Not all optimizations are more energy consuming. For an analogy, does a using a car consume more energy than a bicycle? Yes. But a using a bicycle does not consume more energy than a man running on feet.
I would not discount NLP tasks just yet. In practice, they are still used to solve problems like spellcheck, autocomplete and even words and text rewrites.
I'd argue that every one of those tasks is better solved with a neural LM. The fact that people still use traditional techniques does not mean those old techniques are better. It just means those tasks haven't caught up to the modern era yet.
Or maybe it's because MLM are too expensive to run. But that's hardly an argument that MLM should solve traditional NLP tasks.
The state of the art models these days would not be able to be bundled with browsers. These are typically neural models [0] and require specialized hardware to run, and also have high memory requirements.
The models in browsers are light-weight to be able to run on most devices. Might be similar to those used in smartphone keyboards like GBoard [1].
Comparing the spellcheck quality of Firefox to Google (search, not Chrome) might not be completely fair. The browser most likely uses a client-side spelling model with tight memory & performance constraints. The suggestions from Google come from high quality models hosted on their servers.
Not sure about TV shows but for films (especially Netflix originals), that's partly due to the recent trend of films getting shot for TV viewing experience. These films tend to have fewer "wide" shots and more "character" shots compared to the earlier theatre release only films.
Sidenote: The style guide (recently?) removed the ban on non-const references [0]. They are now allowed for non-optional output parameters. Though returning value is generally preferred over output parameters.
The argument for tabs really goes that time is spent much more on reading code than authoring, so it should be optimized and customizable (tab width) for the reader.
I've settled on "follow the existing/upstream project's style; if it's a new project, follow the language's idiomatic style". I personally (strongly) prefer spaces over tabs, but I've inherited/forked plenty of projects that use tabs in JavaScript for example, and I just set my editor and formatter to use tabs in that project.
I think the ideal situation is a language with an official or at least commonly accepted formatter, so that existing and new projects will essentially always follow the same style and you never have to think about it. Like "go fmt" always using tabs. I don't like tabs, but I like that kind of enforced consistency way more than I dislike tabs.
That's also why I like using opinionated third-party formatters like prettier and black. Combined with pre-commit hooks, you almost never have to think about style and can just focus on the code. Plus diffs are cleaner.
I used to feel very strongly about this. Then I started using Common Lisp and discovered the abomination that is tabstop. This archaic "feature" leads to tab width that varies across the line and seems to be hardcoded in every text editor out there. Worse, it's only useful if using tabs for alignment which is completely broken anyway! At some point I intend to patch the source for the editors I use to remove this nonsense.
Admittedly this is something of an edge case - how many languages other than Lisps involve alternating layers of indentation and alignment? The more common C like languages don't suffer from this at all.
At this point I'm largely convinced that more or less all of our tools, languages, and conventions are poorly thought out, brittle, and inelegant. /rant
