Technology

The devices they're talking about are also still turned on. The power usage of the network requests is incredibly small. Switching from cellular to wifi will make the biggest difference, but who the hell isn't already on their home wifi network? Plus, at least me personally, I have my liked songs downloaded on Spotify to save data usage. I suspect others may as well.

This is like the folks worrying about the water usage of AI. Environmental concerns are a real problem and there are tons of things to focus on, but they pick such a weirdly specific, negligible, non-issue.

Use localised storage rather than cloud-based systems for all of your music and video files

This is good advice tho. I also chose to read it as a Spotify endorsement of the high seas ;)

You do realize that it's harder to move to renewables if the energy required keeps increasing? Higher bandwidth usage requires expansion of internet infrastructure to account for peak usage which increases the amount of energy used, not only for the manufactured hardware (which will likely turn to e-waste at some point) but also to keep the infrastructure running. I highly recommend reading research about the sustainability of the internet.

Ads. Ads are more important to them the anything else.

That's one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

It's less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.

It's to put the blame on the consumer. Fuck these cooperate overlords. I'm hungry, when do we eat?

55g of CO₂e is 50 times more than audio streaming and the equivalent of microwaving four bags of popcorn

How much is that in football fields?

I'll keep streaming and just eat less popcorn. I've been needing to cut back. I blow a kiss to the sky. I got your back, Mother Earth. I always check the resin identification codes before I recycle plastics, too.

Youtube and tiktok are video platforms (instagram turned into one some years after creation). Telling them to stop having videos is equivalent to saying they should cease to exist. Spotify is a music streaming platform. Telling them to stop having videos has a minimal impact on their business model, which is evident by the fact that Spotify was widely successful before they started including videos.

It's so so frustrating. AI is cool, I get it, LLMs are impressive, but we're in such a bubble right now. Every company is like "damn, that other company is doing a cool thing with AI, we need to make sure our shareholders think we're doing cool things with AI too!" So they make flashy AI things and it feeds back into the cycle because obviously other companies and their shareholders see it, because these companies are publicly traded.

...we can do both...

Music discovery is the greatest feature besides having most music available without having to rip it first. Shared playlists are fantastic as well. The platforms automatically recommend music for you, can play music similar to one song you like, and so on.

How do you share a curated playlist of songs with someone else without something like Spotify?

Using VLC is easy. Having good musical taste and finding the time to renew your library so it doesn't grow stale is hard.

I know, I used to download all my stuff and now I just get YouTube music started on a piece I like and let it autoplay forever while I work, do a tabletop campaign, play videogames... I find that this way, I find the music it plays to be in the right mood 98% of the time.

It disgusts me to say it but it just works and saves me a lot of time.