cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1339480

Results for lemmy.ml: https://www.ecoindex.fr/resultat/?id=248e7bbb-41bf-4249-a4f8-de5b716e55e2

At my engineering school, we had a mandatory lecture of the environmental impact of IT. Initially, I thought it was some bullshit lecture that the education ministry imposed on us, and all I had to do was sign the attendance sheet at the end and be done with it.

But it did stick with me, we know that crypto mining consumes massive amounts of power to the point where Ethereum had to switch to the more efficient Proof-of-Stake in late 2022. Now, the recent hype of AI is starting to exacerbate energy consumption since petabytes of data have to be stored in data centres, then the models have to be trained for months on end.

In fact, there are many sectors of IT industry that consumes gigantic amount of energy, and I think it’s something to be considered when we’re using the Internet.

Here’s an article by Raphael Lemaire (in French, but you can translate it): https://raphael-lemaire.com/2019/11/02/mise-en-perspective-impacts-numerique/

I also found this really interesting website that tests the environmental impact of your website. Lemmy.ml got a F.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an English-language equivalent of this website, but I still found it interesting enough to share.