If you offload data processing to the end user, then your data center uses less energy on paper. The washing part is that work is still being done and spending energy, just outside of the data center.
Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid.
That work needs to be done anyways and Apple is doing it in the cleanest way possible.
What’s an alternative in your mind, just don’t do the processing? That sounds like making progress towards being green. If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
I didn't make any claims, I just explained what the parent was saying. There could be multiple ways to make it more green: one being not doing the processing, or another perhaps just optimizing the work being done. But actually, no, you don't need a viable way to be green in order to call greenwashing "greenwashing." It can just be greenwashing, with no alternative that is actually green.
> Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid.
This doesn't make any sense.
> If you’re making claims of green washing you need to be able to back it up with what alternative would actually be “green”.
Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake.
Though in this case using renewable energy can help.
> Sometimes there isn't an alternative. In which case you don't get to look green, sorry. The person critiquing greenwashing doesn't need to give an alternative, why would that be their job? They're just evaluating whether it's real or fake.
Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be, is trite and borderline intellectually dishonest. They don’t want to have a conversation about how it could be improved, they just want to interject “haha that’s stupid, corporations are fooling all of you sheeple” from their place of moral superiority. This shit is so played out.
> Baselessly calling every greening and sustainability effort “greenwashing”, especially when there’s practically no thought put into what the alternative might be
Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort.
Fake green should always be called greenwashing.
You don't need to suggest an improvement to call out something that is completely fake. The faker doesn't get to demand a "conversation".
You've seen a bunch of people be incorrectly dismissive and decided that dismissiveness is automatically wrong. It's not.
For an extreme example, imagine a company installs a "pollution-preventing boulder" at their HQ. It's very valid to call that greenwashing and walk away. Don't let them get PR for nothing. If they were actually trying, and made a mistake, suggest a fix. But you can't fix fake.
> Baseless? The foundation of this accusation is rock solid. Offloading the exact same computation to another person so your energy numbers look better is not a greening or sustainability effort.
Yes, I consider it baseless for the following reasons:
- First, consider the hardware running in data centers, and the iDevices running at the edge – the iPhones, iPads and presumably Macs. There's a massive difference in power consumption between a data center full of GPUs, and whatever the equivalent might be in iDevices. Few chips come close to Apple's M-series in power usage.
- Second, Apple's commitment to making those devices carbon neutral by 2030; I'm unaware of any commitment to make cloud compute hardware carbon neutral, but I'll admit that I don't really keep up with that kind of hardware so I could be totally wrong there.
- Third, consider that an AI compute service (I'm not sure what you call it) like OpenAI is always running and crunching numbers in its data center, while the iDevices are each individually running only when needed by the user.
- Fourth, the people who own the iDevices may charge them using more sustainable methods than would power a data center. For example, Iowa – where I live – generates 62% of its energy from wind power and nearly two-thirds of its total energy from renewable resources [1], whereas California only gets 54% of its energy from renewable resources. Of course this cuts both ways, there are plenty of states or even countries that get most of their power from coal, like Ohio.
That said, neither of us have any real numbers on these things so the best either of us can do is be optimistic or pessimistic. But I'd rather do that and have a discussion about it, instead of dismiss it out of hand like everyone else does by saying "haha dumb, get greenwashed".
You're right that improvements don't need to be suggested to have a conversation about greening/greenwashing. My irritation lies more in the fact that it's almost a trope at this point that you can click into the comments on any HN story that mentions greening/sustainability, and there will be comments calling it fake greenwashing. I don't disagree that it's easy for a company to greenwash if they want to, but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking. Everyone wants to be so jaded about corporations that they'll never trust a word about it.
[1] Although this two-thirds total includes the bio-fuel ethanol, so I feel like it shouldn't be included.
1. Maybe, but wouldn't Apple want to use M-series chips to do this either way?
2. That's an interesting angle.
3. It's the same total amount, and both will go idle when there's less demand.
4. I think the average data center gets cleaner energy than the average house but I can't find a proper comparison so maybe that's baseless.
Also as far as I'm aware, inference takes significantly fewer resources when you can batch it.
> but it's tiring to see everything called greenwashing without applying any critical thinking
That does sound tiring, but in this particular case I think there was sufficient critical thinking, and it was originally brought up as just a possibility.
> Which honestly is still good for the environment to have the work distributed across the entire electricity grid.
Sometimes, but parallelization has a cost. The power consumption from 400,000,000 iPhones downloading a 2gb LLM is not negligible, probably more than what you'd consume running it as a REST API on a remote server. Not to mention slower.
Yeah it's a shame that mobile games are shit when console and PC gaming gets taken so serious by comparison. If you want to blame that on developers and not Apple's stupid-ass policies stopping you from emulating real games, be my guest. That's a take I'd love to hear.
Keep downloadin' those ads. This is what Apple wants from you, a helpless and docile revenue stream. Think Different or stay mad.
