Anthropy
@mirabilos @dalias @Em0nM4stodon While I much appreciate people running homelabs and using old hardware, and I do so myself too, in terms of power efficiency, and even green energy percentage, that scores really low compared to actual datacenters.
AI-specific hardware is definitely pushed to its absolute limits though, 1200W chips that could easily use 50% less power if they'd run 20% slower- but again, 60-70% of even new datacenters, is all just classical internet workloads, such as fedi hosts
Rich Felker
@anthropy @mirabilos @Em0nM4stodon It's "classical internet workloads" made several of orders of magnitude more inefficient.
Yes, virtualizing a very high end machine for a large number of tenants might be "more energy-efficient" than running the same workloads on individual more modest machines, but like adding lanes to highways or improving combustion engine efficiency, it's not driving usage down, but making room to be more inefficient with how it's used (by making software more and more layers of awful).
Rich Felker
@anthropy @mirabilos @Em0nM4stodon We tolerate Mastodon being the ruby-on-rails hell of inefficiency it is because of the importance/urgency of retaking control over social networking, which matters far more than any environmental externalities of the entire fediverse infrastructure combined, which is miniscule compared to capitalist shit.
This doesn't mean we have to like it.
Anthropy
@dalias @mirabilos @Em0nM4stodon don't get me wrong, but I think that's a really ironic thing to say on social media that's running on a pile of datacentersa
Rich Felker
@anthropy @mirabilos @Em0nM4stodon I never made any claims about efficiency of homelabs/self-hosting, only about the harmfulness of the data-centers model.
The environmental harm that comes from them has nothing to do with relative efficiency of self-hosting vs VPS-hosting.
It comes from the orders-of-magnitude-larger capitalist uses of them.
Anthropy
@dalias @mirabilos @Em0nM4stodon that's kind of besides the point and a lame thing to say, even if everyone would be using Honk or whatever, the lack of sharing of resources is what makes it inefficient, not the software that's on it.
again, I much appreciate homelabs, especially in terms of freedom, but you can't also win the 'efficiency' point there.
Rich Felker
@lispi314 @Em0nM4stodon @anthropy @mirabilos Again, not that it matters, but I run old hardware where the cpu has a TDP of 8.5W. I'm skeptical that you'd do better in a data center.
LisPi
@dalias @anthropy @mirabilos @Em0nM4stodon
I do so myself too, in terms of power efficiency, and even green energy percentage, that scores really low compared to actual datacenters.
Most of the energy expenditure in a computer is in its fabrication. Datacenters with their short hardware lifecycles are absolutely horrendous for that.
They consider it an externality and disregard it.
Also, the old hardware can be a lot more efficient in use if we get rid of the server-centric always-online model of interaction and opt for message-centric or distributed models.
Those latter models are inimical to capitalist & state control, which is exactly why they have been heavily incentivized against & marginalized. Can't have user agency & autonomy.
This is also the reason why we have such garbage (operating) system architectures instead of far more efficient and secure capability systems. The priority for top-down hierarchical control & structure overrode everything else.
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