
Power to the People - pimterry
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/power-to-the-people/
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smoyer
I'm not arguing that data centers aren't power hungry but I will say that I'm
a bit concerned that proof-of-work crypto-currencies are consuming way more
power than the coins will ultimately be worth. I know that bitcoin has made
millionaires but I still can't spend it at my grocery store.

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jessaustin
48V is interesting. It's a fairly safe voltage for humans to encounter. POTS
in USA has used it for a long time, and PoE runs pretty close to it. It's easy
to buy batteries for backup. As noted in TFA, it doesn't require components as
beefy as those with 12V. I wonder if this sort of effort on Google's part
could lead to more consumer-level electrical gear with strange voltages? ISTM
a modern home with modern lighting should drive all of that with PoE or
something else much like it...

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thinkingkong
Im not sure the economics of running our own rack servers makes too much sense
for most companies and teams. But for groups like cloudflare, netflix, any
edge computing or distributed cache systems this makes total sense.

If I had to guess Id say oxide will look like some kind of high voltage rack
level installation of ARM cpus for groups or teams that actually still need
on-prem or cdn-esque capabilities.

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EGreg
I was excited to read about how to return power to the people from centralized
services and data centers that arose to power the modern Web.

Indeed, this article started out talking about centralized data centers, but
then veered off to talk about power consumption instead of Power to the
People. I guess as a play on words, “power” can refer to power consumption.

But if you want to find direct solutions to centralized data centers usurping
the power of people and their local communities, I wrote an article two years
ago with the same name:

[https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-
people/](https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/)

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crispinb
I wonder what software stack choice brings to the table here. Are the
differences between the power draws of services written in (equivalent scope &
quality) Python/jvm/Rust/node of _any measurable significance_?

[Edited to emphasise empirical interest]

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dodobirdlord
Interestingly, this has been studied.

[https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/sle...](https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/sleFinal.pdf)

There's a quicker writeup here if slogging through paper's isn't how you want
to spend your time.

[https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-
the-l...](https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-least-
electricity/)

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crispinb
Nice, thanks. I've just glanced through and will have a proper read later. It
would I guess be pretty complex to extend these kind of isolated tests to
whole real-world installations.

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p9s
That is an excellent post, but shouldn't we rethink our usage of data instead?

We know we shouldn't rely that much on private corporation to run public
services infrastructure and own people data.

Today there is plenty of tools emerging to host your own cloud, that is a path
we should explore as well there is so much to be done in this space to create
simple to use product for all.

