Data centers used 460 TWh, or about 2% of total worldwide electricity use, according to IEA in 2022.
In comparison, 30% of total energy (energy! Not electricity) goes to transport!
As another point of comparison, transport in Sweden in 2022 used 137 TWh [1]. So the same order of magnitude as total datacenter energy use.
And datacenters are powered by electricity which increases the chance that it comes from renewable energy. Conversely,
the chance that diesel comes from a renewable source is zero.
So can we please stop talking about data center energy use? It’s a narrative that the media is currently pushing but as so many things it makes no sense. It’s not the thing we should be focusing on if we want to decrease fossil fuel use.
2% of total worldwide electricity use in 2022 is a shit load of electricity and emissions. Your argument is the same as those who argue "our country shouldn't care about emissions when China is the biggest emitter".
If you dive into a detailed breakdown of emissions you'll find that it's a complex hierarchy of categories. You can't just fix "all of transport" or treat it like a "low hanging fruit", just look at how much time it's taken for EV penetration to be in any way significant; look at how much of transport emissions are from aviation or shipping or other components.
Any energy use that's measurable in whole percentage points of global emissions needs addressing. That includes data centers.
China is actively working on reducing their emissions (they're building tons of nuclear and renewables, and have long term plans for both), and a lot of theirs are to manufacture stuff the whole world uses.
> Your argument is the same as those who argue "our country shouldn't care about emissions when China is the biggest emitter".
China and the US are in the same order of magnitude in emissions. So NO that's absolutely not the argument I am making.
> Any energy use that's measurable in whole percentage points of global emissions needs addressing
But it isn't! That's my point. Electricity use is about 20% of total energy use. So if we talk about global emissions, data center is only about 20% * 2% = 0.4% of total energy use.
And then if we talk about total emittance, it's even lower because 40% of electricity is generated from nuclear and renewables.
> just look at how much time it's taken for EV penetration to be in any way significant
Yes so let's focus on that instead of data centers. Data centers are not the problem!
EDIT: Also CPUs and GPUs are still becoming more energy efficient. So I'm a bit skeptical of extrapolations which say that data centers will consume a large percentage of US energy. If the number of CPUs and GPUs doubles each 2 years, but energy efficiency doubles too, then overall energy usage doesn't grow so fast. Especially if old CPUs and GPUs are taken out of the system over time because they become too expensive to operate.
> Yes so let's focus on that instead of data centers. Data centers are not the problem!
This is like saying I shouldn’t care about pollution from the local auto painting shop because there are strip mines somewhere else. Yes, it’s not the top priority but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to reduce pollution just as we are for every large producer, and with both LLMs and cryptocurrency having potential demand outstripping the existing supply we have every reason to expect continued growth in emissions at a time when we need decline.
Rather than taking this so personally, consider that people on HN talk about it because our choices actually matter here. Very few of us affect heavy industrial policy but all of us can think about how much our applications need to run.
Thanks for sharing. I care about it. I run a small hosting company. Sure, there are many low hanging fruits for fighting CO2 emissions that should be tackled first. I am also hopeful that energy from directly available renewables will be the most economic choice for building data centers anyhow, so that this is not a matter of believes any more.
But on the other side, to bring down CO2 levels, fast change everywhere is required. As far as I see data center energy consumption continues to grow, specifically with AI.
If I am not mistaken, data centers produce more CO2 than aviation.
And sure, most 'green hosting' is probably 'green washing', yet I would still support and link initiatives such as:
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/
You can choose which electricity company provides the amount of power to the grid that you're using. While you don't get "your" electricity, overall you can still affect the carbon balance of the electricity that's produced in your name.
Hetzner is using 100% green hydro and wind power for that, which is as sustainable as any grid-connected company can be.
A lot of EU datacenter providers specifically pick green electricity providers/sources, and pride themselves on it, and use it in advertising their sustainability.
Scaleway in particular are 100% no-CO2 (they have it easy, most of their DCs are in France where it's easy to be fully nuclear+renewable). Hetzner are the same.
While fans of nuclear energy like to meme about the German power grid, Hetzner is — in so far as anyone with a grid connection can be — powered by 100% green wind and hydro energy.
Sounds like a win for the US...get competing economies to block the technology for trivial reasons, then by time the bugs are worked out they will be so far behind that their only choice will be to choose US-based solutions
Posts related to PHP usually become discussion if the language sucks or not here on HN. I am co-founder of a PHP PaaS and I can confirm that almost all clients are using frameworks or even CMS systems on top of PHP to build stuff. Why not?
I am interested how PHP and frontend tooling will work out in the future. Nobody is compiling JS/CSS with PHP (as far as I see). That is usually done with Node.js. Livewire (and Inertia.js) are bridges. Sometimes PHP becomes a backend to provide an API for an SPA frontend.
Nuxt Content is a lot less opinionated. You'll have to build out most yourself. There are themes (https://github.com/atinux/content-wind), but last I checked, it wasn't simple to configure.
Agreed. I built my personal website with Nuxt Content, but I'm not satisfied with it. It forces you to do a lot of things yourself and is definitely targeted towards dynamic websites. Since I am building for Github Pages, I found it quite unintuitive.
I would recommend using VitePress, Zola, Jekyll, or some other tool instead if you need an SSG.
VitePress is geared more for documentation websites, while Nuxt Content is more for regular websites.
Of course, VitePress can be used for all sorta of stuff. My old website used to be based on it. If you click through the sites using VitePress you can see the similarities and what you get for free with the default theme.
This is interesting but misses the real killer PT feature: closing the loop between velocity and planning:
1. Tasks have points
2. Sprints have duration
3. Points accomplished per sprint is velocity
4. Use the average velocity of the past few sprints to pull some number of tasks off the top of the backlog. Those are the tasks for the next sprint.
It makes sprint planning basically transparent. I just prioritise the backlog (sometimes lazily) and it keeps me pretty productive. It's almost gamification in a way, but not quite.
If you have a prioritised backlog and you’re working in priority order then there’s not much value in sprints — is there? Sprints provide value when you can’t just churn through tickets one after the other in priority order. Sprint planning is time consuming because sprints are useful when you need to plan.
You could use Linear’s cycles and milestones but you probably don’t need any of that structure if you’re just working ticket by ticket.
I've not looked at Linear - but when I was freelancing I used Pivotal (free account) to just put all my clients' requests into one long queue (I had about 8 clients at any one time).
I put in a very random guess as to the points value of each request - nothing more than "trivial, easy, difficult, bastard-bloody-hell-shit-buckets-difficult".
I had Tracker set to work in "weekly sprints" - but they're not really sprints at all - it's just a unit of measure. Internally it averages the number of points completed over the last three weeks, uses that for an average velocity, then moves the date markers on the "backlog" list to match.
Then, when a client asked when something will be done, I could pretty accurately say "unless something urgent crops up, it will be '18th-24th March'" (where "something urgent crops up" means I insert a story at the top of the queue instead of at the end).
PT automatically adjusts the number of stories that make it into a sprint. They don't really have a concept of sprint actually... it is just average velocity over time and the number of stories that can fit into that average.
If a PM wants to see how adding in just one more feature impacts the schedule, they can just drag the pointed story into the queue and see what gets pushed out to the next week.
If a developer goes on vacation, it is easy to see how that impacts the schedule cause you can subtract their average velocity.
Most people don't understand this killer feature of PT unless they've actually spent a bunch of time using it. It really enables you to do accurate project estimates, if you do it right.
In other words — design your system assuming that your opponents know it in
detail. (A former official at NSA's National Computer Security Center told
me that the standard assumption there was that serial number 1 of any new
device was delivered to the Kremlin.)
Thanks HN for bringing this up again. I never fully understood what Acquia does and might never will. But it seems to go well, which is hopefully good for Dries. I respect when the open source project and the business behind it are clearly separated.
I believe that Hetzner data centers in Europe (Germany, Finland) are powered by green energy, but not the locations in US.
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