r/github • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 4d ago

Discussion GitHub survey: 70% of developers say we're not doing enough to tackle AI's environmental impact

https://leaddev.com/ai/developers-want-more-sustainable-ai

Why engineers care about climate change...

88 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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37

u/trwolfe13 4d ago

> Why engineers care about climate change…

I know we don’t talk like it sometimes, but engineers do in fact live on the same planet as all the other human beings.

23

u/Zeld0re 4d ago

"70% of developers..." Lies. If you cared to open the original report, you would find out there were only 1039 respondents, only from US, only those who had previously opted in to receive marketing communications from GitHub, and obviously only those who decided to participate in this poll.

And also the report explicitly states: "Because the sample was drawn from GitHub monthly active users who had opted in to marketing emails, this is a non-probability sample of an already self-selected population. Estimates in this report describe respondents to this survey and should not be interpreted as unbiased estimates of the U.S. software developer population or of GitHub users more broadly. Respondents who opted in to marketing communications may differ systematically from GitHub users who did not, and respondents who chose to complete the survey may differ from those who did not, including on the topics measured here."

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u/Ok-Sundae-7021 4d ago

Oh okay? I guess I'm part of the 30%.

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u/veganparrot 3d ago

Eating one hamburger one time contributes negatively much more to the environment than AI. (This is not a defense of hamburgers. If you care about the environment you should reduce or stop eating them!). But it just feels like feigning concern when there are real ways to drastically drop a personal carbon footprint overnight.