Charlie StrossThis is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.
You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Tb NAS box that costs about £2000 and sucks less electricity than a laptop.
The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511
Simon Zerafa (Status: :no_AI_logo: :catthink: 😊
)@cstross@wandering.shop
I asked earlier for ideas on how many emails I need to delete to save one litre of water.
Might be useful to know 😉
🤷♂️
javensbukan@cstross@wandering.shop Or like, you know.... put it on a flash drive? Or like, literally any other form of offline storage?
My life is backed up on HDDs and M-Disc Blu-Rays.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@cstross@wandering.shop
It’s even worse than that. Old emails will be cool storage. Cloud providers are really power efficient for this. But when you delete things, that invokes doing a load of compute, which consumes power.
I doubt it’s intentional gaslighting though. It’s far more likely to be ignorance.
SeanBurlington 🌈
🕊
️@cstross@wandering.shop even the "install a rain butt" doesn't do much good with the typical sized butt.
A lot of this stuff is symbolic without actually doing the maths about what works.
It's also about shifting responsibility to the individual.
Building new reservoirs would be more efficient than water butts.
anathema@cstross@wandering.shop "delete your old facts so you can just trust the new facts that we summarized from the original, don't worry about it" 😭
The Sleight Doctor 🃏
🍉
@cstross@wandering.shop Where's Columbo when we need him?
Irenes (many)@cstross@wandering.shop yeah. somebody in corporate PR seems to have noticed that the public is finally starting to notice resource usage by data centers, and gone out of their way to invent an individualist non-solution
Mythic Beasts@cstross@wandering.shop to put some numbers on it, one of our hosting VMs has ~1200 mailboxes using 1.5TB of SSD. Accounting for the CPU + RAM to allow the mail to be usable and searchable, you can get ~20 such servers on our standard 1U VM host, that uses ~250W. Approx 24k mailboxes on a server. A standard DC with adiabatic cooling would evaporate at most (likely much less) than 3500l of water per server per year or 145ml per account. We're in Telehouse South which uses 40x less water ~ 3ml/mailbox/year.
tabbycat@cstross@wandering.shop If these data centres are producing vast amounts of hot water, couldn't they use that for something useful? Maybe for heating local homes or greenhouses for growing salad stuff in the winter?
Christof Damian 💙
💛
@cstross@wandering.shop
I am going to assume someone asked one of the bullshit generators.
And therefore wasting water.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@sean@mastodon.me.uk @cstross@wandering.shop
My house came with a rain butt. It had one because the builders got soy side for installing it. It was connected to a gutter that ran down one side of the shed roof. Not the house roof. Not even the whole shed roof.
After a year, it had about ten centimetres of water, which was enough to slowly dribble out bit if you connected it to a hose it would do nothing.
At the same time, the main drain for the house roof goes down a wall that could have a wall-mounted butt on it and would then provide a decent amount of water pressure and could drive a little irrigation system (it’s also right next to a water main, so could be easily topped up in dry seasons).
So much efficiency is lost from failing to think.
Christof Damian 💙💛@cstross@wandering.shop
I just realised that my thinking is now:
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by some using an LLM"
And only then Hanlon's Razor
Irenes (many)@cstross@wandering.shop like... it's bullshit, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's accidental bullshit. it inverts responsibility too directly for that, and it falls into that sweet spot where even attempting to rebut it seems to legitimize it. accidental bullshit would be less well-crafted.
we've personally met the people who come up with this kind of thing, and we can attest that yes, companies do this stuff deliberately.
Eric S. Smith@jillypaddock@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop Indeed, whether a given data centre wastes water for cooling or not is site and implementation dependent. Is it draining an endangered aquifer and dumping it into the air? Is it a closed loop? Those seem to be the extremes, to me.