#59 Debriefing Qcon Sustainability track with Erica Pisani
How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences?
Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ?
And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco-compute to generic Tech conferences?
To talk about it Gaël Duez sat down in this latest Green IO episode with Erica Pisani who was the MC of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London this year. Together they discussed:
- The inspiring speakers in the track
- Why Qcon didn’t become AIcon
- How to get C-level buy-in by highlighting the new environmental risk
- The limit to efficiency: fine balancing between hardware stress and usage optimization
- Why performance and sustainability are tight in technology
- Why assessing Edge computing’s positive and negative impact is tricky
And much more!
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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#58b Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 2
Why is the model of a Nobel prize winner not necessarily good science? What is “good” modelling? Is access to information enough to change a system behavior?
This episode is the second part of a long interview with Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design who is one of the co-authors of a research paper investigating the claims made by the second hand digital platform Vinted about the avoided carbon emissions thanks to its operations. As presented in the first part, their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced!
In this second part, Gaël Duez and Laetitia Bornes moved away from the Vinted use case and discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general. You can enjoy this discussion without having listened to the first episode however we would suggest you do so to enjoy all the references, especially to the Vinted study. Among the topics covered in this second part are:
- An impressive transparency exercise about the limit of the model used for the Vinted use case,
- Why models are “wrong” and how to still use them purposefully,
- Why a Nobel prize modeling in his lab without publishing isn’t doing science (yet),
- Access to information and its connection to the four main categories of leverage points,
- The concept of protopia,
And much more!
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here:
https://greenio.tech/blog
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#58a Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 1
Can a digital company be “carbon negative”? What should we think of these claims of “tons of carbon avoided” coming from 2nd hand platforms such as Vinted or Back Market?
Dr Laetitia Bornes conducted research on Vinted claims, investigating its data sources and the methodology used with her colleague David Ekchazer. Their findings were surprising, enlightening for the IT sector and nuanced! Among the ones she share with Gaël Duez in this first part of the episode were:
- The pitfalls of assessing "Tech for Good" even using Life-Cycle Analysis,
- The complexity of rebound effects and other indirect effects,
- How to improve things as a Designer, … and as a CEO!
- The need for a systemic perspective and some tools to build it,
and much more!
And because this conversation was so rich that it couldn’t be reduced to a one hour discussion, this episode comes in 2 parts, the first one focusing on the Vinted use case and the second one where we discussed modelling, the scientific method and Systems Thinking in general.
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here:
https://greenio.tech/blog
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#57 Greening Intelligence: Bridging Infrastructure and Governance for a Sustainable AI Future with Pr. PS Lee and Pr. Heng Wang
“It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering”. Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and governance perspective of the ongoing AI Boom. Among the topics covered in this episode recorded live from the Green IO Singapore conference with Gael Duez were our imperfect, incomplete and unpredictable knowledge on AI, the fit for purpose approach with the right mix of cooling solution, dealing with legacy datacenter infrastructure, the moratorium on new data center and the other tools used by the Singapore government to cap energy consumption, and much more!
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#56 Building Green Software, the one year anniversary with Sarah Hsu
A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Designing for sustainability” (8 years ago!), O’Reilly didn’t publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So, it’s a fair statement that this book was long awaited.
But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why Sarah Hsu, one of its 3 co-authors as well as the chair of the Green Software Foundation’s Principles of Green Software committee, joined the show to talk about the trends she witnesses first hand in the green software engineering field and how she would envision a v2. More specifically she talked about:
🌟 GreenOps being the new kid in the block
👨🏫 What FinOps can teach to GreenOps
📈 How SRE can help treating environmental metrics like any other business metrics
🕵️♀️ The hard truth about the four nine
📏 Progress made in measurement
🔬 What the Rumsfeld’s Metrics can tell us about the difference between monitoring and observability
🚧 Why it should always be space and time for deviation
And much more!
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
All the references, the link to get free tickets, the wrap-up article and the full transcript is on Green IO website here:
https://greenio.tech/blog
Green IO with Gaël Duez explores how to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world. Twice a month, on a Tuesdays guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling all responsible technologists, within the Tech sector and beyond, to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time.
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