UK government delete-old-emails-to-save-water bullshit got me VagueGrumblin' about File Sizes In General

Y'know how everyone who Routinely Uses A Computer and 99.9% Of Fedi has their file manager set up to show their files as a list of files, with buttons at the top to order them by name or size or age, and it'll show, like...

todolist.txt - 1.2kb - today
pettygrumblestopostonline.txt - 20kb - yesterday
fuckinghomeassistantbastard.txt - 45kb - 10/8/2025
pictureofmykid.jpg - 2.5mb - 28/7/2025
sonicthehedgehogfootrub3drendercompilation.mp4 - 3.8gb - 18/6/2025

Everybody who hit that "Show my files as a list of files" button has the file size staring them in the face All The Time, and they can see that a picture takes up as much room in your computer as a couple of novels. But most people don't ever hit that button, and the default behaviour is to show this like grid of thumbnail icons with sod-all information or clues, everything looks the same size.

So most people don't viscerally understand that text is tiny. TIIIIINY. Like, so small that if your computer downloaded books as fast as it could for one minute, it'd take up less than 1% of your hard drive and you'd have enough reading material to last you a decade, whereas the 90 minute Sonic The Hedgehog foot massage ASMR video gets you 90 minutes of relaxation not counting rewatches but weighs hundreds of thousands of times as much

But that information is hidden, in the default show-everything-like-the-pictures-folder view. Hide it for 20 years and folk forget that things even have a weight, and end up paying a fiver a month for some tiny amount of cloud storage when they've got like two hundred gigabytes of empty space on their hard drive

If you have no context for How Big Things Actually Are then deleting your old emails to save space makes sense, because you probably have LOADS of emails!