Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Webp
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    1 year ago

    That’s exactly the reasoning Google has followed with its development and promotion of webp. Unfortunately, whether the website cares or not, CO₂ emissions are markedly higher due to increased client energy consumption, and that does directly affect you, so it’s worth considering the implications of using webp in a popular site.


  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Webp
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    1 year ago

    Webp is pretty great actually. Supporting a 32bit alpha channel means I’ve actually managed to reduce file sizes of what were formerly PNGs by something like 80%, which drastically improved performance (and the size of my project). I don’t get where the complaint of image quality came from either, as it seems to perform better than JPEG at the same file size.

    The worst part is that you missed the real problem with the format: the CPU overhead (and therefore the energy cost) of handling the file. A high-traffic site can dramatically increase the energy required for the images processed by the thousands/millions of clients in a single day, which places a drain on the grid and emits more CO₂ (yes, this is really a thing that people measure now).

    Basically Google invented the format to externalise their costs. Now, rather than footing the bill for bigger datacentres and greater bandwidth, they made everyone else pay for decompression.






  • I have much the same:

    • Files on the network with NFS
    • Kodi on an old laptop under the TV so we can watch said files.
    • Syncthing on our phones and laptops to pull films from there onto that file server.

    The only difference is that I’m using a Synology 'cause I have 15TB and don’t know how to do RAID myself, let alone how to do it with an old laptop. I can’t really recommend a Synology though. It’s got too many useless add-ons and simple tools like rsync never work properly with it.




  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Liquid Trees
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    1 year ago

    I had the same reaction until I read this.

    TL;DR: it’s 10-50x more efficient at cleaning the air and actually generates both electricity and fertiliser.

    Yes, it would be better to just get rid of all the cars generating the pollution in the first place and putting in some more trees, but there are clear advantages to this.