The future of renewable energy is very promising. It’s easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.

Beyond solar I’m also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.

We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from “very very left” to “very left” — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it’ll filter down into our politics. Even if we don’t interact with them.

For a long time, the “default” ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don’t think this is an accident.

Hydrogen is really bad as an alternative to batteries for transport. The energy efficiencies go out the window — too much energy is lost both making the hydrogen for use and for using that hydrogen. My recollection is it’s about a 50% loss each at each step, meaning about 3/4 of the energy input is wasted. This is comparable to an ICE vehicle. Again by my recollection, BEVs are in the ~90% net efficiency range. The vast majority of the energy input is used for moving the vehicle, rather than being wasted.

In a world where we are decades from fully de-carbonizing the electric grid, wasting such enormous amounts of energy on hydrogen is pure foolishness. Especially when, in order to be practical, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will require even more infrastructure than BEVs require.

Hydrogen as it stands is a really bad option. For specific uses like airplanes or small/medium warships it might make sense: entities that are too small to justify nuclear power but where battery density is unlikely to be sufficient for a long time. But in general it’s overhyped and just not a great choice.

It’s useless for answering a questions that wasn’t asked, sure. But I didn’t pretend to answer that question. What it is useful for is answering the topic question. You know, the whole damn point?

How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?

I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.

All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.

With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.

It’s a superscript. You can see it in the comment editor options. It’s: ^text^ which looks like ^text

You can also check a comment’s source by clicking on the icon that looks like a dog eared piece of paper at the bottom of it.

Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn’t need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they’ll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don’t like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we’ll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they’d be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That’s 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^{note 1} exabytes.

That’s a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube’s compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That’s 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube’s annual revenue.

Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024ⁿ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren’t correct. It’d be 115 exbibytes instead.

EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.