Notices by Tom Ritchford (tomswirly@toot.community), page 3

@samhenrigold I ain't clicking on that. Why encourage them?

@paulbiggar I sent them a message on their contact form saying I'll never use them again.

(I started boycotting Kellogg's almost 30 years ago because they sued a band I liked for being called "The Toucans", and it simply became a habit, so I shan't forget this one either.)

@freemo @flexghost "A bad thing happens, so this justifies other bad things happening to others."

No.

@evan Spam and harassment also existed in email, at orders of magnitude greater levels, and yet Google did not try to kill open email standards but simply solved the issue.

They rolled out Gmail on April 1, 2004, with a good spam checker that improved over time, and didn't get into XMPP until much later.

You present no evidence of the claim that "spam and harassment outweighed the benefits". No evidence appears to exist except a single press release, bereft of even a single number.

Skeptical.

@evan @anclement @dilmandila

> Participation in the social web is a human right.

Really? https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

No, it is not a violation of "human rights" if, say, my instance or all instances choose not to federate with Threads.

That you bring "human rights" into the issue is a measure of the poverty of your actual argument. And I might add that Facebook has complete disregard for human rights.

@colo_lee @evan Can you explain what "stepping up" would have been, exactly, and who exactly are the people who didn't do it?

What solid evidence do we have that "not stepping up" caused Google and FB to silently and gradually stop supporting XMPP, except a single unsupported and unspecific statement by a Google spokesperson vaguely blaming Spam, with no details or numbers?

If Google had broken email for the same reason, would you have agreed?

@damon @evan @colo_lee

There is zero hard information of any type.

What percentage of the traffic was spam or harassing? Was it 10%, 1% or 0.0001%? How much effort did dealing with this take? Why couldn't the spam protection mechanisms of gmail be used to the same purpose?

If they wanted to be transparent at the time or any time since, they could. It has been proven in court repeatedly that Google are deliberate monopolists. There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

@freemo @heinragas

Really? Here are some people born in the Netherlands who were also anti-Fascists:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walraven_van_Hall

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Arond%C3%A9us

And I personally meet a lot more anti-Fascists than Fascists here in the Netherlands.

Probably it's just how you choose your friends that results in the big difference in perception.

And probably I'm a bit biased because my grandfather spent years in a Fascist PoW camp.

@maltimore

"just shouldn't exist anymore"?!

But you can easily prove there is no way to prevent this problem in general, which is why all programming languages have this!

I strongly recommend reading some books on numerical analysis. The second volume of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming has a chapter called "Arithmetic" that is still one of the best sources.

@georgetakei I have injured my neck from excessive shaking this past week. This year. These last eight years.

@MeeMee @MiriShuli @chu @Ulzana @Niall

None of these things is even 1% adequate to the massive, existential problem facing the world.

It is like using a teaspoon to put out a forest fire.

We need to decrease our carbon dioxide output by 90% over a decade. But the current plans will have us producing about 10% more CO2 in a decade.

@MiriShuli @Ulzana @MeeMee @chu @Niall I might add that if you block someone for making factual claims, and don't provide any facts, logic, reasoning, or peer-reviewed citations, you're essentially saying that you don't care whether someone is factually correct or not, you just don't want to hear it.

@MiriShuli @Ulzana @MeeMee @chu @Niall

We have known about the climate catastrophe for over 50 years.

The previous D administration was disastrous: https://archive.thinkprogress.org/obamas-worst-speech-ever-we-ve-added-enough-new-oil-and-gas-pipeline-to-encircle-the-earth-e5e24a156910/

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/06/we-now-know-the-full-extent-of-obamas-disastrous-apathy-toward-the-climate-crisis

Thanks to Obama's focus on fracking, America is the largest oil producer in the world. The US still gives $20 billion a year in subsidies to fossil fuels.

Spending just 4% of the amount spent on fossil fuel subsidies to fight the climate catastrophe is far too little, far too late.

@anarchopunk_girl @CosmicTrigger

Why waste everyone's time with your blah blah blah?

You want to eat meat because you like it, and you don't care if it hurts living creatures or destroys the ecosystem.

Just say that and don't surround it in a haze of empty self-justification.

> You cannot convince someone to switch out the very foundations of their moral system.

No, eating meat is not the foundation of your moral system.

@squig @StillIRise1963 @philip_cardella

https://www.thehivelaw.com/blog/how-many-rapists-are-convicted/

The United States has the most violent, the most expensive and one of the least effective police forces in the entire world.

Respect needs to be earned.

@cstross @aral @johnbierce I worked as a programmer at Google for five years, 2004-2009, in the "Don't Be Evil" days.

I had just been baffled by the fairly rapid degradation of their search, but @pluralistic clued me in: https://doctorow.medium.com/microincentives-and-enshittification-574290ea196f

It's disgraceful. It shows how the addictive power of money destroys everyone's integrity.

@johnbierce @cstross F&SF is the most radically left-wing print science fiction magazine left.

The editor is a woman of color who publishes all sorts of non-binary people, people from developing countries, and that sort of thing.

I've been reading F&SF for over 40 years, and I like these new changes.

I suspect it's simply that the American editor has no idea who the British writer was.

@psychoalpastor @mutualaid @mutual_aid Sent you a few bucks! Good luck.

@LouisIngenthron @clacke @dangillmor @cobalt To be accurate, your analogy would have to have a slave owned from birth to death by a King, sitting at every campfire, and giving back nothing to any community.

Really, to compare an individual listening to another individual around a campfire to a huge machine sucking in billions of documents is just a false comparison entirely.