Highlights
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2024-03-03 22:44 Open source software is big. A recent post made by Sasha Lucioni, one of my absolute favorite thought leaders in AI, caught my eye. Sorry. A recent HBS study found that companies would have to spend 3.5 times more on their software development if open source were not around. And we’re talking about an $8.8 billion estimated market.
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2024-02-29 07:53 If everyone is inventing their hardware to kind of be unique and proprietary, it just means we have a whole lot of potentially wasted components that won’t work with other systems, and we’re producing lots of different types of components that only work with one particular platform.
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2024-02-29 07:54 So I’m a really big proponent of the open compute project also because they’re looking at things like can we increase the ambient temperature of data centers, for example, to reduce their cooling requirements and things like that. So they’re doing some really clever stuff in that area. But I think also open hardware is interesting when you look at the sort of hardware hacker sort of culture that’s created as well, right? What can you run on an embedded device like a raspberry PI?
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2024-02-29 07:58 Like you run AWS’s cloud carbon tooling versus Azure’s versus Google’s, they all have different methodologies and so they’re not comparable.
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2024-03-03 22:46 Cameron was on the show last year. I’m a big advocate of CCF, among other open source tool, but at the end of the day, they have to recalculate things that should be provided by hyperscalers. And I think here we’ve got two very serious issues. The first one is the methodology. Tools like open source tools like boa Vista, cloud scanner or CCF.
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2024-03-03 22:46 So I think AWS especially, they don’t include scope three. I think that’s one of the benefits of the cloud cam footprint tool, is that it provides a way to at least try and estimate that proportion allocated to scope three and sort of compare on the same level with those from like Google as you are. I think Google does provide data on scope three emissions. So I think it’s sort of just picking the right methodology for your estate. So, for example, if you just had Google Cloud, maybe you just go with their tool, since it’s probably more up to date and includes scope three, whereas if you had multicloud or AWS, you might want to look at a tool like cloud carbon footprint.
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2024-03-03 22:47 I think pretty sure that Google are still the only ones that give you near real time carbon intensity information of the different regions that they operate in. Why are Google doing that? In my view, they’re doing that because they are probably still number three in terms of enterprise cloud adoption. Like it’s AWS and Azure, depending on which stats you look at, are the leading two. Right? Google is still trying to compete. So in order to compete, I think they are offering more transparency, they’re offering more options around sustainability than the other two are, arguably. And so I think this can be a competitive edge. I do wonder whether if Google went a bit further in the near future, the EU companies might all of a sudden go, do you know what, we’re just going to adopt Google cloud because they just give us the data we need for regulatory compliance, for example.
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2024-02-29 08:08 I honestly think if there are organizations that are being far more transparent about the supply chain and the kind of full lifecycle analysis of their products, and they do that in a way that you don’t have to fight free pdfs and extract information from data sheets, but actually they perhaps provide an API or an open standard or something where you can just get that information. I think that fairly soon will be a competitive advantage. And so I think the first organizations that do that will win.
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2024-03-03 22:47 I also look at companies like Fairfone that are more modular and repairable with the right to repair act that the EU has also just put out. I honestly think that there is scope for innovation in repairability. And it will be really interesting to see, for example, how Apple responds to that regulation.
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2024-03-03 22:48 I think it’s pretty early. Right. But the comparison I would make to this is a bit like when you buy your laptop, what power profile does it ship with? Right? Does it ship with the high performance profile enabled by default or the power saving profile enabled by default?
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2024-02-29 20:37 It’s an open source approach as well, but it’s more like a best practices checklist. Like, okay, is my API management clean?
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2024-03-03 22:48 And so we’re equally looking at other software development lifecycle roles like testing to say should there be a test suite for efficiency, for energy consumption of code? So part of your pipeline, your builds break if energy consumption is over a certain level or efficiency is not hitting the bar.
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2024-03-03 22:49 I’m very enthusiastic about what you described, and actually I know that there are a few projects in CI CD pipeline trying to automate it. So full disclosure, I’ve launched a project with my good friend Bernoir Petit at Boa Vista association, but that’s not public yet. But we’ve released the version zero of our repository of green it tools because we want to increase the transparency in the landscape.
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2024-03-03 22:49 It’s the way that Green Software foundation have sort of promoted their principles and their green coding patterns, sort of promote the tool in the same way. But when you launch an open source project, I mean, you have an idea you want to launch. Obviously you will create a GitHub repository and the license blah blah blah. But hey, you’re still two or three of you. I don’t know how many people actually, how many people will join from Scotlogic for that kind of project will it be only the two of you?
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2024-03-03 22:50 Like some of the tech meetups I’ve been going to recently. There’s almost two camps, there’s people that are almost falling for the techno optimist manifesto from Mark Andreessen Horowitz and just think, growth and energy consumption and increasing energy consumption isn’t the problem. And there are others who are more aware of the issues. We don’t have endless power sources that are renewable. Sadly I’m living a Jekyll and Hyde personality day by day at the moment. Right, Gail?
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2024-02-29 20:45 I think just like seeing the work that our team’s been doing as well, the tech carbon standard, I think it’s already positive it’s going in the right direction.
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2024-03-03 22:55 And I hadn’t heard about this, but a huge investment, like, we’re talking billions of pounds or euros investment to create this undersea link between Denmark and the UK. And it makes a lot of sense because both Denmark and the UK have a lot of wind power. And because of the time difference between Denmark and the UK, our peak electricity demands are at different time. So there’s a lot of sense in this interconnect because when it’s windy in Denmark and there’s lots of demand in the UK, they can send their wind power to the UK and vice versa. And so I didn’t know this thing was even being built.