This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate.
So pass a law banning evaporative cooling systems from all industrial and commercial applications (or single out data centers), give them 6 months to comply and start handing out fines every day past the deadline.
straight up not feasible for many serious and necessary facilities like powerplants and refineries, unless you prefer very warm lake or river nearby (which also cools down by evaporation later)
straight up not feasible
It's very feasible to create the law, collect the fine, and raise the price on energy sources or industrial process that require the cooling.
It's a formality, you could do it in an afternoon. Costs a bit of ink and a piece of paper.
"But then it gets more expensive!" and "This might push corporations out of the city/country." is the consequence the people / the government / the country have to have the balls to endure, if they want to stand by things like "having enough water" or "living on earth in the 22nd century".
If the free market is something you believe in, you should love this, because it makes water a more scarce resource and the market will be able to find another optimal solution to that new scarcity problem.
Which is why I mentioned limiting it to data centers as an option
They could heat many houses or fill many heat reservoirs instead.
Depending on local climate, season and proximity to cities or industrial customers, this is often done, but you'll still have to dump lots of heat in the summer when space heating is off
You know what you're right. It's too hard. I think running out of water is maybe the better option.
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!
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.
The country is riddled with leaky mains pipes because water companies are more concerned with allocating huge bonuses to themselves than they are with fixing infrastructure.
Now we're courting tech companies to build more data centres that our other shitty infrastructure (electric) isn't even fit to support because magic money tree go brrrrrrr
This is mandated recycling 2.0. Fill supermarkets with products 99% of which come in plastic wrappers, only successfully recover a fraction of that, and then tell the consumer they're the ones destroying the environment.
If they can fit my 5 recycling boxes up their rear, then they can shove this up their arse too.
I suggest spitting to lose weight
Nice analogy. I used this one in the past: "you can't fix a full disk by deleting word documents", but I like yours more
Always used to amaze me as a kid I had to pay 20p to inflate my bike tyre from, air.
Boggled my mind since I had a hand pump.
To be fair, those automated air pumps require upkeep (e.g. compressors fail after awhile and aren't always super cheap to replace when factoring the cost of the part and labor to fix). So that's what your money was paying for, not the air itself. But, I agree it is a bit ridiculous.
As a side note, I highly recommend those portable air compressors that can plug into your car's aux port. Super convenient in the winter time when your tires' air pressure drops.
I'm not sure how is this applicable?
If you have storage for documents, they will fill it up and you have to remove them.
One shitpost meme video in your downloads folder = hundreds of Word docx files. Pick the low hanging fruit.
I never heard so much bs in a single article. Those files and emails are stored on cold storage, and is using zero water. I guess it's a good thing to remove old files and empty your trash bin, both in real life as well as digital.
But this article makes no sense at all. Just one query to an AI will use so much more energy and water in comparison with your old email in cold storage. It's a joke.
Ps. By removing your files now, and checking the contents, you are actually moving the files from cold storage to hot. Meaning the server will load the data into memory etc. Which will actually makes this drought worse, not better.
How about deleting private ownership of utilities instead?
I tried deleting my files but I was age checked...
Fk UK government
I hope the Department that released this guidance is being absolutely pilloried in UK media. What an absolutely worthless, dishonest pile of crap.
How is deleting locally-stored files on your home PC going to save water, when your hardware sips resources vs. any AI datacenter in existence?
Most people save these thing in some sort of cloud storage solution.
No, most people do not store their files in a cloud storage solution.
Yeah they do, it has absolutely become the norm and has been for several years. It may not be the norm among Lemmy users, but general public absolutely do use cloud storage for especially pictures.
I’m not sure that’s true any more. Microsoft all but forces you to use OneDrive by default these days.
Most people only have a smartphone and maybe a tablet, and don't have personal PC or laptop. Android and iOS automatically upload stuff to the cloud (at least photos).
Authoritarian and incompetent.
Just like all the other Fascists.
I don't think I will. In fact, I think I'll download more.
Absolute farce of a country
I'll also wear blue clothing to have the same impact
Well, deleting stuff causes a load of processing that wouldn't have otherwise happened... So I guess I should have some coal barbecues?
So where does this water go after evaporating or leaking from your toilet? Is it flying into deep space and being lost for our planet forever?
Raining over the ocean where it is no longer in the stores of freshwater these systems are pulling from
So this doesn't sound like a big deal after all. Maybe just stop pulling water from those "stores of freshwater" for cooling purposes and get your own from the ocean.
Corrosion issues, marine life clogging, too expensive, etcetc.
Yeah, let them figure it out. It's their problem after all. If it's more expensive, then let them increase prices for their "data serving" activities. If it's too expensive for some people, they might reconsider their usage of said services which in turn might be equivalent of "deleting old files or emails". Instead of asking people deleting files right now before those in charge even tried to fix the problems they created.
Ideally yes, but realistically, fuck the commoners, give money.
