General Discussion

But like it or not, we indicate that we want them.

Those AI summaries for Google searches? Lots of processing power.

A friend applied for a teaching job. They had her background, since job interview and all. Called her Wednesday morning, "Can you give a sample lesson tomorrow at 10 am? We'll have students the right age, teachers, admin, and parents. And since you raise ___, and it's biology, it would be great if you could bring in breeding pairs to explain inheritance laws!" She hasn't taught biology for decades, no canned presentation on that. 15 minutes later, she had a lesson plan, questions, etc., in the correct "5E" format, with quiz. Made some fixes, took 30 minutes. AI.

Hell, even Google searches require storing a lot of data and then the processing capacity to index that data in useful ways. Amazon? You like Abe books?

Hey, where do you think Internet Archive keeps all of it's data, on a 1 TB SSD on some guy's desk in Des Moines? Google Drive and Google Classroom. MS OneDrive. The "Cloud".

This will pass through all kinds of server farms. It will be stored, somewhere, eventually. Lots of somewheres, both in the next 30-40 seconds and then in backups after that.

Do we need any of that? Not mostly. But every single time we use that capacity we're saying we want it. Disable all your auto-AI in searches. Don't use chatGPT. Don't much use the Internet, esp when it comes to image searches or image storage. (Imagine what no offloading of data storage would do to the need for places like Netflix or any other streaming service ... or OnlyFans ... to start building their *own* server farms, if they haven't already. Oh, wait, those are also data hogs.)

Like illegal drug trade in the US, there's a supply side--'build it and they will come"--and a demand side, with people that think they can make a living (aka 'profit') off supplying that want/need. Want to really cut down on server farms and the far more efficient and faster data centers, hey, let's go back to dial up modems.