You’re right I have no idea, I use it for scripts, it works well, you guys are all linux nerds talking about philosophy that I don’t care for
I need code to make a script, it works, end of story, I don’t care about your philosophy on less code more code better code worse code, and I’m pretty sure most businesses don’t care either
I’m a C++ programmer most of the time, but I also write scripts. Claude and even Gemini write better bash scripts than I do - better error handling, better commenting, better input sanitizing, better use of parameters - because, all that bash syntax is an annoying pile of illogical junk that I have to look up every time I go to use it, and what are AI agents really fast at doing? Looking stuff up.
sure let’s just burn down half a hectare of the amazon for a seven line script.
engineering philosophy is where the rubber hits the road. building software with the right philosophy can mean the difference between needing a datacenter or a raspberry pi for the same job. it directly translates to money saved in recurring costs.
The seven line script isn’t burning down the rainforest. Programmers are a 1% slice of AI token usage. A seven line script takes less datacenter power to generate than your monitor does to show you this message thread while you read it. What’s burning down the rainforest is billions of “ordinary” people using AI to make Rule 34 animations, graphic layout flyers for their next coffee date, research papers on obscure topics that will never be read by anyone, schemes to trade bitcoin, etc. etc. etc.
I glanced across one once, I doubt any of the demographics are entirely reliable, but even with the uncertainty it appears that programmers are but a small minority even among Claude users.
I know a family that uses it to write sappy greeting card type mini-novels to each other.
Others use it to make graphic promotional flyers (give me a flyer describing this event, time place, activities and illustrate it with pictures of geckos and calla lillies…)
Some (bad) colleagues at work use it to summarize their e-mail inbox, and draft replies when warranted.
I know a woman who has been teaching “Creative Writing” at an online university for 10 years. Her past two crops of students are 99% using it to write their papers.
I’m sure there are day-traders out there using it all kinds of ways to try to gain advantage in the markets.
Customer support is a big one (reading the manuals to the customers) and, sadly, customer engagement - constant contact type messages.
A friend of ours recently took a 3 week vacation in Ireland, gave AI some “hard constraints” that they had to meet and let it plan out their routing, lodging, car rental, train fares, etc.
to be fair I use https://www.ecosia.org/ which is climate positive so anything else I do on the web is carbon negative, however I also have solar and a battery and export power at night so I am technically climate positive (I reduce more emissions than I make)
also I mainly use lechat tbh, it’s french and aims to be climate friendly:
The project will support large-scale AI model training and inference workloads, leveraging Sweden’s renewable energy capacity and EcoDataCenter’s established footprint in sustainable data center operations. The facility is expected to be powered primarily by renewable energy sources, aligning with both companies’ commitments to reducing the carbon intensity of AI compute.
If the grid is more green, the data centres are more green, and in the most tech heavy place on earth:
The growing portfolio of grid-scale batteries in California, the world’s fourth biggest economy, hit a stunning new peak earlier this week, reaching a share of 44 pct of evening demand at once stage in the early evening.
It’s not my fault Americans are innovative enough to come up with a magic computer code box but not smart enough to install a bunch of solar panels and batteries :\
I am technically climate positive (I reduce more emissions than I make)
by some measures. Look at the food you eat, cost of transport, energy costs to produce, maintain and eventually recycle your energy and dwelling infrastructure. Do you eat at restaurants? Not only what you consume there, but the energy costs for the restaurant to operate, maintain their structure, maintain the roads for you and the employees to get to and from, costs of employee transit…
You are making an effort, which is admirable and sadly rare. You are highly unlikely to be cradle to grave climate positive. We all emit CO2 which is balanced by natural processes from phytoplankton to rainforests to the African Violet on your windowsill. Unless you maintain and protect a large swath of nature (we used to own 20 acres of undeveloped forest… that didn’t completely balance our footprint, but it probably did more than ecosia…) you are party to more CO2 emission than carbon recapture.
the energy costs for the restaurant to operate, maintain their structure, maintain the roads for you and the employees to get to and from, costs of employee transit
that would be split though? a bit like a bus or train, average costs to produce the meals would be lower as they’re made in bulk
You are highly unlikely to be cradle to grave climate positive
that is true, you can see my ecologi link in my profile with my eventual goal, although that’s just for the sake of it
i have recently funded a second solar battery which should reduce another few thousand co2’s out of the air every year pushing me even further co2 positive
there is also corena which i want to donate too after this damn russin invasion is up, money goes to them, they lend it out at low interest rates, the money comes back and they can lend it out again, pretty damn good
the energy costs for the restaurant to operate, maintain their structure, maintain the roads for you and the employees to get to and from, costs of employee transit
that would be split though? a bit like a bus or train, average costs to produce the meals would be lower as they’re made in bulk
I find money to be a really good proxy for carbon emissions. The more you pay for something, the more people get money that they eventually spend on energy. So, if you go to a restaurant and pay $100 for the meal, don’t focus on where the potatoes were grown or whatever, focus on the $100 - where does it go? Most of it ends up paying for the expenditure of energy eventually.
Yes, but like the restaurant where you are just a pro-rated slice of “the bad things”, schemes like this make you a pro-rated slice of “the good things.” It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not as big of a good thing as it sounds by the time 10,000 people share in its “goodness.”
This: https://mangocats.com/ao/BeachVendorBlockchain.html is a half-baked idea I have been kicking around for use of blockchain tech as a backbone for small scale / local credit. Don’t go expecting the simulation servers to be running or anything like that, I just spent a weekend updating the old ideas with spare AI token credits recently and while it made tremendous progress, as the papers themselves say: it really needs hands-on time and attention to develop it properly.
so fun fact, i live within walking distance of that dc project (close enough that i was invited to attend a presentation by edc on what it would do to the immediate area) and i’ve done the math on the grid load. the hydro plants in the city currently meets about 40% of its needs. edc wants 750MW of reserve power generation (that’s diesel) installed on the site. if we assume that’s double their average usage, they will still more than double the energy needs of the city. and that’s in the middle of an infrastructure crisis that means we’re stuck buying german coal.
ecosia has always felt kinda skeevy to me, because tree planting isn’t actually carbon positive. it becomes positive after 40 or so years, granted that the trees are not cut down. which is usually what happens. also, just like ddg, ecosia is dependent on bing, the search provider with the worst carbon footprint, to function.
and i probably don’t need to tell you what cobalt mining does to the environment or the people who handle it.
so it does help to look deeper at the things in your daily life :)
is germany increasing or decreasing the amount of coal it burns every year?
ecosia has always felt kinda skeevy to me, because tree planting isn’t actually carbon positive. it becomes positive after 40 or so years, granted that the trees are not cut down. which is usually what happens.
the tree counter for example aims to match reality not hope:
For instance, if we plant 1000 trees and know from experience that the mortality rate in this area is 25%, we’ll only add 750 trees to our tree counter. We continually measure the survival rate of the trees we plant, through inventories and satellite technology, and adjust our tree counter accordingly.
Pretty much every tree planting project now involves cooperating with the local community around the trees, in some cases money goes to them to buy goods to prevent them from needing to cut down the trees
Not only that but tbh it’s just a good thing :)
also, just like ddg, ecosia is dependent on bing, the search provider with the worst carbon footprint, to function.
you are out of the game too long, they switched to google a while ago:
For the first time in its 16-year history, Ecosia users in France will now receive a proportion of their search results directly from EUSP’s independent European index. The rollout aims to serve 30% of French search queries by the end of the year.
that’s nice, if a bit loose. i hope it’s a working solution.
you are out of the game too long, they switched to google a while ago
that link is broken for me, but from their privacy policy it seems they use both. not that google is any better, unfortunately.
For the first time in its 16-year history, Ecosia users in France will now receive a proportion of their search results directly from EUSP’s independent European index.
that’s very good to hear. hopefully it rolls out to more than just france.
You’re right I have no idea, I use it for scripts, it works well, you guys are all linux nerds talking about philosophy that I don’t care for
I need code to make a script, it works, end of story, I don’t care about your philosophy on less code more code better code worse code, and I’m pretty sure most businesses don’t care either
I’m a C++ programmer most of the time, but I also write scripts. Claude and even Gemini write better bash scripts than I do - better error handling, better commenting, better input sanitizing, better use of parameters - because, all that bash syntax is an annoying pile of illogical junk that I have to look up every time I go to use it, and what are AI agents really fast at doing? Looking stuff up.
🤣 so true!
I picked up python fairly quickly but bash my gosh
sure let’s just burn down half a hectare of the amazon for a seven line script.
engineering philosophy is where the rubber hits the road. building software with the right philosophy can mean the difference between needing a datacenter or a raspberry pi for the same job. it directly translates to money saved in recurring costs.
The seven line script isn’t burning down the rainforest. Programmers are a 1% slice of AI token usage. A seven line script takes less datacenter power to generate than your monitor does to show you this message thread while you read it. What’s burning down the rainforest is billions of “ordinary” people using AI to make Rule 34 animations, graphic layout flyers for their next coffee date, research papers on obscure topics that will never be read by anyone, schemes to trade bitcoin, etc. etc. etc.
i’ve not actually looked at the demographics. is that available somewhere?
I glanced across one once, I doubt any of the demographics are entirely reliable, but even with the uncertainty it appears that programmers are but a small minority even among Claude users.
what’s everyone else doing then? isn’t it specifically for code?
I know a family that uses it to write sappy greeting card type mini-novels to each other.
Others use it to make graphic promotional flyers (give me a flyer describing this event, time place, activities and illustrate it with pictures of geckos and calla lillies…)
Some (bad) colleagues at work use it to summarize their e-mail inbox, and draft replies when warranted.
I know a woman who has been teaching “Creative Writing” at an online university for 10 years. Her past two crops of students are 99% using it to write their papers.
I’m sure there are day-traders out there using it all kinds of ways to try to gain advantage in the markets.
Customer support is a big one (reading the manuals to the customers) and, sadly, customer engagement - constant contact type messages.
A friend of ours recently took a 3 week vacation in Ireland, gave AI some “hard constraints” that they had to meet and let it plan out their routing, lodging, car rental, train fares, etc.
ew :(
Yeah.
that would probably be a couple hundred tokens so the same energy use as a google search
a google ai search, sure. a normal web search uses several orders of magnitude less energy.
to be fair I use https://www.ecosia.org/ which is climate positive so anything else I do on the web is carbon negative, however I also have solar and a battery and export power at night so I am technically climate positive (I reduce more emissions than I make)
also I mainly use lechat tbh, it’s french and aims to be climate friendly:
https://dcpulse.com/news/mistral-ai-ecodc-ai-facility-sweden
If the grid is more green, the data centres are more green, and in the most tech heavy place on earth:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/grid-batteries-reach-stunning-new-peak-of-44-pct-of-evening-demand-in-worlds-fourth-biggest-economy/
They’re rapidly getting pretty green
It’s not my fault Americans are innovative enough to come up with a magic computer code box but not smart enough to install a bunch of solar panels and batteries :\
by some measures. Look at the food you eat, cost of transport, energy costs to produce, maintain and eventually recycle your energy and dwelling infrastructure. Do you eat at restaurants? Not only what you consume there, but the energy costs for the restaurant to operate, maintain their structure, maintain the roads for you and the employees to get to and from, costs of employee transit…
You are making an effort, which is admirable and sadly rare. You are highly unlikely to be cradle to grave climate positive. We all emit CO2 which is balanced by natural processes from phytoplankton to rainforests to the African Violet on your windowsill. Unless you maintain and protect a large swath of nature (we used to own 20 acres of undeveloped forest… that didn’t completely balance our footprint, but it probably did more than ecosia…) you are party to more CO2 emission than carbon recapture.
what about this
https://www.bankaust.com.au/about-us/conservation-reserve
😁
that would be split though? a bit like a bus or train, average costs to produce the meals would be lower as they’re made in bulk
that is true, you can see my ecologi link in my profile with my eventual goal, although that’s just for the sake of it
i have recently funded a second solar battery which should reduce another few thousand co2’s out of the air every year pushing me even further co2 positive
there is also corena which i want to donate too after this damn russin invasion is up, money goes to them, they lend it out at low interest rates, the money comes back and they can lend it out again, pretty damn good
https://corenafund.org.au/
there is still work to be done though, never give up!
I find money to be a really good proxy for carbon emissions. The more you pay for something, the more people get money that they eventually spend on energy. So, if you go to a restaurant and pay $100 for the meal, don’t focus on where the potatoes were grown or whatever, focus on the $100 - where does it go? Most of it ends up paying for the expenditure of energy eventually.
Yes, but like the restaurant where you are just a pro-rated slice of “the bad things”, schemes like this make you a pro-rated slice of “the good things.” It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not as big of a good thing as it sounds by the time 10,000 people share in its “goodness.”
This: https://mangocats.com/ao/BeachVendorBlockchain.html is a half-baked idea I have been kicking around for use of blockchain tech as a backbone for small scale / local credit. Don’t go expecting the simulation servers to be running or anything like that, I just spent a weekend updating the old ideas with spare AI token credits recently and while it made tremendous progress, as the papers themselves say: it really needs hands-on time and attention to develop it properly.
so fun fact, i live within walking distance of that dc project (close enough that i was invited to attend a presentation by edc on what it would do to the immediate area) and i’ve done the math on the grid load. the hydro plants in the city currently meets about 40% of its needs. edc wants 750MW of reserve power generation (that’s diesel) installed on the site. if we assume that’s double their average usage, they will still more than double the energy needs of the city. and that’s in the middle of an infrastructure crisis that means we’re stuck buying german coal.
ecosia has always felt kinda skeevy to me, because tree planting isn’t actually carbon positive. it becomes positive after 40 or so years, granted that the trees are not cut down. which is usually what happens. also, just like ddg, ecosia is dependent on bing, the search provider with the worst carbon footprint, to function.
and i probably don’t need to tell you what cobalt mining does to the environment or the people who handle it.
so it does help to look deeper at the things in your daily life :)
is germany increasing or decreasing the amount of coal it burns every year?
they have a blog post on this
https://blog.ecosia.org/how-do-ecosia-trees-survive-cut-down/
the tree counter for example aims to match reality not hope:
Pretty much every tree planting project now involves cooperating with the local community around the trees, in some cases money goes to them to buy goods to prevent them from needing to cut down the trees
Not only that but tbh it’s just a good thing :)
you are out of the game too long, they switched to google a while ago:
https://archive.md/cGE0Z
but! even better!
https://tech.eu/2025/08/06/ecosia-rolls-out-independent-search-results-in-europe-taking-another-giant-step-away-from-big-tech/
How exciting!
Try to stay positive eh ;)
right now, they’re ramping up massively.
that’s nice, if a bit loose. i hope it’s a working solution.
that link is broken for me, but from their privacy policy it seems they use both. not that google is any better, unfortunately.
that’s very good to hear. hopefully it rolls out to more than just france.
thanks for the reminder. genuinely.
Stop talking as if you give any semblance of a shit about the art and craft of programming. You clearly don’t.
upvoted because you’re right, i don’t care?
edit: javascript sucks btw i hate it, it can suck MY art and craft