We are now paying a gigantic environmental cost that has been coming due for decades. The hunger for data centers is real because developers used to be able to fit an entire OS into 40 MB and a “huge file” might be 888K. The trend I would get rid of is software bloat, because we managed to go to the moon on tightly written code and have chosen “good enough” ever since. There’s no modern operating system with all the bells and whistles that’s under 2GB, and 20 GB for something like MacOS or Windows. You take a photo with your phone and it’s 12 MB at full resolution. The operating system is big. The files are big. We want to back up everything, and a lot of it is memes… or worse, an entire gallery of the inside of your pocket.
AI is the newest edition of panic at data centers, but there was going to be panic anyway. We are all keeping too much stuff, and programmers aren’t keeping an eye on the size of what they create. It can be cool and small.
Stories That Are All True 