masterspace
The source control was so smooth and pleasant that it convinced me that git isn’t the be all end all, and the general developer focus was super nice, but some of that tooling was pretty janky, poorly documented, and you had no stack overflow to fall back on. And some of it (like EdenFS), really felt like it was the duct tape holding that overloaded monorepo together (complete with all the jankiness of a duct tape solution).
Facebook uses Mercurial, but when people praise their developer tooling it’s not just that. They’re using their CLI which is built on top of Mercurial but cleans up its errors and commands further, it’s all running on their own virtual filesystem (EdenFS), their dev testing in a customized version of chromium, and they sync code using their own in-house equivalent of GitHub, and all of it connects super nicely into their own customized version of VS Codium.
Me: “oh ha. ha. /S”
Me 5 min later: *tap* *tap* *tap* *giggle* *tap*
Microsoft posted a revenue of $211.9 billion for 2023. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of the world’s population uses Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office and loads of online applications run on Microsoft Azure, the economic impact of Microsoft’s products is probably counted in trillions of dollars.
Comparing this to countries with the same ballpark energy consumption, Azerbaijan’s GDP was about $78 billion, Slovakia’s GDP was around $127 billion, and Iceland’s GDP was approximately $30 billion in 2023.
The economic output of Google and Microsoft by far exceeds these countries’ GDPs, highlighting the vast financial scale of these tech giants relative to their substantial electricity consumption.
Oh yeah, it’s crazy to think that! I don’t know where I would have gotten that idea, other than the article that OP linked that we’re all discussing.
Yes, training new AI models uses a bunch of power, so does building out any new infrastructure. Atleast Microsoft and Google use a far high percentage of renewable power than most other industries.
As of last year ~70% of software developers were using copilot or a similar AI assistant. The legal field has seen a drop off in junior hires because of AI assistants. Snapchat’s AI filters and tools have long been a huge draw for that platform (and then copied by everyone else to avoid bleeding users), and Bing saw massive user growth after integrating OpenAI.
AI has problems and limitations but it’s absurd to think there’s no demand for it just because it’s pushed by annoying people. Everything with hype will get pushed by annoying people.
