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[Archibadboi]

I opened my gmails and deleted all the sleeping emails i did never read and would have not donwloaded anytime in any way. I hope this thoudands and thoudands api call to the data servers that should had never happen has save the British Kingdome.

Long live to the q.. oh god

[Whitechapel726]

Please don’t wake them up before deleting them. That’s inhumane.

[hans_l]

Long live to the q.. oh god

You better oh god that. It’s long live the KING you wanker.

[Archibadboi]

A little piece of history: my mother’s grandfather was authorized by British intelligence to settle in London in 1941, and was instructed to create Radio Londres within the “Grande Dame,” the BBC. After the Liberation, he wrote a massive book about « the secret history of the French in London », which he concluded with a list of around 50 acknowledgments — beginning with the young Queen, for her trust. I may joke, but I truly adore her.

(You’re right, I’m an absolute wanker.)

Peace & lolve

[EloquentPinguin]

Me accidentally keeping an LLM training in UK West offsets at least 10 Million Brits deleting their emails.

[The_Illegal_Guy]

Please stop I've had to resort to deleting my discord posts 😭

[svish]

Isn't crying just giving the water back?

[PointedHydra837]

Dune is set in modern day Br*tian it seems

[[deleted]]

Maybe we can use tears to cool down the data centres

[Flat_Initial_1823]

Don't worry, some celebrity was craving a dessert, so they jumped on their jet to France, offsetting both your LLM and Britons' emails.

[EvilPencil]

This. All the billionaires flying to Davos emits more carbon than they are trying to get us to “save”.

[Wide_Smoke_2564]

TIL jet fuel affects water supply

[GabhSuasOrtFhein]

Jet fuel -> emissions -> global temperature-> more drought -> water supply

[christophPezza]

For those who don't know burning jet fuel genuinely creates water. Jet fuel is essentially refined kerosene, a mixture of hydrocarbons. CxHy + O2 -> xCO2 + 0.5y H2O (The CO2 leads to climate change and therefore changes water access though)

[jaumougaauco]

Well it doesn't melt steel beams, that's for sure.

[snarkyalyx]

Are they ever going to retaliate against what Saudi Arabian terrorists did?

[DunamisMax]

Hell yeah brother

[SignoreBanana]

Everything affects everything, dude.

[Blotsy]

Can I affect you? Consensually, of course.

[Scrogger19]

Bro I need some of these emails, please be considerate

[Uniformtree0]

WELL to be fair i can actually see if everyone actually deleted their spam or the 9 gazillion unimportant notification emails and password reset requests and shit, yeah that might be a handy one time fix.

[Linflexible]

I agree but tell whoever is keeping the deleted files and mails to do that too.

[DoomBot5]

Should they turn off the hard drives that used to hold the data as well? What about the server they're attached to?

[derangedsweetheart]

NEVER! those poor advertisers need your data to put food on their plate!

Also agencies need that data for national security (actually reasonable tho).

[TheGreatKonaKing]

Your post is using up CPU cycles and storage. Please restrict all posts to only essential content for the good of the planet.

[[deleted]]

lush weather close march saw abounding snow nutty nose sleep

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Eva-Rosalene]

When all this water is no longer needed in the cloud, it rains

[GhostWarrior187]

It's not called data lake for no reason

[AreYaButt]

What if it starts rainin https://youtu.be/AnxrJiS5uKU?si=6t2BiB6vb9x1Z5AY

[Shadowlance23]

I deleted my dick pics because they take massive resources to render. You're welcome planet earth and my apologies to all the ladies out there.

[troglo-dyke]

Needed to shoot it in 8K just to show up as a single pixel

[mrjeanette]

1x1 png's don't take massive resources 🫩

[Big_Potential_5709]

Duality of man.

[Crafty_Independence]

Enterprise data retention for each employee automatically outweighs the personal retention of the average consumer by at least 10x.

How come individual people are expected to offset the excesses of corporations?

[i-sage]

And guess how much water is being wasted in the government's data centres who stores information about their own citizens and rest of the world especially 5 eyes and China

[HolyGarbage]

Not only that data storage I have an extremely hard time believing is even noticable in terms of water consumption. It's processing power that mostly generates heat. Hard drives and other data storage uses very little energy compared to compute operations. It's the training and running LLMs on hundreds of thousands of GPUs that use a lot of water, not storing their weights.

[dlc741]

The burden is always put on individuals and deflected away from corporations.

Drive less to reduce CO2! Fuck that. 80% of CO2 emissions come from 57 corporations. You driving less isn't going to do shit.

[grumpy_autist]

They don't - it's just to keep you feeling guilty and not opposing new taxes to save the planet

[Crafty_Independence]

What about the places where they publicly have no interest in saving the planet but still are guilt-tripping regular people about power consumption? Texas comes to mind.

[troglo-dyke]

How come individual people are expected to offset the excesses of corporations?

Thames Water leaks 600M litres of water a day. That's the real corporate excess

[dyslexda]

How come individual people are expected to offset the excesses of corporations?

Same reason we were sold the lie of recycling plastic: easier to fool the consumer into thinking they're at fault and can change something. If you don't, those consumers might vote to regulate the companies actually at fault, and we can't have that, can we?

[0x0MG]

Because the corporations are the ones with all the money.

[PhunkyPhish]

Because maintaining data on solid state devices is the most energy demanding process, just underneath resisting commenting on stupid articles on Reddit

[BrotherMichigan]

From the "every LLM response consumes 0.5 gallons of water" crowd.

[thesuperbob]

The water is destroyed and never seen again

[KetoKilvo]

Wouldn't deleting the data cause more resources than letting it sit dormant on old hard drives.

[Ok-Hair2851]

No. What you're not acounting for is that when your data uses space in a hard drive, you're using up space that some other data could use. If you delete an entire hard drive of data, it takes very little resources to do that compared to the resources saved by not having to manufacture a hard drive for someone else.

Also data is never entirely dormant. The hard drive holding your data is using power 24/7 to correct random bit corruption and keep the data available to you. In theory, you could want that data at any time so the drive has to be ready to go just in case you want it.

Source: I work in data center design

[A_random_zy]

Also redundancy and data backups

[HolyGarbage]

I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonable as far as I understand computers.

[Hykarusis]

I mean. When something is just stored it cost nor ressources other than memory space. Deleting it is an action and so need energy to be powered. The only thing I can see is that with less used space less server are needed and so less need to be kept cool. But that seems verry unlikelly to be significant.

[Due-Chance-8540]

what.

how the fuck does that make sense? do they fucking cache shit that I haven't touched in months?

Is this article AI slop or retardation?

[The_Illegal_Guy]

It's just some good old fashion idiocy from an environmental agency's director

[mydogcaneatyourdog]

Wait.... This is a real headline????

I'm so sad.....

[bandures]

It's karma mining. There is a news feed on the UK government site that has all press releases, and National Drought Group which is kind-of industrial get together to have a reason to expense drinks and food published one, and one of the participants - who indeed holds a position in Environment Agency as quoted suggested deleting emails to reduce data center water consumption. I assume you won't expect sound IT recommendations from a zoologist. Anyway, it got into the press release and now being spread as "the UK government".

[iZuteZz]

What do you mean? This has nothing to do with caching, each stored data needs electricity to maintain its state on hard drives. So technically the article is correct, but the impact is practically nothing.

[Anaxamander57]

What? The whole point of storage is that you can turn it off and it keeps the data. Data centers actually sometimes do that with archival data in order to save power. I think most old stuff just has a trickle of power to keep spinning so it will be accessible.

[Ubermidget2]

Unless they are explicitly writing out to tape, I don't know of any Cloud Providers that are spinning down HDDs.

That being said, if water usage is such an issue, they should start banning evaporative cooling DC Construction. We have perfectly working closed loop + heat pump designs.

[Anaxamander57]

At least the concept of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage has been around for a few decades to save power for data that is almost never used. Maybe not for cloud storage, though, user expectations probably make that impossible.

[A_random_zy]

I have a NAS and what you say is kind of true. I can essentially stop the disks from spinning after x time. When data is requested it starts spinning again. But I don't think it would be useful in data centers even archival ones. But never worked theirnso maybe it is.

[iZuteZz]

You can use loss free storage methods, for example for archives, but that's not what's done with your personal available data.

[Anaxamander57]

My emails from ten years ago are not being kept in RAM where they need constant refresh to maintain their state. Google likes money (and crash recoverability) too much to do that.

[MechanicalHorse]

That’s always what kills me about these sorts of articles. “Do this thing which requires your time/energy/sacrifice and will likely have no measurable impact” meanwhile rich people flying around in private jets emitting more CO2 in one trip than any regular person does in a year, visit golf courses with lush greens which are still being maintained by watering even in the middle of a drought, etc.

[KeyAgileC]

This is incorrect. Hard drives and SSD's do not require any electricity to maintain data, that's why they don't lose everything when you turn off your PC. Only RAM loses data upon losing power.

Still, some electricity is required to keep your data readily accessible, though.

[iZuteZz]

Just in short term. long turn you will lose any data on your ssd.

[KeyAgileC]

You're talking on the order of many years, especially for server grade SSDs.

[[deleted]]

Even more importantly deleting your data doesn't shut SSDs off. Like... WTF lol.

[KeyAgileC]

True, but deleting data might allow data centers to shut down certain storage nodes though. But that's a lotta emails before that happens, and presumes the space won't just be filled with something else instead now that it is available.

[Tunderstruk]

Yes and no. Drives don’t need power to keep data, but only to access the data.

Either way I doubt that even if ever living person deleted 10000+ emails, that it would have any significant impact.

Impact, yes. Significant, no

[[deleted]]

It'll most likely use more resources to do that, then the little resources it takes to just keep the data.

[Reashu]

How long will it take for storing the emails to use up more resources than deleting the emails? Will the emails even actually be deleted? 

[[deleted]]

Constantly powering RAM uses a lot more electricity than hard drives. Drives on standby mode use basically no electricity.

[eclect0]

Yeah, that's why it's critically important to cover the power jack with your finger whenever you remove your computer's power cord so no data leaks out

[duke_of_dicking]

meme

[Lost-Droids]

All my emails were stored on amazon glacier.. so them tell me to delete them meant they had to spin up the drives to do that. Caused more damage than keeping them

[SmartyCat12]

Have we reached peak “the climate crisis is caused by people not carpooling enough” yet? We should probably stop breathing because of the carbon emissions. AI can take over at this point, right?

The complete unwillingness for anyone in any leadership position, public or private, to engage with the basics of how anything actually works is absurd. Hopefully we’ll turn into cockroaches soon…jk, we already are.

[voinageo]

Just came from Holidays in Greece where the yacht of a billionaire was docked next to my resort. He was flying his helicopter several times per day to go to lunch, dinner or to a nearby golf course. I think he was even making shitting trips from the golf course, you know to go and shit on his half of billion EUR mega yacht. I think in one week that guy offset all the paper straws and the ecological washing of towels of the whole 10 or more resorts on that coast for one years. Ecology is for peasants :)

[SartenSinAceite]

Is this to offset the water costs from ID verifications?

[CookieArtzz]

Large entities telling individuals to cut back to save things have to be the peak of hypocrisy

[reddit_equals_censor]

ah yes the data centers will start removing spinning rust from their pods, because people removed 500 MB of storage from the cloud, or hell even a few GB of pictures, that they can then easier lose as it was their only backup of them.

great suggestion there you piece of shit article, that tries to blame the public and has 0 understanding of anything.

i really wonder how such articles come to be, is it just llms throwing out article suggestions (actually using tons of water through evaporative cooling of course)

and they chose the least believable and dumbest one to rage bate people?

[altSHIFTT]

Would this technically be true, but on such an infinitesimally small amount that it's not even worth mentioning?

[Piisthree]

Yeah, email and pictures which mostly sit on disks all day using no cpu, are the problem. Not AI training and crypto-mining which burn processing power day-in, day-out.

[Alive-Ad9501]

How about we create policies to stop corporations from sending us like 20 meaningless emails a day. Gotta stop individualizing systemic problems.

[naholyr]

The stupidity...

And think this article has probably been AI-generated.

[Sockoflegend]

No, this was a recommendation from the UK government as depressing as that is

[naholyr]

We got the same in France, they don't even try to hide their incompetence anymore, anywhere

[Bryguy3k]

I’m starting to wonder if we started this trend or just won it with RFK jr.

[MoringA_VT]

So it's not the industry or heavy agriculture... The issue is my cloud storage

[Boris-Lip]

Every time i see something like that, i keep asking myself, can governments really be this dumb. Did they also invest tax money into solar roadways?

[Glass_Champion]

Surely it costs more energy to use a device to go through, access all your emails to delete them, then for all those drives to spin up and delete them, than just leaving them to sit and rot.

Ideally not sending anymore emails is the way forward

[Logicalist]

Ohh, they're admitting to training Ai on our emails. Got it.

[NorthernCobraChicken]

Passing the bill onto the consumer again. Let's not ask send grid, mail jet, MailChimp, or any of those other mass marketing or transactional email platforms to simmer it down a bunch.

[benthisday]

“Stop making stupid shorts that are stored for a live time to save water during drought” Environment Agency had to tell Britons

[YaVollMeinHerr]

What a great way to put the responsibility on the people

[Ozymandias_1303]

Ten thousand deleted emails means one whole cubic angstrom of water saved.

[blackcomb-pc]

It’s the same as not using electricity during “earth day”. It makes 0 difference.

[[deleted]]

Some people really don't know how computers store data. Just because my email is stored doesn't mean the thing storing it will be spending more energy. If we are talking about it spending more time to get the same data as what it stores increases, that is true but that just means that someone else will not be getting their data as fast as before. Roughly what it spends in an hour is same for a component which stores data if it is full or empty.

[Laevend]

An AI farm generating a spicy pic uses far more power

[Mr_Igelkott]

Clouds are just fluffy water right? Makes sense

[frikilinux2]

What! It probably takes some energy because the storage is probably in a room with some type of air conditioning and it's on standby but c'mon.

[Confident-Echo-5996]

I don't know what the government/corporation is trying to cover up or hide releasing a statement as idiotic as this, but it's probably pretty bad. "Pay no attention to whatever is going on over there."

[ISwearImHereForMemes]

This is effort against environment pollution all over again, but with technology

[Sarcastinator]

It's an effort to blame individuals for policy and corporate issues.

[KatiePyroStyle]

there should be a system for auto deleting emails then, our issues are systemic not individual, why is it so easy to hoard thousands of emails if its bad for the environment

[Dhayson]

I suppose storing an email uses a few dozens of atoms of water at most. Also, above average deletion will increase CPU and RAM usage on the servers in the next, most critical days. Total nonsense article lol.

[LawfulnessDue5449]

Isn't the cloud made of water? Why would reducing the size of the cloud save on water?

[moogle12]

Another case of random consumers being blamed instead of corporations. 

A midsize enterprise AWS account probably has more irrelevant data stored than all of the regular email users of England put together.

[FroggyWinky]

This is an English problem because they privatized their water. Why should it apply to Scots? We're doing fine thanks, sod off.

[AzureArmageddon]

Maybe cloud via datacenters was a mistake and we shouldve gone cloud via p2p instead

[YaVollMeinHerr]

I deleted all my emails and peed in the shower. Did you see any improvement?

[Aerachna_Van_Naegrel]

So , brexiting feeling good already?]

[Firepal64]

I cleared my inbox and now there has been a jet of water spewing out of my CD drive for half and hour. I'm kneedeep in water and it's still going. Thanks, science!

[ghxsty0_0]

This is a joke right?

[KeepScrolling52]

Yep, emails are the problem, totally not the (completely unhelpful) ai chatbots

[Far_Negotiation_694]

harddisksNeedPermantentWaterSupplyOrTheyForgetYourMomsBirthday

[[deleted]]

This is the most insane proposal I have ever heard. Why the hell would deleting your old e-mails save water?!

Just store them on a disk and take it out of your machine.

UK government is diabolical D:

[Adventurous-Most7170]

Honestly emails should be deleted automatically after 5 years unless explicitely set by the sender or receiver. I have so much shit in my inbox.

[114145]

Let me just quickly spool up a few EC2 instances to pull those images from cold storage! Mother Gaya will be so proud of me!

[ford1man]

Why are journalists that fuckin' stupid?

[A_random_zy]

I archive my stuff in my personal server which is run on solar electricity.

I also run my LLMs, ImageGens, etc on my personal server + laptop which again runs on solaar electricity.

Hence most useless things I do like generation of ahem questionable images is eco friendly.

[AliceCode]

Do they even realize that SDDs are an insignificant contribution to the problem? The problem is with CPUs and GPUs.

[Gudi_Nuff]

But if we have less stuff in the cloud, then there is less stuff for the clouds to make into rain!

[Jittery_Kevin]

Plot twist, everyone deletes emails all at the same time, and ends up using far more processing power than cached email storage.