The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud

wildcherry, 3 months ago

1. We had a perfectly fine system to download videos without the need for polluting data-centers but capitalism took it from us. Remember gnutella (shareaza). Remember the pirate bay.
2. What they are advocating for (“Energy efficiency, human efficiency, financial efficiency”) sounds liberal to me. The Lean movement was something along the line of taylorism to squeeze more money out of the worker.
3. Seriously I am all for decreasing consumption in data-centers. Now we all had this guy who takes planes and take his cars everyday and produce more plastic than a family of four being like “curious, you’re on your computer, did you know that pollutes too?”. Sounds like deflation to me.

schmorpel, 3 months ago

A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.

Then why isn’t it used to heat 50,000 homes? Rethinking excess heat as extra heating kills the hyperscaling argument.

schmorpel, 3 months ago

… oh after reading on, it seems the data centers are too noisy and shouldn’t be placed anywhere near our homes.

Cybermatrix1, 3 months ago

Very interesting read. Time to make these sensory excursions open for public to understand the clouds physical existence.