I Have an Idea to Reduce Digital Carbon Footprint by 4x
summary
Tristan Nitot argues that instead of relying on continued hardware improvements (Moore’s Law), software should be radically optimized to cut the digital sector’s environmental footprint. He presents the 'erOOM' principle—systematic mass optimization (e.g., extreme speedups in real code, even a cited Python script sped up by 408 million×)—and proposes improving software performance (roughly 2× every two years) to reduce hardware churn and the three-quarters of emissions coming from device manufacturing.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:50Moore's law impact
- 7:28Wirth's law software bloat
- 14:26Why Moore's law ends
- 16:14Digital carbon footprint
- 26:01Software optimization
- 30:31Hou's law optimization
- 34:23Moore's law consequences
- 43:24Conclusion
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