pretty sizeable chunk of energy. Smaller things add up when you're talking of hundreds of millions of people

Attention is highly latency sensitive, and bringing reaction for your action a second sooner has major implications, and significantly increases your ability to interact with and understand content

Of course there has been improvement in absolute terms, but our current state is much more than just that, which skews the results when thinking about where we are. The opinion is definitely not popular on hackernews, but I still want to throw it out there.

Cheap SSDs can tank below 70MB/s after cache, which is less than a gigabit connection, so it can totally affect your performance even in the smallest local networks.

You don't have to sustain writes for long at all to start seeing the compromises hidden in cheap SSDs, especially if they're using their TLC as SLC cache, in which case you run out faster and faster.

Behavior of microwaves is well-understood yes. Proving a negative would be rather difficult however, much like I find it hard to prove that no magical gnome exists at the bottom of my well, or that there is no renaissance-era teapot floating at the other side of our solar system perpendicular to our planet.

I think people often misunderstand how bandwidth (and generally any utilization) works. It's not about using 10% of the speed for some time, but using 100% of it for a fraction. You're practically always bottlenecked by transfer.

Major improvement is latency, which not only enhances existing application experience significantly, makes development easier by removing lots of concern, but it also enables completely new tech that has been stopped because of the latency profile of earlier tech.

What you're propably thinking of is the smallest use case like a webpage (which can still significantly be sped up) or a video. But have you though about loading several GiB sized app for just product demonstration purposes on the fly? The things fast connections enable can be hard to even imagine. You could have an entire VR/AR experience where-ever you are

Latency benefits would enable many new realtime applications both in business and consumer end and speed up many existing ones so they'd be much less janky to use, and thus more accessible to people.

It's impossible to see all the future exploits the new technology allows. All the things we do are built upon other existing ideas, moving to higher speed, lower latency connection is another step in progress.

Think about being able to download several GiB application on the fly just to view a demo for a house, or get the schematics for what you're viewing in realtime with AR

It's also to note that SSD capacity hasn't strictly improved, it's been gained through massive compromises that severely impact their lifetime and performance.

More than that, a 5 year old nas drive can outperform a modern cheap ssd in throughput easily.

You should be wary of any hostilities between your site and it's users. Even though it can't be brought down, your wallet sure can be if you don't set it up really carefully.

You can simply retrieve the page constantly over a residential connection to drive up the costs to over hundreds of dollars

The compute is really a negligible part and one that you can severely effect.

Outbound bandwidth is the real killer, going at ~$90/TB

It reminds me of cult-speak, where everything has to be redefined according to some abstract higher level representation, even when it's simple.

It's can vs. can't, which is perfectly comparable, in both cases you cant know what you get until afterwards, which is not acceptable. When the freedom to use the your own devices is in question, it needs to be addressed.

Shifting the blame onto the victims by saying they should have known the county can do that, is just sheltering yourself from the uncomfortable truth.

I don't want to feel like I'm being taken advatage of either, believe me. It's just better to fight back than let it roll over you.

Buying a house and suddenly getting your water cut off because the county"doesent feel like it" is also similarily a "conscious" decision, and similarily bites you only a time after you bought something.

You might say that's illegal, and I'd recommend thinking about why that has become the way it is. Things are deemed important to everyday life, and suddenly they aren't free game.