Submitted 5 hours ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/science/758275/drought-delete-files-email-data-center-water-uk
I never heard so much bs in a single article. Those files and emails are stored on cold storage, and is using zero water. I guess it's a goodtthing to remove old files and empty your trash bin, both in real life as well as digital.
But this article makes no sense at all. Just one query to an AI will use so much more energy and water in comparison with your old email in cold storage. It's a joke.
A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate.
So pass a law banning evaporative cooling systems from all industrial and commercial applications, give them 6 months to comply and start handing out fines every day past the deadline.
straight up not feasible for many serious and necessary facilities like powerplants and refineries, unless you prefer very warm lake or river nearby (which also cools down by evaporation later)
straight up not feasible
It’s very feasible to create the law, collect the fine, and raise the price on energy sources or industrial process that require the cooling.
It’s a formality, you could do it in an afternoon. Costs a bit of ink and a piece of paper.
“But then it gets more expensive!” and “This might push corporations out of the city/country.” is the consequence the people / the government / the country have to have the balls to endure, if they want to stand by things like “having enough water” or “living on earth in the 22nd century”.
Which is why I mentioned limiting it to data centers as an option
They could heat many houses or fill many heat reservoirs instead.
I tried deleting my files but I was age checked…
Fk UK government
I suggest spitting to lose weight
Nice analogy. I used this one in the past: “you can’t fix a full disk by deleting word documents”, but I like yours more
I’m not sure how is this applicable?
If you have storage for documents, they will fill it up and you have to remove them.
Always used to amaze me as a kid I had to pay 20p to inflate my bike tyre from, air.
Boggled my mind since I had a hand pump.
I hope the Department that released this guidance is being absolutely pilloried in UK media. What an absolutely worthless, dishonest pipe of crap.
I’ll also wear green clothing to have the same impact
Well, deleting stuff causes a load of processing that wouldn’t have otherwise happened… So I guess I should have some coal barbecues?
How is deleting locally-stored files on your home PC going to save water, when your hardware sips resources vs. any AI datacenter in existence?
Most people save these thing in some sort of cloud storage solution.
Cloud is just my own Nextcloud, hosted from my own garage. And trust me, it's using zero water.
What are you, some kind of nerd?
So where does this water go after evaporating or leaking from your toilet? Is it flying into deep space and being lost for our planet forever?
Raining over the ocean where it is no longer in the stores of freshwater these systems are pulling from
So this doesn’t sound like a big deal after all. Maybe just stop pulling water from those “stores of freshwater” for cooling purposes and get your own from the ocean.
Absolute farce of a country
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 41 minutes ago
The country is riddled with leaky mains pipes because water companies are more concerned with allocating huge bonuses to themselves than they are with fixing infrastructure.
Now we’re courting tech companies to build more data centres that our other shitty infrastructure (electric) isn’t even fit to support.
This is mandated recycling 2.0. Fill supermarkets with products 99% of which come in plastic wrappers, only successfully recover a fraction of that, and then tell the consumer they’re the ones destroying the environment.
If they can fit my 5 recycling boxes up their rear, then they can shove this up their arse too.