- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Sorta like how corporations pushed recycling onto the public to deflect from their own culpability for pollution. Why would we regulate the companies building huge data centers when we can get average people to absorb the cost? It’s not like they’re making obscene profits while laying off untold thousands.
I mean, if that was the case, sure, let’s have them pay to clean up the waste they generate. But have you seen NVIDIA, Microsoft, or Meta lately? These companies are barely staying in business. Their CEOs can hardly afford to ride the bus to work. Let’s cut them a break.
TLDR: It’s your fault the earth is dying because you horde emails.
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The current crop of politicians (not just in the UK) is something else. They keep poking their nose at things that are not their concern and fail spectacularly at fixing things that are (health, housing, employment, education, infrastructures).
triggering the server to delete your email is more energy than leaving it in storage (on a platter disk in some array in a raid)
the people who thought of that example are ignorant of how data centers work
The British Government are Authoritarian and Incompetent.
As is invariably the case with Fascists.
the people who thought of that example are ignorant of how data centers work
Almost all politicians are ignorant about tech, yet we let them regulate it. In the worst ways. And fail to regulate it where it ought to be regulated.
Competent Politicians are well aware that they’re not experts on everything and hence hire domain experts to help them understand those domains and actually make informed decisions about them.
Mind you, I suspect this specifically is more a side effect of the profound problems with Dishonesty and Cronyism that the UK has: basically they tackled drought as a negative perception of the Government problem, so set up a talk group to project the impression that the Government was doing something about it and chose as head of it (and to be well paid for it) somebody whose greatest qualification for it was being their mate, all of which is very typically in British power circles.
The natural consequence of such things is them producing fancy press releases which look absolutelly moronic for domain experts, but since most of the people who read such releases are not domain experts, that’s usually fine and in fact advances the true purpose of that “group” (managing perceptions).
Even with the Tech Press internationally picking this up and making fun of it, since the very same people who play these power games over there also control the local Press, they might very well get away in Britain itself with a press release with even such a moronic idea as this, as it will be spinned to make them look good.
Also super long term archives are stored on magnetic tapes, they consume virtually 0 energy
That’s for backups. You wouldn’t have it as the only storage method because it’s so inconvenient to get the data.
tape storage is for offline storage, and any data storage on it would also be redundant
writing and reading tape archives takes a lot of computing. usually you have your tape library server and a server hosting the app and then the tape sled. tape takes a lot of energy
so deleting it electronically is going to take a more energy
it’s more efficient to overwrite it or use a degaussing device to wipe the tape
OP hit the nail on the head. This is once again shifting the blame (and guilt) onto individuals who even collectively have fuck-all impact on the problem in question.
The worst of it is, some people will believe this shit.
What’s even more infuriating is the numbers of people who fail to recognize that all of these companies sell these goods and services to consumers and it is those consumers who can reduce the demand.
It’s virtually impossible to exist online these days without generative AI bullshit being shoved in your face with no means to opt-out. It’s clearly not consumers driving this so-called “demand,” because savvy people don’t want this to begin with and never did. Rather, it’s the desperate speculative hype around this dumb nonproduct that’s causing big businesses to set electricity and money on fire with AI slop to no tangible benefit.
A saner response from the UK government would be to tell these companies to either power their AI datacenters with renewables or get out, rather than trying to guilt trip individuals over, of all the goddamned stupid things, undeleted emails.
In the case of AI, even if consumers actively try and avoid products with AI, it’s difficult. There are studies showing customers are generally less likely to buy a product if it’s described as having AI features, so the overall market demand is already for consumer products to have less AI. The demand companies are catering to is from investors, who don’t need to care about whether it’s viable to sell anything until after the bubble pops.
There was/is a demand for slavery. Should we wait for these people to realize that maybe owning slaves is not okay and morally wrong? Or should we just outright ban slavery and not give two fucks how “the market forces” view such action? You tell me.
That’s a false equivalence.
Your argument is, correct me if I’m wrong, that the demand for product X always necessetates its production/supply and that supply will cease when there is no more demand.
A valid argument based on basic market economic principles.
I argue that there are times, when the demand for something does not outweigh the cost incurred (by the society) from the production and supply of a product. Meaning there are cases, such as this one, when it is almost impossible to decrease demand and thus influence the production which in turn would decrease the cost incurred by the society. In my view, the State has to protect foremost its citizenry, not ginormous enterprises. If this protection means going against “market forces”, then so be it.
Both “products” cause harm to society while only a few benefit, so no, it was not a false equivalence.
But then again, I could be mistaken and feel free to correct me on anything. :))
Power off the AI farms that no one wants anyway (except the oligarchs of course)
Nah, power off the oligarchs too
I’ll say it again, because I think the idea is a practical solution to the issue: electricity and water usage should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive it becomes.
This would actually incentivise companies to reduce their usage, to question if they actually need that new AI data centre that will eat up all the gains in renewable electricity production and require fossil fuel plants to continue running, it’ll reduce the crypto miners as well, and encourage everyone to try to reduce their usage.
The knock on effect of this is that electricity actually becomes cheaper for everyone.
I don’t think that’s a good idea. There are industries that need huge amounts of energy and produce things that are actually useful, like the aluminum smelting industry. They can actually help to stabilize the electrical grid by ramping their production up or down depending on how much energy is being produced at a given time. It’s good for those industries (energy is cheaper when there’s an excess available), good for the power company (they need to keep the grid stable), and good for renewables (balancing supply and demand is a big problem with less consistent energy sources).
What I think we need is regulations penalizing non-productive energy use, like crypto mining and generative AI training.
Oh, I was wondering how they were going to make this our fault.
…because you horde emails.
I’ve never large-group-of-peopled my emails but have been known to hoard them.
Argh! Caught with a spelling (mis)-substitution twice in two days. Thanks!
I think UK government has no idea what they’re doing. First the stupid age verification which will eventually result in massive leak of private information, now this.
If they wanted to save the environment they should push for mix of nuclear and renewable energy sources. But that requires effort…
That’s not the take-home here. We should regulate large companies, but as ever, individual choices both have direct effects on the environment, and indirect effects which influence the behaviour of a small number of more powerful organisations. Also important is that individual choices in the political realm influence what regulations get made, so we’re never absolved of a responsibility to the environment.
The take-home for me is that the government is using long-discredited statistics relating storage to water usage. Stored emails don’t increase water usage by an appreciable percentage.
More processing might result in more water use, but storage? It makes no actual sense. Having more stuff sitting in your storage isn’t making your computer hotter.
In fact, I guess creating a guideline for servers to use more efficient processors would do much more for that.
Nope. Server farms are by design made with energy efficiency in mind. You can’t push them any further with regulation
It makes sense, and in the long term even LLMs will need more efficient hardware if it will stick around in affordable prices.
