1980s-2000s : the information age
2000s-present : the data age.
Information implies it's correct, data implies it can be anything , true or false.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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aughts were not bad but it was falling and once we got in the teens ugh. oh and old man thing the pre www was advertisement free which was awesome.
sure. the cut off can be somewhere around there, start can be earlier too.
Checks out, at least in my case.
I self-host my email and pretty much every other cloud service I'd otherwise be using. My Gmail account is literally a spam catcher address, so everything there and elsewhere I haven't already deleted is 100% crap.
You'll pry my kitten pictures from my cold dead hands!
Yes, but 90% of everything is crap. Why should we expect data centers to be any different?
Solutions?
sudo rm -rf /data
I’m imagining Data from Star Trek being deleted…
Captain, this is most illogical.
That depends on the problem.
I disagree w/ the author that storing blurry cat memes is what's "destroying our environment." Transportation is our biggest net polluter in terms of CO2, which is higher than all electrical generation combined. If we're want to solve CO2 emissions, we have to solve transportation, since that's the 500 pound gorilla in the room.
If we look specifically at datacenters, storage makes up a tiny fraction of the overall energy use. That article mentions that datacenters probably have a similar CO2 footprint as the aviation industry, which makes up about 2.5% of the world's carbon emissions, or about 10% of the total transportation emissions from the above link.
If the goal is to fix climate change, data centers are pretty far down the list in terms of priorities. Higher priorities are, roughly in this order:
- ground transportation - electrify or switch to something like hydrogen
- electrical power generation - this will directly reduce the impact of data centers, be part of 1, and solve a number of other issues
- residential heating - switch from fossil fuels to heat pumps for heating, which should be a relatively "drop-in" replacement and could save customers money
- industry - largely solved by 2, but there may need to be some shifts in certain types of production processes to reduce emissions
Changing anything about data centers is way down the list of priorities, and it'll be largely solved by something much higher up. So it's really the wrong target to attack.
You forget the production and disposal stage of datacenters which are the biggest polluters.
Sure, but how does that compare to all the plastic crap people buy? Or electronic waste from consumer goods? Businesses keeping offices open when WFH is a thing?
I haven't looked up the supply chain stats here, but I imagine it's also relatively small potatoes when compared to other 500 pound gorillas in the room.
We should certainly deal with it, but it should be much lower priority than the larger sources of pollution.
How is that different from producing and disposing a modern car? Those things are essentially large computers with wheels and a combustion engine
Solutions?
Carbon tax.
In this micro example, imagine if you could access all of your data for free when there as abundant sunshine (carbon free), or had to pay for carbon based energy at night. You'd start to sort your data for what you really wanted so that you'd only be paying a small amount for a small amount of data.
I don't see one unless our society because less dependent on bullshit and honors privacy. I don't know about anyone else but I constantly bullshit specifics about myself on line to dirty up any data collected on me.
charge more to customers for long term data storage. allow short-term for free.
How do you differentiate old from new? I can just create a fresh copy of whatever I'm storing and it'll look new.
It doesn't matter, strict enforcement is not the point. we're talking about reducing "crap data" which is data people don't care about long-term. If you care enough about the data to copy it manually more power to you. If you don't care that much, you'll let it get purged, whch is the goal.
If the files are exact copies, then MD5 checks will catch them; tweaking so many files just to bypass this could prove to be too tedious of a process for people to bother exploiting it.
However, people could create scripts for others to mass-download, -edit, and -upload their files accordingly to reduce this tedium.
Massive deduplication across all accounts on all servers of image, audio, and video data would theoretically be possible, but ain't gonna happen. Or we could just discourage people from posting cat videos and bad memes (even less likely to happen).
I would argue that duplication of content is a feature, not a bug. It adds resilience, and is explicitly built into systems like CDNs, git, and blockchain (yes I know, blockchains suck at being useful, but nevertheless the point is that duplication of data is intentional and serves a purpose).
If the data has value, then yes, duplication is a good thing up to a point. The thesis is that only 10% of the data has value, though, and therefore duplicating the other 90% is a waste of resources.
The real problem is figuring out which 10% of the data has value, which may be more obvious in some cases than others.
Technically git is a blockchain
Deduplication is trivial when applied at the block level, as long as the data is not encrypted, or is encrypted at rest by the storage system.
If the storage all belongs to one machine, yes. If it's spread across multiple machines with similar setups that share a LAN, then you need to put in a little thought to make sure that there's only one copy for all machines, but it's still doable.
In this case, we're talking millions of machines with different owners, OSs, network security setups, etc. that are only connected across the Internet. The logistics are enough to make a hardened sysadmin blanch.
Sturgeon's Law in action again.