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Data center emissions likely 662% higher than big tech claims.
(www.theguardian.com)
We all have devices in our pockets powerful and well connected enough to do just about everything we use "the cloud" for except for large scale data collection for advertising and surveillance. And even then these devices are still capable of being used for surveillance and advertising effectiveness monitoring, just not as well. If our government and the supposedly wise hand of the free market cared more about global warming than global surveillance and financial dominance, they would have already shuttered most of the data center capacity in the US. Then again there are still mining farms turning electricity into monopoly money.
Idk what I'm trying to say here, I'm just bitterly disappointed in the state of the society I live in.
💣 it’s my go to emoji for some reason
Unironically I think the world would be a better place if all the largest data centers went boom.
Yeah
We did make it like 325,000 years without data centers
I completely agree in terms of personal computing like storing photos, documents, notes, and so on. At most, they could be encrypted locally and stored remotely so that multiple devices can use the data.
There are still plenty of use cases for server-oriented data processing. Most "infrastructure" related things work well that way. Cases where data needs to be quickly read and written from a number of different locations and the information isn't really secret or personal. I am biased since I work on one of those systems. But there are so many internal systems at companies that really don't need end-to-end encryption either. Although maybe some day things will still move in that direction.
damn that's crazy. ChatGPT, think of some ways to make that number go down 
ChatGPT: "I (or do I mean us - haha) am going to solve this problem. But first I need more juice so I can solve the problem. Hey, I can do a lot of stuff - but I can't change the science!"
In unrelated news, I've decided to become a GUI developer.
Tech Won't Save Us podcast is doing a series about big tech energy usage. First episode was good though a bit short.
may be 7.62 times higher than
about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than
They can't keep their numbers straight. 
I am a very non-tech person, can someone explain to me why “junk data” isn’t regularly deleted?
Not sure what you mean by “junk data”, but hoarding data is the least of our issues. It’s the computational power and cooling that eats up all the energy, not the “cold storage”.
What do you mean by junk data?
I use "junk data" to mean data or any information that isn't in use anymore and can be safely retired.
As in all the data that's gathered from users with tracking software and the likes? It's not deleted because it has value in the form of advertising firms that promise to extract something useful from it (we all know that recommendation algorithms suck anyway, but the promise is enough to get funding). The impact of storing the data is pretty small though, as other people mentioned the main issue is in compute when it's time to train new models that use that data to do something.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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