Comment by ViewTrick1002

It’s valuable, it’s it’s the least valuable part of the value chain. A rounding error that looks good due to the immense scale of the numbers involved. Buys you some time.

Cheap energy and delivery is many times more valuable than spending that same amount of money on efficiency. One has your engineers and builders working on solving new problems - the other is just taking existing solved problems and making them more efficient.

I’d much rather be finding new and exciting ways of burning ridiculously clean and cheap megawatts of electricity than spending the same human capital on how to solve the same solved problem marginally more efficiently.

For the most part the low hanging fruit has been long picked and we have long past hit the point of diminishing returns.

Ideally you do both of course.

You can have your devs spend a year making your code run 50% more efficiently. Or you can use those same devs to make new features and simply buy 50% more cloud compute capacity. Computers are cheap and human capital is limited.

It’s interesting HN generally goes one direction here when it’s “their” economic interests on the line and the other way around when electric generation and grid capacity is the topic.

>> you can only do so much

> There’s no value

That's not a reasonable interpretation. But even so, your example's a good one:

   100w bulb lasts hundreds of hours
   5w led puts out comparable light with 20x less energy AND lasts tens of thousands of hours

The led is a little more intensive to make, but let's just assume it's less intensive than all the bulbs you'd need to make to burn for the same time (i'm not sure if it's true though).

Seems a slam dunk in the LED's favour right?

But it's still the same problem, you fall out of intensive growth and back to extensive growth as soon as you want more lighting. So are we saying there's a bar on how many lights we should ever want on the planet?