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UK government suggests deleting files to save water
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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This is analogous to the "I'm using paper straws while the billionaires take a private jet each to Venice" situation.
So I should delete old mails so that maybe (and actually no, it won't) there will be less drives to cool in the datacentre while the techbros have entire datacentres using hundreds of terawatts of power[1] and is predicted to be using billions of cubic metres of water per year by 2027[2].
As usual, they're looking toward the people they can influence to make changes to their lifestyle, and ignoring the people actually doing the damage because they know they will not change.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024: IEA annual report showing that AI and crypto is estimated to have consumed 465tw/h of energy in 2024. [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water: Forbes report stating that AI datacentres are estimated to use around 6.6 billion cubic metres of water by the year 2027.
Wait, you mean deleting a few MB out of the (max) 10s of GB won't make a dent in the TB/PB storage needs of companies who are actively sucking up data to process for their LLMs.
Well color me fucking shocked
E: lollabytes
Shocked I say! Shocked!
I’m familiar with TB (tuberculoses and terabytes) but what is YB? Yeet-a-byte, since they want you to purge shit? I thought the next step up was petabyte?
Yottabyte, but that's waaaaaaay more than I meant lol. I completely forgot that petabyte, exabyte, and zettabyte are between TB and YB
Fun fact, GPT disks can only go up to 9.6 ZB. So it would take over 100 maxed out GPT disks to get 1 yottabyte of storage.
Yottabyte is past tense for yeet-a-byte because you for sure should have cleaned up your storage before then.
Pretty sure that’s true. But I didn’t know yottabyte was a thing (fr) so I could be wrong I guess.
I don’t even begin to understand your fun fact, which made it more fun for me. 😊
Going by the Forbes article's numbers on adult human water consumption, 6.6 billion m^3 would be pretty damn close to the entire human population's water needs. 2.6 litres per adult per day is 0.949 m^3 over a year, so multiplying that by a world population of 8.2 billion people (I know that's adults and children but I'm approximating for scale here) is 7.7 billion m^3 of fresh water
2.6L/day might cover drinking water, but definitely not cooking/cleaning/bathing/laundry. Let alone growing food.
You alone are nothing, but everyone else like you adds up. Private airplanes of the billionaires in total to less fuel than commercial airplanes. Not that billionaires shouldn't reduce their consumption, but the "common man" even though insignificant alone still adds up to a lot.
Ah yes, planes used by 1% of the population isn't equal to thr planes used by 99% of the population. What a great comparison!
I fucking hate this argument
Everyone hates it when they have to change. Everyone wants someone else to change.
Yeah it has nothing to do with having to change, but thanks for the advice.
Sure, but since per capita they can do pretty much a billion times more than me. Then, I think it should be "after them"