Tag: review

Lazy Coding

Steam, what are you doing on my machine? I have one chat window open, nothing else, there are NO messages going back and forth and yet my system stats show something like this (10 second integration):

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                                                            
1578766 ronny     20   0 4857032 330216 165264 S  38.5   1.6   4:23.91 steamwebhelper                                                                                                                                     
1578554 ronny     20   0  592368 132636  82224 S  18.3   0.7   2:16.90 steamwebhelper                                                                                                                                     
1578596 ronny     20   0 9196408 420472 108172 S  13.2   2.1   1:48.26 steamwebhelper

The processes with the highest CPU load are steam, using 75% of one of my cores. For nothing. What is going on in the background?

I guess here we see the externalisation of developer costs. Instead of it decreasing Steam’s revenue for employing someone who implements the better solutions, every user is paying the costs in their electricity bill. For one user it’s only a few Watts, but 60 Million people use Steam on a daily basis. Even if everyone has Steam open for just an hour, we are talking about hundreds of Megawatthours per day, or tens of GWh a year. This is the equivalent to what over 10,000 households use a year.

Writing this down is a nice reminder for myself to try not to implement the lazy solution, but invest the extra brain work to create something I can be more proud.

While I wrote this text, the steamwebhelper processes accumulated 23 minutes CPU time (in 33 minutes runtime)

Don’t look up (my personal thoughts)

(by Ronny Errmann)

I finally watched the movie “Don’t look up”. First thought I had at the beginning was how nice that the research environment was shown quite realistic. Not in everything (calculations on a white board instead of using computer programs and knowing it will hit earth with just few hours of position data), but hey, it’s a movie. And second thought was, why is everyone reacting so crazy to the threat.

I really could connect with the feelings of the main characters to get the public and politics react to the threat. In that sense it was quite a stressful movie for me, getting too much involved.

In terms of the climate crisis I feel the same situation as shown in the movie is happening in our real lifes and I wonder if scientists from that field feel like that for years or decades. The impact of humans on the climate is know for over 70 years, and we see the rising temperatures clearly for 40 years. And yet, only slow action is being taken and the things decided are not enough for a 1.5 C limit. If we, the world, keep creating the same amount of CO2, that we created in each of the previous years, then in 8 years will have used up all the budget to keep within the global average of 1.5 C temperature increase. If we use produce more, than we will raise the temperature more than 1.5 C, which will create much more severe effects. And I can’t see any chance that the global emissions will decrease, on the contrary, every year we produce more CO2 than the year before.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
https://theconversation.com/the-1-5-global-warming-limit-is-not-impossible-but-without-political-action-it-soon-will-be-159297
https://www.statista.com/chart/26102/emission-reduction-goal-and-projected-achievements-by-country/
https://theconversation.com/new-research-suggests-1-5c-climate-target-will-be-out-of-reach-without-greener-covid-19-recovery-plans-151527
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45678338
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03036-x