5 ms·

What previous resource intensive activities are these data centers replacing although? We used to ship far more paper around by parcel, and store them in tempe

by novok 5y ago

What previous resource intensive activities are these data centers replacing although? We used to ship far more paper around by parcel, and store them in temperature controlled rooms and shops in dispersed locations be it books, legal documents and more. Things that used to be air flights are now video calls. Videotapes, DVDs and video stores replaced by efficient streaming. Photographs stay on digital media instead of paper media. We fell trees and had 'paper' data centers in the form of pulp mills, which are also resource intensive industrial plants in remote locations. Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's significantly reduced. When you look at the internet and the telephone compared to what we replaced it with, the internet comes out far, far ahead in environmentally friendliness.

beebeepka 5y ago
I am not sure paper usage is down. Overall, humanity is using more than ever. As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons. I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a very serious, almost patronising way
- Retric 5y ago
  Overall humanity is much larger and richer than it was 40 years ago. Paper use includes packaging, plates, toilet paper, etc so it’s hard to get actual numbers as it relates to IT. Especially when recycling initiatives have resulted in new uses for lower grade paper products. That said, personally I am way down due to IT not just replacing forms but also physical books, newspapers, and even bills.
- roca 5y ago
  P2P can't work once you have more than a few participants.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    This is only true due to bad protocols and network infrastructure. As long as ISPs have incentives to make Netflix go fast and the connection to your actual neighbors go slow, P2P can't take off. Also multicast networks could easily outperform cloud infrastructure in many setups, but something something business incentives.
    - roca 5y ago
      In-network IP multicast has all kinds of practical issues. Without it, you can't match the performance of colo-hosted stream concentrators.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        I'm not saying otherwise, although i don't have any experience with multicast (i just know people who were playing with that some years back). Feel free to point to some more detailed/critical resources if you have links at hand. But even on unicast networks Bittorrent (and other P2P protocols) largely outperforms any cloud provider in terms of bandwidth, especially in parts of the world where your "cloud" company has no infrastructure. What i was denouncing is that many ISPs (at least in France) make sure if you have 10Mbit/s upload it will work fine on a route to Google, but you won't ever get the full 10Mbit/s to your literal neighbor who's using a competing ISP... You'll be happy if you even get 1Mbit/s. There's no technical reason for that, it's all political/economical considerations (the same that make us have asymmetric bandwidth, no static IP, no configurable reverse DNS, etc).
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > I am struggling to get where you come from. There are many billions of people on the world that have a lot of room to grow consumption to even come close a fraction of typical developed world consumption.
  - mrpopo 5y ago
    And some of the typical developed world consumption is ridiculous and should be considered an affront to human decency rather than an ideal for the world to reach.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Of course, that is why the only solution I think will work is making fossil fuels 10x more costly. Without $20/gallon gas/petrol at the pumps and $10k flights, I do not think we see any meaningful impact to environmental problems. But until then, the music will keep playing and everyone is will keep dancing.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >I am not sure paper usage is down. It's mixed. Office paper use is down or flat, newsprint is down, packing materials are way up. Interestingly the paper and pulp industry is a massive consumer of energy and resources. I think I've read that it is 4% of global carbon emissions.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Not everything can be measured with carbon emissions. For example, assuming the paper industry emits as much CO2 as the computing industry, does it mean they're equally polluting? Micro-electronics require hundreds of different chemicals/ore which means polluting many more extraction sites and using their local water supplies... then comes all of the ore refinement processes which itself requires considerable amounts of water pollution. Then of course, there's waste disposal which incurs even more pollution because to this day electronics aren't being recycled (because they're designed for performance/miniatureness not recyclability). Overall, the IT industry has a much higher ecological impact.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      The paper industry has its share of other environmental issues as well. I'm not sure which is worse. None the lest 4% of CO2 is a big problem of its own.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        It is, but it's worth making the trade-off explicit. In a day and age where 1/3 of the world population drinks water polluted with lead, and a recent study was published this week on HN claiming out of over 1000 water streams studied only 2 were unpolluted by medicine, the chemical treatments and quantity of water required for some production are key metrics to consider. I mean it's not that i'm not worried about CO2 emissions. But tackling this problem is super easy and it's just no politician/businessman is interested in the answer (degrowth and low-tech). Forever-chemicals and polluted water sources on the other hand is a much harder and yet mostly-undiscussed problem beyond collapsologist circles. +2°C is worrisome and will have significant damage on many species. Polluted water sources challenges the very idea of humanoid life in much of the world. It's interesting to note that both problems have the very same origin (industrial capitalism) and the same solution: don't produce shit we don't need, don't produce un-durable stuff, don't produce stuff from cheapest imported/synthetic materials.
ssivark 5y ago
> Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's significantly reduced. But a la Jevons Paradox [1] I'm sure the total amount of information being shuttled around now is far more than what was being sent around on paper -- bu orders of magnitude. So it's not at all clear that we still have a lower net ecological footprint. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- aaron695 5y ago
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > But a la Jevons Paradox [1] I'm sure the total amount of information being shuttled around now is far more than what was being sent around on paper -- bu orders of magnitude. In general I'm glad for the easier access to information and being able to answer questions I have and learn things. But how much of that theoretically measurable amount is actually needed? If we cut the amount of bits transmitted by half, how much would the quality of life decrease? If we doubled it, how much would people's lives improve?
shadowofneptune 5y ago
That assumes the same amount of information is being passed around. The ease of the modern internet has led to more work being produced for servers to process. No video site 10 years ago had HD enabled by default, for instance.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  YouTube?
  - rdlw 5y ago
    I couldn't find a source that says when YouTube started showing videos in 720p by default, but I did find this circumstantial evidence that shows it was after October 2012, so at most 9 years 8 months ago: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/68318/view-youtube-videos-in-720p-by-default-in-safari https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/68318/view-youtube...
rr808 5y ago
We used to print out a few dozen photos a year. Now my wife takes that many photos at lunch time- then backed up to 3 locations forever.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  It's not really forever. Realistically it might be 30 years. And do you really think the ecological cost of storing 5 MB of data is more than manufacturing and developing a single photo? One hard disk can store a million photos. Will she ever get even close to 100k photos?
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    >> We used to print out a few dozen photos a year. Now my wife takes that many photos at lunch time > Will she ever get even close to 100k photos? Assuming a dozen photos per meal, 2 meals a day, 360 days a year... thats 8640 pictures per year. In 10 years, she'll be at 86k pictures of food. For what it's worth, my own photo album has an average of ~7000 photos per year for the last 10 years (and that includes 2020 and 2021 being abnormal years), and I don't use social media. In less than 5 years, I'll cross 100k photos. Actually thats combined photos and videos. The videos take up more space. They used to be 1080p videos. They're now all 4k.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    My Dropbox has 1.1M files in in, many of which are photos (and then stupid stuff like thumbnails of the same photos from iPhoto in 2008). However, my impression when they said all the compute and all the laptops is 2%, I'm like, "not so bad." We get a ton of value out of that stuff - music and books and movies and phones and pictures and even adult ed and stuff my parents did with physical stuff and don't have to travel so much because can video and stuff. If they can get right to repair and full-lifecycle closed loops going once (maybe?) the tech settles down a bit more, it'll be a net gain I'm pretty sure.
Jackpillar 5y ago
southerntofu 5y ago
> Things that used to be air flights are now video calls. I'm skeptical. What used to be a phone call is now a video chat, which arguably consumes more resources (more bandwidth = more infrastructure). > Videotapes, DVDs and video stores replaced by efficient streaming. This is entirely wrong. Efficient streaming uses peer-to-peer connections so if your neighbor has the video you're looking for you won't have to cross half your country/continent to reach a Netflix caching server. The cloud is the opposite of eco-friendly IT which is best represented by low-consumption services reusing existing devices/infrastructure.

by novok 5y ago

beebeepka 5y ago

I am not sure paper usage is down. Overall, humanity is using more than ever. As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons. I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a very serious, almost patronising way

Retric 5y ago
Overall humanity is much larger and richer than it was 40 years ago. Paper use includes packaging, plates, toilet paper, etc so it’s hard to get actual numbers as it relates to IT. Especially when recycling initiatives have resulted in new uses for lower grade paper products. That said, personally I am way down due to IT not just replacing forms but also physical books, newspapers, and even bills.
roca 5y ago
P2P can't work once you have more than a few participants.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  This is only true due to bad protocols and network infrastructure. As long as ISPs have incentives to make Netflix go fast and the connection to your actual neighbors go slow, P2P can't take off. Also multicast networks could easily outperform cloud infrastructure in many setups, but something something business incentives.
  - roca 5y ago
    In-network IP multicast has all kinds of practical issues. Without it, you can't match the performance of colo-hosted stream concentrators.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      I'm not saying otherwise, although i don't have any experience with multicast (i just know people who were playing with that some years back). Feel free to point to some more detailed/critical resources if you have links at hand. But even on unicast networks Bittorrent (and other P2P protocols) largely outperforms any cloud provider in terms of bandwidth, especially in parts of the world where your "cloud" company has no infrastructure. What i was denouncing is that many ISPs (at least in France) make sure if you have 10Mbit/s upload it will work fine on a route to Google, but you won't ever get the full 10Mbit/s to your literal neighbor who's using a competing ISP... You'll be happy if you even get 1Mbit/s. There's no technical reason for that, it's all political/economical considerations (the same that make us have asymmetric bandwidth, no static IP, no configurable reverse DNS, etc).
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> I am struggling to get where you come from. There are many billions of people on the world that have a lot of room to grow consumption to even come close a fraction of typical developed world consumption.
- mrpopo 5y ago
  And some of the typical developed world consumption is ridiculous and should be considered an affront to human decency rather than an ideal for the world to reach.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Of course, that is why the only solution I think will work is making fossil fuels 10x more costly. Without $20/gallon gas/petrol at the pumps and $10k flights, I do not think we see any meaningful impact to environmental problems. But until then, the music will keep playing and everyone is will keep dancing.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>I am not sure paper usage is down. It's mixed. Office paper use is down or flat, newsprint is down, packing materials are way up. Interestingly the paper and pulp industry is a massive consumer of energy and resources. I think I've read that it is 4% of global carbon emissions.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Not everything can be measured with carbon emissions. For example, assuming the paper industry emits as much CO2 as the computing industry, does it mean they're equally polluting? Micro-electronics require hundreds of different chemicals/ore which means polluting many more extraction sites and using their local water supplies... then comes all of the ore refinement processes which itself requires considerable amounts of water pollution. Then of course, there's waste disposal which incurs even more pollution because to this day electronics aren't being recycled (because they're designed for performance/miniatureness not recyclability). Overall, the IT industry has a much higher ecological impact.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The paper industry has its share of other environmental issues as well. I'm not sure which is worse. None the lest 4% of CO2 is a big problem of its own.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      It is, but it's worth making the trade-off explicit. In a day and age where 1/3 of the world population drinks water polluted with lead, and a recent study was published this week on HN claiming out of over 1000 water streams studied only 2 were unpolluted by medicine, the chemical treatments and quantity of water required for some production are key metrics to consider. I mean it's not that i'm not worried about CO2 emissions. But tackling this problem is super easy and it's just no politician/businessman is interested in the answer (degrowth and low-tech). Forever-chemicals and polluted water sources on the other hand is a much harder and yet mostly-undiscussed problem beyond collapsologist circles. +2°C is worrisome and will have significant damage on many species. Polluted water sources challenges the very idea of humanoid life in much of the world. It's interesting to note that both problems have the very same origin (industrial capitalism) and the same solution: don't produce shit we don't need, don't produce un-durable stuff, don't produce stuff from cheapest imported/synthetic materials.

ssivark 5y ago

> Yes we still have paper and lots of it, but now it's significantly reduced. But a la Jevons Paradox [1] I'm sure the total amount of information being shuttled around now is far more than what was being sent around on paper -- bu orders of magnitude. So it's not at all clear that we still have a lower net ecological footprint. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

aaron695 5y ago
throw0101a 5y ago
> But a la Jevons Paradox [1] I'm sure the total amount of information being shuttled around now is far more than what was being sent around on paper -- bu orders of magnitude. In general I'm glad for the easier access to information and being able to answer questions I have and learn things. But how much of that theoretically measurable amount is actually needed? If we cut the amount of bits transmitted by half, how much would the quality of life decrease? If we doubled it, how much would people's lives improve?

shadowofneptune 5y ago

That assumes the same amount of information is being passed around. The ease of the modern internet has led to more work being produced for servers to process. No video site 10 years ago had HD enabled by default, for instance.

charcircuit 5y ago
YouTube?
- rdlw 5y ago
  I couldn't find a source that says when YouTube started showing videos in 720p by default, but I did find this circumstantial evidence that shows it was after October 2012, so at most 9 years 8 months ago: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/68318/view-youtube-videos-in-720p-by-default-in-safari https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/68318/view-youtube...

rr808 5y ago

We used to print out a few dozen photos a year. Now my wife takes that many photos at lunch time- then backed up to 3 locations forever.

IshKebab 5y ago
It's not really forever. Realistically it might be 30 years. And do you really think the ecological cost of storing 5 MB of data is more than manufacturing and developing a single photo? One hard disk can store a million photos. Will she ever get even close to 100k photos?
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  >> We used to print out a few dozen photos a year. Now my wife takes that many photos at lunch time > Will she ever get even close to 100k photos? Assuming a dozen photos per meal, 2 meals a day, 360 days a year... thats 8640 pictures per year. In 10 years, she'll be at 86k pictures of food. For what it's worth, my own photo album has an average of ~7000 photos per year for the last 10 years (and that includes 2020 and 2021 being abnormal years), and I don't use social media. In less than 5 years, I'll cross 100k photos. Actually thats combined photos and videos. The videos take up more space. They used to be 1080p videos. They're now all 4k.
- lanstin 5y ago
  My Dropbox has 1.1M files in in, many of which are photos (and then stupid stuff like thumbnails of the same photos from iPhoto in 2008). However, my impression when they said all the compute and all the laptops is 2%, I'm like, "not so bad." We get a ton of value out of that stuff - music and books and movies and phones and pictures and even adult ed and stuff my parents did with physical stuff and don't have to travel so much because can video and stuff. If they can get right to repair and full-lifecycle closed loops going once (maybe?) the tech settles down a bit more, it'll be a net gain I'm pretty sure.

Jackpillar 5y ago

southerntofu 5y ago

> Things that used to be air flights are now video calls. I'm skeptical. What used to be a phone call is now a video chat, which arguably consumes more resources (more bandwidth = more infrastructure). > Videotapes, DVDs and video stores replaced by efficient streaming. This is entirely wrong. Efficient streaming uses peer-to-peer connections so if your neighbor has the video you're looking for you won't have to cross half your country/continent to reach a Netflix caching server. The cloud is the opposite of eco-friendly IT which is best represented by low-consumption services reusing existing devices/infrastructure.