this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Late Stage Capitalism
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I'm not an expert in this field ofc, but I suspect simply serving a file would be way less energy intensive. There are less centralized alternatives too such as torrent streaming, which may or may not be more efficient. It would be nice to exist in an economy where we could explore these questions!
Than encrypting and decrypting for DRM reasons? Yes. But the reason the cloud exists at all is because economies of scale are real.
Just because an economy of scale is real, doesn't mean the work being done is meaningful or necessary. I'm arguing that the last couple of decades have seen a lot of work being created in order to necessitate traditional 'economy of scale' business models — aka a factory with an owner — when other ways of doing things may have been better in terms of global energy efficiency. E.g. the transcoding/compression only needs to happen once for each use case, the whole movie could be buffered rather than maintaining a server connection for the entire runtime. There are examples outside of streaming too ofc, and I'm not saying cloud computing has no use cases — but nobody really believes that the Netflix model is based on sound fundamentals, do they
I think we agree that it's a both/and situation with economies of scale, so let's explore Netflix.
The vast majority of energy for Netflix is not in centralized data centers but at their massive number of distribution points. Those distribution points serve a specific problem: end-user-acceptably fast download speeds.
Is that a reasonable problem to solve? Yes, sort of. Instead of people going back to a central server for their content, they go to a regional server. In essence, while end users don't own their own storage and search infrastructure, the next best solution is a localish solution for the customers in that region.
But what if we just solved the lack of storage and search at home? No profit. So you've got that part right for sure