Which software, based on how it is used and what impact it has on the world is most wasteful?
Wasteful meaning perhaps energy consumption, or data requirements, or any other form of "waste".
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Latest comments (107)
Bitcoin miners. They use enormous amounts of processing power to generate, which requires a lot of energy. Depending on the price of coins at any given moment, they can sometimes cost almost as much as they're generating.
Maybe not the most wasteful, but the software of my soundbar does much more than it needs to, especially the 12x amount of outbound network traffic compared to the second most active device on my network (my phone).
Yamaha YAS-109 Soundbar has Excessive Network Traffic
Henrik Sommerfeld ・ Jan 21 ・ 2 min read
Uber/Lyft and other Transportation Network Companies (TNCs). Not for the app or infrastructure itself, but the product. They have "disrupted" an industry of taxis and transportation networks by undercutting existing systems and outsourcing the cost of their business to "independent contractors" who are not professionals in that industry.
TNCs have put a lot of money into getting users to buy subsidized rides instead of taking public transit. This has resulted in drops in transit rides, and therefore less funding is allocated for transit. The environmental and societal costs for this massive increase in traffic is much larger than expanding public transit would be. TNCs promise the idea of "ridesharing", where existing drivers can give riders a seat, decreasing traffic, but studies have shown this simply is false, as drivers deadhead (drive without passengers) more than they provide rides, and whole sub-industries have popped up trying to sell or rent cars to people who don't have one but want to start driving for a TNC.
Beyond the environmental impact of all these cars, and the increased traffic from more cars (including time spent in traffic for other drivers), the societal impact has been huge. Increased traffic means an increase in traffic injuries and deaths, as well as the less documented increases in asthma and other conditions caused or worsened by automobile pollution. Decreased transit availability (and buses stuck in traffic) mean that more people take cars when they could have seen health benefits from walking or biking because they feel unsafe on or near roads. More parents drive their children to school because… you guessed it, there's too many cars.
Imagine if we had contributed the shear amount of money VCs have put into just Uber (which still loses BILLIONS of dollars a year) into good quality urban transit, regional rail, and high speed rail across just the US. Imagine serious sidewalks and bike lanes in all cities that made walking, biking, skateboarding, scootering, and even using a wheelchair safer. Imagine if we redesigned cities and towns so that most things can be walked to from a train station instead of multi-lane roads through the heart of downtown.
AWS DOCs :D :D
By far, Bitcoin and all those similar cryptocurrencies.
It's unfortunate that popular or productive languages/frameworks/whatever succeed beyond their designer's intents and muffin-top with additional abstractions, libraries, and feature creep into elements of undesirability. "Victims of their own success" is certainly applicable.
CI Toolchains? :D
NodeJS modules.
When I get a new VPS, I need to install a Node (and PyPI) mirror on it so my CI/CD pipelines don't download half the internet on every push.
[Not software] GIF as a format is overused. We don't need 1-minute long videos in GIF format; we have other file formats more suitable for this sort of content.
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