Computers really rock. Yes I’m a nerd, and I love my computer. One thing has changed from when I started using computers. Back in the days, my god I feel old when writing this, your tools would be on your computer. Now there are in “the cloud”. That comes with a lot of nice things. Everything is backed up. You don’t have to think about your disk space. Nice.

But it also comes with it’s issues: you don’t know what electricity is used to run that cloud, you tend to put much more on it than what you did before (that’s what happens with “unlimited” space), and it seems that in general it’s less energy efficient.

That’s why, when it comes to AI, I really like when it’s possible to use these tools locally on my machine (1). I know what energy it uses. I even see how much energy it really uses because I see how it drains, or not the battery of my laptop (or even if it goes hot under my fingers).

Action question

Which of your tools or files really need to be in a cloud? Which one could you have on your machine or just in a hard-drive?

Footnotes

(1) A simple way to do that is to use an app called Ollama that let's you install and use AI models on your device.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.