A modest proposal for reducing mail traffic (1996)

I think about all of the emissions generated from software every day. I feel a little bit better when I refactor an endpoint from a p99 of 3 minute to 3 seconds. Then feel worse when I realize a youtuber canceled out those gains 100x over when they uploaded a 4k clickbait video about some drama happening on Twitch.

I don't get it. I know the Johnathan Swift reference, and the many parodies of parodies based on it. But I don't get why the author is being so sarcastic about things. Was compression or optimization "overdone" in 1996? I was just a kid looking up the new Ultra 64 on the library computers at the time. These days, saving 8 bytes per message could be a legitimate bug fix at Google, or even a OKR, depending on the tradeoffs. It adds up to tangible money on the scale of a billion users. I suppose 1996 was starting to ride the dot com bubble, and during a bull market optimization might have been a waste of time. Was that the idea here?

DJB&#x27;s proposal is especially entertaining in the modern world of DKIM, where headers are often many times the size of the actual emailed message 8-)<p>Many more of his proposals, outside of sarcasm, should be heeded for a more user oriented internet in the new millennium...

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