In a new digital twist to environmental individualisation of responsibility, the UK government is now advising people to “[d]elete old emails and pictures” in data centres to help with the current drought. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-drought-group-meets-to-address-nationally-significant-water-shortfall
@mikarv But yay for AI in everything! 🙄
The UK is beyond satire now...
@elsactivitypub @eLearningTechie @mikarv
Indeed we are proud to see that our relentless advocacy for human sacrifice is now becoming government policy! We are particularly fond of the "Take shorter showers". Great job, UK.
@mikarv Why not say “stop using Generative AI for dating advice” because it uses massively more water for much less success?

@mikarv

Doesn't even make logical sense.
Surely the act of deletion surely potentially uses more energy/water than just leaving things be.
Anyway, its all moot because there's no real way of knowing where your data is actually stored. So how could you hope to affect local data centre resource use.

@raymierussell @mikarv plus, let's be honest, they are retaining those "deleted files" to train AI with.
@demofox
Absolutely.
If we really wanted to save resources it would be to restrict AI, Search and other data centre activities but that would get in the way of AWS and Google. As ever the individual is urged to take action while corporations, meh not so much.
@mikarv I propose another solution : launch nukes to the nearest data center as they require vast amounts of water to cool their systems!
@mikarv I don't think my emails are doing much to influence cooling demand here...
@mikarv is this of the same government of (check notes) "turbocharging AI"?

@mikarv * Avoid capitals, bold and serif fonts because they take more processing power.

* Increase your use of words with repetitive letters / letter blocks, such as look, feel, cheese, dodo & tartaric because they can be better compressed and this reduces their transit time through computer circuitry, limiting the heat generated by friction.

* Use words better suited to processing with renewable or low carbon energy sources, such as: Whoosh, proton, breeze, shhh.

@mikarv I don't know about emails but AI prompts are very heavy for water and energy consumption
@mikarv
And a million drives cranked up and processors strained as people deleted ten year old emails that they'd probably never look at otherwise.
@mikarv correct me if I'm wrong, but data centers don't actually need to waste all the water they use right? They could have a (more expensive) closed circuit and this is something that could be regulated for.