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Programming AI Earth

Salesforce Executive Shares 'Four Ways Coders Can Fight the Climate Crisis' (forbes.com) 79

Posted by EditorDavid from the hello-world dept.

Saleforce's chief impact officer, writing in Forbes: Code and computer programming — the backbone of modern business — has a long way to go before it can be called "green..." According to a recent report from the science journal Patterns, the information and communication technology sector accounts for up to 3.9% of global emissions... So far, the focus has been on reducing energy consumption in data centers and moving electrical grids away from fossil fuels. Now, coders and designers are ready for a similar push in software, crypto proof of work and AI compute power...

Our research revealed that 75% of UX designers, software developers and IT operations managers want software to do less damage to the environment. Yet nearly one in two don't know how to take action. Half of these technologists admit to not knowing how to mitigate environmental harm in their work, leading to 34% acknowledging that they "rarely or never" consider carbon emissions while typing a new line of code... Earlier this year, Salesforce launched a sustainability guide for technology that provides practical recommendations for aligning climate goals with software development.
In the article the Salesforce executive makes four recommendations, urging coders to design sites in ways that reduce the energy needed to display them. ("Even small changes to image size, color and type options can scale to large impacts.") They also recommend writing application code that uses less energy, which "can lead to significant emissions reductions, particularly when deployed at scale. Leaders can seek out apps that are coded to run natively in browsers which can lead to improvement in performance and a reduction in energy use."

Their article includes links to the energy-saving hackathon GreenHack and the non-profit Green Software Foundation. (Their site recently described how the IT company AVEVA used a Raspberry Pi in back of a hardware cluster as part of a system to measure software's energy consumption.)

But their first recommendation for fighting the climate crisis is "Adopt new technology like AI" to "make the software development cycle more energy efficient." ("At Salesforce, we're starting to see tremendous potential in using generative AI to optimize code and are excited to release this to customers in the future.")
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Salesforce Executive Shares 'Four Ways Coders Can Fight the Climate Crisis' More

Salesforce Executive Shares 'Four Ways Coders Can Fight the Climate Crisis'

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  • Really? (Score:5, Informative)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @06:42AM (#63727514) Journal
    "Leaders can seek out apps that are coded to run natively in browsers which can lead to improvement in performance and a reduction in energy use."

    Definitely someone we can all take valuable optimization advice from. In other news, using Electron causes apps to generate their own energy; which is super efficient.

    • Noticed they didn't say build native applications. Somehow I think writing something to run in the browser is a little bit less efficient...

      Maybe they didn't say that because the environment isn't their real concern in writing this article.

      • Stop using white backgrounds. (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        One easy way to save power is to stop using white as your background color. Black (the absence of light) is the most power efficient, so use black liberally.

        Where black isn't possible, consider that there are Red Green and Blue colored LEDs that make up your display, and that Red LEDs are generally the most efficient of those, followed by Green LEDs, and finally the Blue LEDs being the least efficient.

        This is why I make all my apps default to night mode color schemes.

        • That's definitely a consideration, but display tech is not all the same. My screen is LCD, so whether it's white on black or black on white, background light is doing the same work. The difference is whether I let energy escape as light or block it and let it turn into heat. I guess the key takeaway is to know your target audience.

    • IT being green? Lol. Some kind of virtue signaling? Hold on I just have to.... sorry. I had to throw away my phone, laptop, desktop, monitors, etc because they came out with a new version this year again. Now, what were we talking about? Being green? (Lol.)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        This is an ad. Sponsors pay a lot of money to have their "articles" put up on a pedestal.
    • is if government just effectively regulates and/or taxes carbon emissions, and incents clean renewables and supporting grid infrastucture and energy storage, causing the country to get off coal and gas electricity ASAP.

      That would be approximately 10,000 % more effective than having coders write less bloated, interpreted code.
    • To be the devil's advocate the idiot is probably referring to the amount of man-hours sunk into development for native apps, their porting to other platforms, initial shipping out to customers, and the related costs.

      Of course, one should also compare that to the need to run a high availability server 24/7/365 per X number of users and the necessary data transmission hardware + trunk lines + on going maintenance costs that web apps require on top of their initial coding and deployment by comparison. (Which

  • You fucking fuckers are why the web is fucked! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @06:50AM (#63727530)
    Fuck off, suit! (Excuse my language, but this is the only adequate way to express this.)
    • Sadly, if you had an actual specific point, you didn't articulate it.
      I don't care about the f words, but explaining what you mean would be helpful. General anger isn't useful. It's more an affliction.
      • It isn't what he wrote, it's that he had the audacity to write it. If you do not understand what a brazen display of arrogance that article is anyway, you wouldn't understand an explanation either. The only response to something like that which doesn't denigrate the addressee of that article by considering any of that rubbish is to tell the author to fuck the hell off. If he told his bullshit to a bunch of "coders" in person, he would risk physical abuse.
        • So the class of "fucking fuckers" is:

          CEOs of tech companies?

          Does that include technical founders who remained CEO?

          All of them?

          And this is because a better model for developing and operating and maintaining complex, multi-contributor software applications on the Internet would be?
          Perhaps an informal benevolent techno-dictator BDFL model (Linus? Guido? Vitalik? ...?)

          Or perhaps you prefer a non-hierarchical, non-profit development and operations model. I'm fine with that as long as it obtains usability and sta
          • What he did was like a white man going into a black bar and proclaiming "hello, my *******, are you aware that cotton farming is bad for the environment?" I don't know what to tell you if that isn't immediately obvious to you.
            • First of all it was "she" not "he".

              One thing I know about class structures. If you buy into them, and buy into your place in them, you are doing as much to perpetuate them as anyone else.

              As an alternative, consider just getting together with a bunch of technically and business-qualified friends and forming your own company to make something that you want to exist, the way you want to make it. That's exactly what the tech billionaires of today did 20 years ago or so.

              While this may not be possible across all,

              • it was "she" not "he"

                Gender doesn't matter. We can agree on "it", if you prefer, but unless we're talking about something that "she" can do that "he" cannot, I'm not going to check on its preferred pronouns, whether they were assigned at birth or chosen later. "He" means a guy or a gal. It's generic until gender matters, and it doesn't matter for being a huge asshole. The moment I care who that really is is the moment it becomes personal. Probably best to avoid that.

                Also, this isn't about class. They don't own slaves. Is nobod

                • Regarding the tracked-advertising business model of the web/internet these days.
                  We are where we are because of a couple of uncomfortable but nonetheless true contextual facts.
                  1) web/app/internet users are in general not willing to pay (or pay enough to support development and operation) either up front or by subscription, for the most universal applications and information services (search, social media, news etc) they use on the internet.
                  Companies making those applications/services therefore converged on t

  • Emissions (Score:5, Funny)

    by RegistrationIsDumb83 ( 6517138 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @06:51AM (#63727532)
    Maybe Salesforce can emit less spam

  • The core idea is good, followed by marketing BS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:00AM (#63727560)

    Optimize your code, that one should be obvious.

    But then "run natively in browsers"?! This leads to most terribly inefficient code, that's how you get chat apps that takes a GB of RAM. The browser is a layer between the OS and application code, which has advantages for portability, but it will never beat OS native apps for performance and resource use. Today, computers down to entry-level smartphones are at a level where they should be able run anything but the most demanding applications easily, with only a fraction of their available computing power. 99% of their resources are used by bloat: like hundreds of megabytes of libraries and frameworks of which each app run their own copy of.

    As for AI in its current form, I am fine with it, but one has to admit that from an energy usage perspective, it is terrible. You can't even run, let alone train the most popular models on even a workstation-class computer, serious AI company need MW-scale GPU farms.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      >>This leads to most terribly inefficient code, that's how you get chat apps that takes a GB of RAM.

      I assume if the goal is reducing energy usage you would be optimizing for speed rather than size. The faster a task runs, the sooner the CPU can go back to low-power standby.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pjt33 ( 739471 )

        RAM uses power for refresh, and swapping uses power to operate the disk, so anything which bloats RAM requirements also contributes to energy usage.

    • It's all bullshit. Those who can write optimized code and web pages would love to do so, but aren't allowed to or given the time to do so by the very same kind of people who will later blame the programmers, e.g. the asshole who wrote that article. There is a reason web pages are huge pieces of crap, and the reason is not programmers. My web sites and servers are the leanest they can be, because I have none of those motherfuckers breathing down my neck about them. Their stuff is a different story: All the b
      • A lot of websites aren't really being done by IT anyway. It's a bunch of marketing people dragging and dropping images and widgets.

  • Compilers already optimize (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:09AM (#63727574)

    >>"At Salesforce, we're starting to see tremendous potential in using generative AI to optimize code and are excited to release this to customers in the future."

    Don't all modern compilers already have optimization built-in? I gave up hand optimizing my code years ago since after the compiler was done with it, the binaries were basically the same.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Compilers mostly optimize for performance, not for energy efficiency. Compilers aren't the key to reducing energy efficiency though. The algorithm selected tends to have by far the biggest influence on power.

      Some size optimization would be nice too. I just had to install an app to program some chips, and somehow it's 650MB. Maybe it has all the details of every chip under the sun in it, but most of it will be duplicated since they are mostly families of very similar parts. A hierarchical database or some co

      • Re:Compilers already optimize (Score:4, Insightful)

        by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @11:03AM (#63728514) Homepage Journal

        Optimising for performance does optimise for energy efficiency. If you can get whatever it is you're doing done faster, the CPU can get back to idling faster. Compilers can optimise for code size as well, which is the default with Apple's tools for example. For typical desktop applications, optimising for size often improves performance over optimising for speed, because reducing the size of the working set, reducing the amount of code that needs to be paged in for any given user action, and reducing cache thrashing has a bigger impact than reducing the number of core cycles required to execute a given block of code.

        But software bloat isn't caused by lack of size optimisation on the micro level where compilers work. It's caused by pulling in massive libraries, and writing code in obviously sub-optimal ways.

  • Let's say everyone came on board, and you spend say 10% of developer time extra on a 'energy efficient app' that will reduce the global IT operation costs from 3.9% to 3.8%, you're still having to pay and house and transport and train and cool/heat 10% more developers with 10% more personal devices.

    Meaning that you're increasing operational cost in IT from 3.9% to 4.3% to then reduce it back to 4.2%

  • Ban crypto mining if you actually care (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:26AM (#63727624)
    Even ones that use renewables still "steal" electricty that can be used for legitimate applications and force them to use non renewables, and steal precious fab capacity when we need it for our economy. Microsoft should release an update to Windows that flags and deletes all miners and wallets as malware and destroy the tech bro pyramid scheme for good. It's 2023, time to leave 90s era cyberpunk emoney behind.
    • I think we're about to. [reuters.com]

      Yeah, it says they can still trade in Bitcoin, but bitcoin can't sustain the grift that is crypto. Bitcoin is what you use to get into the market and screw around with one of the other 1m+ cryptos out there. That's a huge chunk of it's trading value (that and wash trading). Take that away and you probably knock the value of it in half. And that gets it dangerously close to the sub $10k mark where it's not profitable to mine.
  • I wonder how many Salesforce executives use private jets to go to conferences, and the emissions from those

    • A lot fewer than previously since Salesfarce is circling the bowl.

      It's a hard sell when the whole platform is designed for lock-in.

      For example they allow BPMN import to flows, but not export of flows. So your business logic winds up locked up in their platform. Getting the data out is easy enough, but the logic is hard.

      With Drupal you could make ECA models in BPMN.io and then export them as BPMN and bring them to other platforms. With Salesforce you're just screwed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hazem ( 472289 )

      While mandating the rest of the workers start driving back to the office again: https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

    • At the least, the CEO "Marc Benioff: 63k Miles in 60 Days" https://www.radaratlas.com/mar... [radaratlas.com]

  • No more tracking! (Score:3)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:33AM (#63727646)

    Completely ditch javascript filled webpages, and get off the "AI" bandwagon.

  • Let's see if the hipsters will get serious (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:39AM (#63727664)

    Starting with stopping the use of energy-hungry languages [thenewstack.io] like Python except for the small niches where they won't be long-running, intensive applications.

    While we're at it, stop using frameworks like Electron that are a lot harder on the CPU than even doing something in PyQT, let alone a Java, .NET or native compiled desktop app.

  • The purpose of government is to enforce rules that make competition without coercion possible, in order that it may generate a productive dividend. A free market is this if nothing else. When that mechanism breaks, you get the natural outcome which is the tragedy of the commons, and there is no greater example than global warming. The cause of global warming is government failure. Private wealth, using power it should never be allowed to have, has undermined the very mechanisms that created it.

    If you are

    • This thing called war will take care of it. In fact, it's the only thing that will. Human societies spiral out of control eventually, only the searing fire of global collapse will 'correct' this problem. It's an inherent flaw in our makeup, and a significant cause of the cyclical nature of history. Then we (the royal 'we', as *we* will be dead) can rebuild again and perhaps do a little better.

      All that stuff about trying to change things is futile and just a good way to get yourself killed. Play your ro

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PJ6 ( 1151747 )
        No. This century's weapons are simply too dangerous to take that attitude.

        The tools we have at our personal disposal are that much more powerful too. I may not accomplish much, and you may not. But one of us, or a group of us will. And they won't even see it coming, because they're just not that smart. They only pay for it.

        Mark my words, one of us will take the wheel. They just need to be reminded of their responsibility, and that it is in their power in the first place.

  • Forbes paid publishing at it again. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by laughableideasintech ( 10472820 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:59AM (#63727746)
    No mention of just not upgrading your laptop every other year. Not buying more junk. Hibernating your computer overnight. Never on the direct power consumer side. Salesforce promoting greenwashing junk. AI is going to help us cut our carbon emissions because people have to do less carbon intensive work!?? Can't make this stuff up. Laughable ideas in Tech fo' sho.
  • This may explain bad Saleforce code, if CEO is asking coders to 'fight' these kinds of issues they are not focusing on their job of pushing out good code.

  • 1. Don't use frameworks

    2. Offer dark theme

    3. Don't use ads or tracking or anything to collect metrics (you're HTTP log should be sufficient)

    • > 2. Offer dark theme

      Write native apps, don't involve designers (but do involve UX specialists), and you'll get that for free.
      Hell even browsers should be able to just switch their colors.

  • Using unproven tech is really not the way to deal with any serious problem.

  • Work from home is the obvious solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @09:22AM (#63728072)

    Coders are well placed to work from home and that will save a lot of energy. So what is Salesforce's policy on that issue?

  • Step 1, does everyone need multiple monitors? Observe the unused space as you walk by.
  • Claiming "coders" have to solve the problem because "executives" are too lazy, stupid, unwilling to change is hogwash! Let's go over those four points:

    1. Use AI: No! AI isn't ready or able to handle the task of designing, writing and maintaining large scale complex software. When AI writes software and a bug causes thousands to millions of dollars in damages, will the executive teams boast about how great AI is? Or will they circle jerk themselves well they blame the developers and make empty stateme

  • If these folks really want programmers to fight climage change, have every programmer write code as if it was for the Apollo moon program. Insignificant memory (by today's standards) and low power requirements.

    Once programmers learn to do that they'll see how bloated today's code is and how costly it is to develop, run, and maintain. Also, with a slimmer code base, fewer problems and, with luck, fewer instances of being breached.

    But I'm sure the hacks from Salesforce will find excuses why this shouldn't be

  • This is yet another symptom of the monomania effect, really a virus that for unknown reasons afflicts primarily only Europe and America.

    Let's worry about the 0.000000000001% effect, using 10% of resources to do so. Why? Because we are idiots.

  • > But their first recommendation for fighting the climate crisis is "Adopt new technology like AI" to "make the software development cycle more energy efficient."

    AI is very power intensive, this is not a path to fewer emissions. Certainly, code that is more efficient can use less power. But using something super inefficient to create something slightly more efficient is not a net win.

    https://hbr.org/2023/07/how-to... [hbr.org]

  • 1. Live off the grid, 2⦠well, start with that⦠heh
  • eat the Salesforce Executive.

  • Leave out the ads and a lot of traffic along with render time vanishes.

    What do you say?

  • Ill take this crap more seriously after these hypocrites fly coach.

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