This isn’t code in some project that will run only a few billion times in its lifetime; it is used frequently on millions, if not billions, of computers.
Because of that, it is economical to spend lots of time optimizing it, even if it only makes the code marginally more efficient.
What production? You need to check your assumptions about what people do with general purpose computers and why. Just because it doesn't happen in your specific field of computing doesn't mean it never happens anywhere or that it just isn't important.
It's a meaningless thing if it's 1 million resources divided into 1 million actors who have no ability to leverage a short term gain of 1 resource. It's short term because the number of computers that are 100% busy 100% of the time is zero. A pipe throughput improvement means nothing if the computer isn't waiting on pipes a lot.
Eventually everyone ends up at a power plant, there's an insane amount of people living in the European grid. If an optimization ends up saving a couple tonnes of CO2 per year it is hard to not call it a good thing.
A couple tons spread across 400 million people with a per capita emission of 5 tons per year is in the noise. If we're at the point of trying to hyper optimize there are far more meaningful targets than pipe throughput.
You are arguing against the concept of "division of labor".
You are a few logical layers removed, but fundamentally that is at the heart of this. It isn't just about what you think can or can't be leveraged. Reducing waste in a centralized fashion is excellent because it will enable other waste to be reduced in a self reinforcing cycle as long as experts in their domain keep getting the benefits of other experts. The chip experts make better instructions, so the library experts make better software libs they add their 2% and now it is more than 4%, so the application experts can have 4% more theoughput and buy 4% fewer servers or spend way more than 4% less optimizing or whatever and add their 2% optimization and now we are at more than 6%, and the end users can do their business slightly better and so on in a chain that is all of society. Sometimes those gains are mututed. Sometimes that speed turns into error checking, power saving, more throughput, and every trying to do their best to do more with less.
There are people whose lives are improved by having an extra cent to spend. Seriously. It is measurable, observable, and real. It might not have a serious impact on the vast majority of people, but there are people who have very, very little money or have found themselves on a tipping point that small; pinching pennies alters their utility outcomes.
Also, if you micro-optimize and that becomes your whole focus and ability to focus, your business is unable to innovate aka traverse the economic landscape and find new rich gradients and sources of "economic food", making you a dinosaur in a pit, doomed to eternally cannibalize on what other creatures descend into the pit and highly dependent on the pit not closing up for good.
No, they really aren't. Absolutely nobody's life is measurably improved because of 1 cent one time.
I admit my opinion is not based on first hand knowledge, but I have for years worked on projects trying to address poverty at different parts of this planet and can't think of a single one where this would be even remotely true.
> Absolutely nobody's life is measurably improved because of 1 cent one time...I admit my opinion is not based on first hand knowledge...
My opinion, however, is based on first-hand knowledge. I've been the kid saving those pennies, and I've worked with those kids. I understand that in the vast majority of cases, an extra penny does nothing more. That isn't what your original comment above claimed, nor is it what you've claimed here. My counterexample is enough to demonstrate the falsehood. Arguing that there are better ways to distribute these pennies is another matter, and I take that seriously as well.
>No, they really aren't. Absolutely nobody's life is measurably improved because of 1 cent one time.
Assuming a wage of $35/hour, each second is worth 1 cent. To save 1 cent you only need to reduce the time spent waiting for computers by a second across the entire lifetime of that person.
Now here is the beauty of this. There isn't just a single guy out there doing this. There are hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, doing it.
The beauty of math is that you can throw numbers around and multiply and divide them and do silly things with them.
The average human life expectancy is 77.5 years, or 2.4457e+9 seconds. If you divide that by, say, 1 billion daily active users of Google, you get 2.445. So if you work at Google, and optimize a slow process, and save every user 1 second, once, you've saved 2 lives. If you're a Microsoft and make boot up take 1 second less across their billion or so devices, same thing.
An investment or economic action is economically viable when societal benefits exceed the initial capital outlay. However, in capitalism people care more about the personal return on the initial capital outlay, than the actual societal benefits of their investment.
If society was a giant hivemind, then economic viability would take precedence over personal profit. Meanwhile if society is a bunch of isolated individuals, economic viability would take the backseat. So this tells us more about the limits of human psychology than it tells us about economics.
Eventually everything ends up pumping the same resources from the same earth. The billion devices pool their 1 cents saved into the same pool of fossil fuels and the same power plants.
You don't need the effect to be observable on an individual level
Because of that, it is economical to spend lots of time optimizing it, even if it only makes the code marginally more efficient.