In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
🏞 Please consider the environment before issuing a return-to-office mandate
Please consider the environment before sending me an email, seriously, I won’t read it.
Ooooh, I’m totally adding that to my email signature.
Aaaaaaand done.
o7
Is that good? I’m old and have no idea what that means.😆
Haha it’s good! It’s supposed to be a little guy saluting. The o is the head and the 7 is the arm and hand doing a salute pose.
There’s an entire page for it.
🫡
I don’t think regular people really understand the power needed for AI. It’s often taught that we just have it. But not where it comes from.
True, but most people don’t realise how little not printing an email ‘helped’ the environment.
It would have been significant if a lot of people did it.
I’m doing my part. Can’t remember the last time I had to print anything.
“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”
I mean, depends on the email. If you spend more time answering yourself than the AI would, you almost certainly emit more green house gasses, used more fresh water and electricity, and burned more calories. Depending on the email, you might have also decreased net happiness generally.
Do we care about the environment or not? Please, oppose datacenters in desserts and stop farming alphalpha where water supplies are low. But your friend using AI to answer an email that could have been a google search is not the problem.
But it’s everywhere now and it’s almost impossible to use mainstream services without it being used. I can just go to Google anymore, type a search query and get a reply without AI bs being used. How long before it’s baked into the GMail compose window and it doesn’t without me wanting to.
Then we stop using it.
I think we need a Rule 34 of open-source programs:
Rule 34: If it exists, there is an open-source version of it
i) If no open-source version exists, it is currently being created
ii) If no open-source version is being created, you must create it yourself
Thanks. You reminded me to turn Gemini off. Did that once and it came back on.
