Why do developers, admins and managers love the cloud? Because it scales, and you don’t need to pay for unused resources (at least in theory). So, why don’t why behave accordingly in the office and at home?

Turn it off when you don’t use it!

The post’s cover image is an ironic oversimplification of a scalable sustainable "green IT" concept, betraying its age by the outdated docker-compose syntax with a hyphen, and its naivity using down instead of stop. Docker containers are lightweight and idle by design, but the same might not apply to services running in those containers and thus on the host machine, thus your computer. Turning off lights at night and reduce heating to a minimum room tempature at night and on weekends might seem obvious. Standby power adapters with a single LED might cause light pollution but usually don’t waste significant energy anymore.

Background processes and telltale traffic

But what about other apps running unnoticed in the background like music streaming or a chat client? WebApp’s web app in the browser, unlike the native app on mobile, constantly polls for new information causing unnecessary network traffic consuming energy, bandwith and costly bills while providing metadata to meta and their partners. Spotify’s music player defaults to playing videos even when running invisibly in a background tab of your browser.

Smart Configuration

A smart, but simple and dev-like strategy to reduce distraction and network traffic is mapping unwanted traffic sources to localhost and unneeded log files to /dev/null. On a laptop or desktop computer it’s a easy as editing the /etc/hosts file with sudo or admin permissions.

127.0.0.2   adform.net criteo.com cas.criteo.com

The above line would stop receiving responses from certain advertising services without installing an ad-blocker extension in your browser. Note that this might violate the terms and services of websites that rely on sponsored ads to pay for their servers! Also note that /etc/hosts won’t support wildcards, so you’d need to specificy every subdomain explicitly.

A sisyphean task only tinkering with the symptoms, this example illustrates the basic idea behind more sophisticated tools and settings: how to empower you as a user to say no to unwanted data.

Prevent unhealthy social media behavior!

Not doing something is easier said than done, whene we are addicted. A common form of social media addiction is known as doomscrolling. We can try to replace our behavior by switching to another, more useful apps (like learning a new language) or activity (like knitting, gardening, or physical exercise), and there are app that can help us by restricting screen time, online access, or switching the display to black and white at night.

Silent watching is common social media behavior, with allegedly about 85% of users watching influencers dance with muted sound, but music streaming clients often do the opposite, making videos run unwatched in a background app or browser tab.

Music streaming services keep getting bad press for various reasons, including unfair and insufficient compensation of artists, biased algorithms favoring paid partners and gen-AI creations instead of using their detailed listening profiles for useful recommendations, and then there are financial and political activities of company managers. There is little that users can do about those issues, but if you are still using Spotify, you can at least lighten the app’s ecological footprint, your CPU load and your electricity bill. Here is how to do that:

Turn off lurking background video!

Spotify defaults to playing videos, wasting energy and exposing potentially disturbing images to children even in a supposedly safe setting where they’re only supposed to listen to music. That’s a concern for privacy and sustainability, but there is a setting to turn it off, currently called "Canvas", or more clearly labeled as "display short, looping visuals on tracks (Canvas)" in my web app version. Turning off Canvas disables default videos, but you can still watch them when you explicitly search or follow a link. Canvas is not switched off per account but per client, so you need to switch it off again for every new device explicitly.

How to disable Canvas in your Spotify settings

You can save your playlists offline to prevent unnecessary network traffic, use an old-fashioned MP3 player or even sing aloud while working unless you’re too shy or your coworker prefer silence in the office. Whatever you do, do it more consciously, because you are not a robot.

Prevent unsolicited AI overviews!

Artificial agents and chatbots often feel like a confused person talking to themselves, elaborating detailed answers that nobody asked for. That even happens in interactive AI sessions because most answers cause "too long, didn’t read" (TLDR) reactions. Search engines add unsolicited AI mode answers as if they didn’t trust their own search results anymore. What a waste of tokens, computational cost and energy! At least Ecosia, a slightly more ecological and private search engine using Bing’s service in the background, lets you "turn off overviews" and will remember your preference even for anonymous guest users within the same browser.

When searching Bing for a simiar setting, it shows an AI overview, without an obvious opt-out button, stating that "thankfully, you can hide Google AI Overviews completely by setting Google Chrome or any mobile browser to automatically use the web tab whenever you Google something via the search bar."

Opting out of unhelpful implementations

So far, so good, but what if I don’t want AI on my mobile at all? Opting out, disabling and hiding seem to be the only options left for not using artificial intelligence these days? Vendors seems quite desperate to make people use AI. If everybody was eager, they could make it invitation-only and charge realistic prices, so what’s going on?

Former Microsoft, Skype, and Telefonica expert Shomila Malik compared the current AI hype to the late days of feature phones and a vision of the "mobile internet" focusing on features that nobody asked for.

The technology will find its true form. It just might not look anything like what we’re imagining today.

Let’s just hope that such a transformation won’t mostly help the military applications of artificial intelligence arms race, which is another good reason to against overusing AI and providing extensive feedback to its service providers. If anything, we should teach AI to prevent war and make a better world come true, as long as we still can.

Don’t use it when you don’t need it!

AI and search engines are examples of convenient options that we tend to take for granted and use them carelessly as long as they’re cheap or free. AI should be our last resort for complex tasks that other tools can’t solve and there is not enough time, money or priority to commision it to a human expert or company (who will now probably also use AI, anyway).

Old-school, unconvential and almost revolutionary advice: learn to decline and stay grateful and humble!

Remember the UNIX philosophy: "Make each program do one thing well," and remember which tools is best suited for a specific job. You might even be so old-school to read books or save bookmarks of useful websites and web apps that you use regularly, so you don’t need to type "svg converter" or "mdn grid syntax" into a search engine which prompts an AI to tell you what an SVG converter does and when and why SVG as a file format orginated.

Just don’t do it!

Use a dictionary when you’re looking for single words or short idioms that you know but fail to remember, or take a walk and have a coffee allowing your brain to remember them eventually! Use documentation and references when you need authoritative syntax and usage information! Use local apps and applications when you don’t need an online service! Use the command line when you don’t need a graphical user interface!

Don’t read posts like this when you’re supposed to work and not procrastinate in the blogosphere! Don’t ask AI to read this post on your behalf! Don’t open social media unless you have a good reason!

And switch off your stuff instead of believing or hoping that it might not make any network requests or computations while it seems to be idle! Save your work, commit and push before you go, and don’t type docker compose down when you only want to stop it!

docker compose stop 🛑 vs. down ⚠️

docker compose stop will shut down your container without losing data and switching off your screen, lights, and heating shouldn’t risk losing your days’ work because of overambitious activism either. Finally, don’t believe everything that you read or that someone tells you. Just don’t do it!

What do you do? What did I miss? Tell me in the comments!