131–140 of 158 posts
The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse. The distasteful part of all this is that thi…
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I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
Can't you invest in technologies like desalination? For instance, over 3/4 of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, mostly from the Mediterranean Sea. Deleting emails to save water usage is not the answer
The world's just going to get thirsty.
I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.
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I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
In the UK a lot of the stuff falls as rain. You just need reservoirs for when there's a bit of gap during the British summer which runs from July to August roughly.
I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fre…
I'm kind of suspicious of the water for datacenter stats, because I'm skeptical of the extent to which evaporation-based cooling is used rather than just air-to-air cooling. Wouldn't this result in visible plumes of condensation, as it does with power station cooling towers? Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter. Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK…
This is the mid Atlantic where the wet bulb and dry bulb temperature are always very close so the water would be useless for cooling. And of course there are few things that add less traffic than empty buildings full of computers.
Also a lot of the non-AI stuff is still air cooled. In fact I know people at a couple large public tech companies spinning up AI hardware and even for that they're going with air cooling because it's all their OPs people are familiar with.
I wish people were more precise with communicating the actual problem.
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Also the UK government: > Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July. https://www.gov.uk/govern…
When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing. He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?
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Closed loop water cooling probably doesn't make a lot of sense at scale; radiators aren't very efficient at the relatively cool temperatures this sort of system would be operating at. Maybe if the water loop was cooled by refrigeration systems? That would be expensive though.
A closed loop water system by definition doesn't "use up" water! It only matters for this discussion if there's a continuous supply of new fresh water going in.
No... Proposed solutions should be practical from every angle, not just that single angle.
I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.
Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.