Baldur Bjarnason

From "Your use of AI is directly harming the environment I live in" at https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/your-use-of-ai-harms-the-environment/ by the Icelandic citizen Baldur Bjarnason:

"Iceland doesn’t have that much excess power generation. Already our power companies have to occasionally limit power delivery to heavy users.

Increasing power generation that much requires tough choices: we’d have to ruin the environment some way. We just don’t have that many locations left for hydroelectric or geothermal power plants. Most locations that remain are popular tourist sites – destroying them would be bad for the economy – important ecosystems, or would require improvements to the grid that nobody seems to be willing to pay for. Even if we shut down some of the aluminium smelters, reusing that power elsewhere would be problematic. The Kárahnjúkar power plant is in the middle of nowhere and was purpose-built to serve the aluminium industry. When it generates excess power – which happens – that power is usually wasted because the grid can’t shift it from the region where most of the smelting takes place to the regions that have most of the population.

However, data centres in Iceland are both located near populated areas and are almost exclusively used for “AI” or crypto. You can’t buy regular hosting in these centres for love or money. If you buy hosting in Iceland, odds are that the rack is in a building in Reykjavík somewhere, not in a data centre

And those data centres…

Haha I was checking the comments precisely to see if this was the case. This happens nearly everywhere a language that isn't Java, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, or JavaScript is used. IMO it has more to do with tech labor arbitrage[1] than anything technical. Even if a system is punching above its weight, over time, the Weird Language Choice spooks people enough that they get the rewrite bug.

Bleacher Report is a funny example: it used to be a darling example of Elixir, where a migration from Ruby -> Elixir claimed a move from "150 Ruby servers to 5 (probably overprovisioned) Elixir servers."[2] But then management and politics got scared, moved it all to more conventional tech, and the whole system suffered (see this legendary post[3]).

Fred Hebert describes a similar thing happening with a migration from Erlang deployments to Go/Docker/immutable, where you lose some pretty valuable capabilities by migrating to more conventional tech.[4]

I don't see this changing anytime soon -- we came of age when it was viable to attract investment with the promise of tech innovation. These days, those are liabilities because managers misunderstood the "Use Boring Technology" post the way consultants bartardized "Agile" (taking decent advice and misunderstanding it into something wholly different and horrifying). The result is you've got companies with customers in the 1000s using k8s, calling it "simple" and "Boring," whereas that same company would be called amateur if they did things like…

Oh for Christ's sake, someone pry Baldur off his cross again.

> Blocking network assets is a setback for format adoption

People are standing here telling him that _allowing_ network assets _is a setback for format adoption_ and he's just going to keep pounding this stupid, obnoxious drum of his until he runs everyone off.

> almost all of the problems described would be solved by getting OS vendors (Google, MS, Apple) to invest more money in EPUB

That's back-asswards. Google, MS, and Apple don't give a shit about EPUB, they never will, and it's arguable that we're better served with them not buying a seat at that table considering how poorly their "help" has helped web standards, as much of the rest of his dismissive thread helpfully notes.

If he wants money for EPUB standards he should shake the cup at IDPF members who rely on it, and particularly Amazon, to whom he quite vocally abdicated the publishing space 12 years ago.[1]

Barking at operating system companies is nonsense at best and how we wind up with another, even more avoidable situation where the space is held hostage by them at worst. At least Amazon can chuck some goodwill money at EPUB development while continuing to kick its ass up and down the market with MOBI.

(Aside from all this, his dismissals of the "clunky" reading system complaint, citing how EPUB has "too many divergences", only further proves to me how tunneled the vision is of the people involved. To hell with forking or improving EPUB, then,…

All-time great read about Apple/EU conflicts: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech/

From the conclusion:

> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.

> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.

> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.

> Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.

> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.

> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding…

With hindsight, considering the cards we were dealt, there's not much I would have done differently. If I had known better before, I would have ensured stronger buy-in because after a while our internal stakeholders were often pushing back on the effort, and that led to concessions where throw away code in the legacy systems was built even for weak business outcomes.

Overall I share your concerns. Having the right reasons to rewrite is key. I believe this blog[1] about software as theory building does a great job at describing the challenge with software gardening, and the times where a rewrite is the solution are few. Even then, it's critical to handle the rewrite in ways that can work - in our case, we chose to progressively eat the legacy software without making major changes when we could avoid them. The legacy software we had was mostly the results of one man heroics and traded off performance and availability for correctness and security. It also was designed to be maintained by a small group. Solid choices if you are early Kraken - but as many successful startups, we were victim of our success and we needed it all.

When it became clear that we had to rewrite the stack (the 2017 3-days shutdown happened just before that realization), those in charge at the time decided to experiment with Rust. It was a crazy bet in early 2018, it was still Rust 2015, no NLL, no async, far rougher ecosystem. The fact that it became successful enough to warrant pursuing a…

What were the arguments in favour of SPAs in the first place?

I'm finding it interesting that most of the top HN submissions (by popularity) matching "single page app" are critical, not positive. First 15 follow, all but 5 are negative:

- You probably don't need a single-page app (https://journal.plausible.io/you-probably-dont-need-a-single-page-app) 816 points | 6 years ago | 499 comments

- A single-page app is almost always worse than a multi-page app (https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/the-architecture-no-one-needs.html) 289 points | 6 years ago | 145 comments

- The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app (https://htmx.org/essays/you-cant/) 262 points | 4 months ago | 143 comments

- Building a single-page app with Htmx (https://jakelazaroff.com/words/building-a-single-page-app-with-htmx/) 252 points | 5 months ago | 143 comments

- AWS Lambda as a back end for a single-page app (http://lg.io/2015/05/16/the-future-is-now-and-its-using-aws-lambda.html) 229 points | 10 years ago | 73 comments

- Create your own dysfunctional single-page app (https://tinnedfruit.com/articles/create-your-own-dysfunctional-single-page-app.html) 208 points | 6 years ago | 138 comments

- The Single-Page-App Morality Play (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/single-page-app-morality-play/) 207 points | 3 years ago | 131 comments

- Todos: a Backbone.js example Single-Page-App (with…