AFAIK a gram of purified silicon has used the equivalent of 75kg of charcoal -- I wish I still had the sources.
So, yeah. Possibly.
Then again: the amount of hard drives I need to get a RAID that performs anything close to even the slowest SSD(RAID) is unfathomable.
-> hard drives need more resources and a lot more power considering performance
I suspect in CO2e if performance is the limitation of what you are doing then an SSD is going to be less CO2e emitted because you can do it on fewer devices. However if you are just looking for space and the performance isn't an issue then the HDD will be the less CO2e emitting solution for now.
This i think will change however as more of the grid uses renewable energy, there is nothing instrinsic in the silicon process that must be burning CO2, its all electricity based and while it uses a lot of energy it doesn't require burning fuel like making Iron does (at the moment).
We have been trying to investigate this SSD/HDD lifecycle carbon footprint tradeoff over the past months, albeit limited to a case study of KV-stores so far.
The work is getting published at CCGrid2025 which is currently taking place, so the paper should soon be available.
> However if you are just looking for space and the performance isn't an issue then the HDD will be the less CO2e emitting solution for now
Yes, that is what our results showed and this is the "easy" conclusion: if a HDD can handle the load, then it should be used as it will have both lower operational emissions as well as lower embodied emissions.
Where it gets more complicated is when you have a load that you could handle with a single SSD but where a few HDD would be needed in parallel to achieve the same performance. In that case, one of the big factors (besides device lifetime and embodied carbon estimates) is the carbon intensity of your operational electricity: if the electricity footprint is low, you can afford the lower operational efficiency of your HDD setup, since the increased energy consumption is less impactful. The reason this is relevant is because this
> This i think will change however as more of the grid uses renewable energy
does not apply equally to all parts of the lifecycle. Hardware manufacturing is expected to decarbonize much slower than the operational part. See also https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604930.3605717 (very insightful article in general).
Important ones anyway. I'll use "Log in with Google" if it's sort of a one-off that I don't want to bother setting up an acocunt for and treat it as a throwaway.
Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail...
Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either.
The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%!
I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected:
- It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time).
- It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon.
- It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time.
- It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account.
No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.
Have you never been on a 3 week vacation? Or even just a 2 week one with a day before/after where you didn't sit down to read your email? Apple apparently started their freakout after 15 days
"We apologize for any confusion regarding data collection being done by the Wacom software driver and the unclarity about the actual information collected."
Again and again:
any PR containing "confusion" seems BS to me.
Which gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke.
The example with the rain is wrong.
It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ).
"wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.
As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.
> "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")
That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)).
Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect.
I would argue (as a native speaker) that "wegen den Regen" is also possible and basically is equivalent to "wegen den Regenfällen".
Of course I am biased but I actually believe that there is no other language that is so elegantly conducive to precise thinking. And above confusing example is actually illustrating this. If thinking is a bit like moving around on a high-dimensional mental manifold then language is an imperfect projection onto a mostly serialized data structure but with referencing (maybe 1.x dimensional). (If you project something from n dimensions onto less than n dimensions you always lose information)
And with German you can explore this mental manifold in a depth and strictness like with no other language. Like entering a meta debug mode where you can form a sentence creating an implicit reprojection into the space where the manifold resides and then muse about how this makes sense.
I often find myself doing that and playing around with "understanding" a sentence in different ways. A simple example would be that you can take almost any German sentence and by stressing a different word the meaning subtly changes. An analogy could be those pictures where you see something and after looking long enough at it it looks different. For example a sketch of a 3D box which you can flip. At some point you can do this intentionally by applying an invisible switch. Same feeling with German statements.
But German has also some short comings especially in the emotional department. For example there are no good translations for "smile" and "to look forward to". Another language I dabbled in is Thai which is pretty much the total opposite of German - very fascinating and refreshing.
Yeah. Concentrating on getting Windows and all MS products to be more secure and robust, instead of building up smoke and mirros would have been too hard I guess.
