Someone should do an accurate figure of compute power usage, including things such as cars, or media centres, and then try to analyse how the existing trend of "wasteful development" affects this.

I bet all the upset over bitcoin power usage, is a tiny thing, compared to (for example) the whole node ecosystem.

Even something such as gmail is massively overengineered. Heck, there are very few improvements over the interface a decade ago, yet I bet it used 5% of the power it does now.

Yet think of how much gmail is used.

And it's not just raw compute. 3d on a page for no reason, massive js binaries for no reason eg ram + bandwidth.

A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html.

But all of this means more development skill, less use of fluff and junk, care for size of page loads, and on and on.

Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally.

Because that's where the excess power comes from.

This paper is the first place I've found a production use of Knights' Landing / Xeon Phi, the Intel massively-multicore Atom-with-AVX512 accelerator system, outside of HPC / science use cases.

And for this use case, it makes perfect sense!

One of my MFA mentors, Tibor Fischer complained about that. His debut novel, Under the Frog was shortlisted for the Booker prize and his publishers wanted more of that, but he wanted to write different things (and did). His later books tend towards darkly comic crime fiction. I recommend The Collector Collector as a good starting point.

Oh what a perfect post in which to see all the absurdly emotional, dismissive, ridiculous crypto hate that this site's commentators just can't seem to stop grasping at rise to the surface.... A supposed "hacker" community filled with people who will reach for any convoluted reason they can to utterly sling shit at a whole complex range of technologies that despite its many bad uses has also proven to be a very interesting, impressively developed ecosystem that has also been used by many people in unique ways, often under adverse conditions that the privileged majority of HN readers never have to deal with.

But hey, let's just blanket claim that it's all a ponzi scheme (despite the definition of ponzi schemes being very clear and very different from the essentials of Bitcoin or Ethereum or many other cryptocurrencies). Or lets go on and on ad nauseum about the carbon burn of BTC and PoW mining (despite many of you working in tech fields where insane amounts of electrical energy and carbon are burned just maintaining billions of people's generally utterly pointless social media posts or cat videos).

Or how about endlessly sniping about fraud and money laundering on these systems, never mind that the wider financial world is filled with fraud on a far larger scale and that even social networks along with many other digital technologies are enormously used for exactly the same thing. Worth noting here again that there are actually many, many people in the world, people who aren't so nicely blessed by sound government landscapes, trustworthy or functional financial institutions and easy access to bank accounts who already do use crypto in many non-criminal ways (at least morally non-criminal). Anecdote, yes, but I personally know many who do this, and especially among people who I know in developing countries. I've read more than enough to know that the use is much wider than commonly reported. Even Chainalysis has estimated that only a small fraction of all crypto transactions are due to crime and fraud, and their very business is tracking the fraudulent use of crypto.

And finally, that it's useless because blockchains can be replaced by so many other things, or because DeFi sucks, or because transaction fees, or because "12 years later and there's barely a use case" and etc and etc... Since when does a technology have to be immediately useful and incredible to be interesting? Some of the sniping against blockchain's usefulness reminds me of the mentality behind those who criticized the Dropbox founder's original 2011 post on HN. Furthermore, have so many of you who make the argument about crypto going nowhere been completely blind to the amount of business exploration and experimentation that the wider ecosystem creates literally by the day? Sure, much of these experiments will fail, collapse or include plenty of fraud. So too have many other interesting and now robust technologies over the decades. Frankly, it's a shame to the very most basic idea of the word "hacker" that these negative arguments should be used to totally condemn something like considering how interestingly it's being explored in the wider world.

I could go on but what's the point? So much of the sniping here deviates so completely from legitimate, reasoned criticisms into irrationally, repetitively emotional hate that it's often like arguing at a brick wall.

Ah yes, the 'substantial real world value'. Nothing better for HN upovte crowd than the self-sure idiot calling a whole industry scam, because it isn't something that he personally wants.

They already made a movie called "Wild Geese" (1978) starring Roger Moore and Richard Burton, inspired by the life of another adventurer, Mike Hoare. I recommend watching it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078492/

https://madmikehoare.com/

Hoare was a British Colonel in WW2 who later became a mercenary that worked a lot in Africa, most famously defeating Che Guevara and the (monstrous) Simba revolt, freeing a group of nuns and other white prisoners that the Simbas were holding hostage and ultimately being instrumental in defeating the entire rebellion using some novel counter-insurgency techniques. Hoare would organize small squads that penetrated deep into rebel-held territory and destroyed supply shipments and laid ambushes for enemy soldiers. Basically a launching a guerrilla attack against the guerrillas themselves.

Fun Fact: The Simbas were almost comically evil -- they were communist cannibals that practiced ethnic cleansing of rival tribes (not uncommon in the various African revolts) and set up concentration camps (which was uncommon). They were famous for cutting out prisoners' livers and then eating the liver as the prisoner bled to death. They had a particular fixation for white nuns - there were many in Africa at the time - torturing, raping, and ultimately killing a large number. Some were held hostage for ransom from the West.

Fun Fact 2: Much has been said accusing Che Guevara of racism for insulting the capabilities of his black soldiers during the conflict, mostly blaming his defeat on the poor quality of his troops, and arguing that if he would have had enough cuban troops, he would never be defeated. While I think this is a bit unfair given today's hypersensitiveness, Hoare never complained about his black troops and in fact praised their heroism. Hoare was an excellent leader in the field and had a close sense of camaraderie with his troops, which you would need to be to launch small-man operations deep behind enemy lines.

There are many other stories about Mike Hoare. For example he was hired to launch a coup in some nation, but the plot was discovered and the government set an ambush for his men as they arrived in the airport. This ended up in a shootout at the airport, Hoare hijacked a plane, and flew it out of the country, landing his men in South Africa, where they were promptly arrested. Arrested, yet alive. Hoare served a brief sentence in jail for that.

Hoare died a happy death, in bed in his home in France in 2020, at the age of 100, a well-loved figure surrounded by fat grandkids.

There are many such adventurers that went to Africa -- it was, and remains in many ways -- the wild west. There you can launch coups, steal gold, fight for land. And especially during the decolonization period and its aftermath, you had a number of weak governments flooded with western dollars but no competence, so they hired western firms to do everything from build electricity plants to run their armies or set up a telephone service. Foreigners were not just hired to aid in supporting and opposing rebellions, they were brought into all areas, but the military aspects are the ones that create the best adventure stories.

Greta Thunberg was a 16yo with no background in science, why was she given the world stage? Who paid for that anyhow?

Bill Nye has no background in science, he was a mechanical engineer become actor. Why would you listen to him?

AOC has no background in anything scientific or engineering or public policy... do you get the point yet?

People listen to who they want to believe in.

Don’t pretend that “both sides” don’t do this.

Yes, just not the usual way. People with karma can flag things they don't like regardless of whether it's correct, factual, polite, etc, and there's no feedback mechanism to rein them in. When your post full of correct information is hidden from others, you can't tell who the culprits are. You can't demand that they say why they did what they did.

I think HN is best thought of as a machine for deepening the delusions of the left. Nothing they don't like will reach the front page, first of all, or if it does, it will be flagged. Whatever remains for consideration, in the comment section you are allowed to fiddle around with a few extraneous details about it, but you can't skewer the whole thing. You can't say it's fundamentally invalid. Nor can you question the source. If it's a science article from the Guardian, you can't link to ten false science predictions the Guardian made in the past and ask people not to post fake news; the Guardian is simply blessed. It is Official Information.

The leftists on HN can throw bricks at your head all day long. But if you pick up any of those bricks and start throwing them back, you'll be downvoted or even banned for being inflammatory.

>What they did was absolutely reprehensible,

Okay, this is a bit much. I know you came to realize all the car companies were doing it, so relatively speaking, it evens out when it comes to image. But this concept of hating a company over false marketing, it's a "and cows moo" moment. All big companies lie about their performances and benefits. Every. Single. One. Who would have guessed people would lie to make money... what a revelation. It's extremely naïve to feel hurt by a company trying to gain the edge over another by lying. That's some weird identity tying consumerism right there.

It was already an old joke when George Carlin did his stand up bit on marketing terms bs and that was some 20 years ago. It's time to grow up. No company is immune from this attitude either. Tech is fraught with it too. WeWork, Theranos are the nice examples. But remember, before it became publicly okay to rag on them, there were folks pointing out the bullshit. Folks who weren't believed because they were so negative about "wanting to change the world". Any time a company tries to play the, "We're making the world a better place" card, whether environmental, social, whatever, it's safe to assume bullshit is afoot. Plays out all the time.