Email signatures are harming the planet and could cost people their lives

[ipython]

That has to be the most absurd thing I’ve read in a long time. They are trying to argue that adding three words (specifically, pronouns, because culture war) to your email will literally cause people to die?

I’m upvoting just because that will cause a small increase in carbon emissions due to the REST request to the HN servers just to spite this author.

[tacticalturtle]

I’m still holding out hope that this is satire, and pretty good satire at that.

The level of detail in the paper he’s publishing is making me doubt that - but maybe he used an LLM to make the joke go a little further?

[anenefan]

LOL best laugh of the day so far ... I thought perhaps the author might have been quite young, they are not, so I would guess it's a fun or not so serious way of saying something without mentioning the real culprits, most of us could probably instantly think of more significant energy wastage - an A.I. snoop though would be well fooled. The author is of an age that should well understand the waste of power in emails is the extra energy for resources required for non text emails - and the multitude that now get sent instead of a text based email. How many lives have I saved by refusing to enable html?

Of course more power (electricity) has been lost for the hours some are engaged in fruitless searches, visiting the websites that are actually near pointless, and loading the spam of the endless ads thrust onto most web users. There's a long list obviously, ymmv depending on view points.

[throw310822]

> The results showed that in Canada, where about 15 per cent of people include gender pronouns in emails, the resulting carbon emissions from this small change (three extra words) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year, according to the 1,000-ton rule.

GENIUS!

[dorongrinstein]

I can't go to sleep now, knowing I killed 0.000001 people with my stupid email signature. I'm a terrible person.

[k310]

The cost of data centers to perform surveillance capitalism is enormous, as are crypto mining, and now an exponential jump for LLM's.

We lived just fine without these. In many ways, better. Compare what Craig Newmark did with minimal hardware.

How close are we to April 1st?

[mouse_]

wait does this guy know about electron apps?