Notices by Peter Ludemann (peterludemann@mathstodon.xyz)

@dalias
It's not a "technicality that doesn't actually matter".
First Data (a company you've likely never heard of -- they provide merchant and bank services for credit cards, so they get to see lots and lots of money transactions) was at one time one of the largest users of the US Post Office ... businesses would go to First Data and pay them to mail advertising to, say, everyone who had spent more than $100 in the past 2 months at Mountain Hardwear, and First Data would do that ... this is very different from First Data giving a business a list of everyone who had spent more than $100 in the past 2 months at Mountain Hardwear. (If you can't work out the difference yourself, I can help you)
Similarly, Google doesn't sell user data.
@lispi314 @lauren

@lispi314
You don't need Google to send out lots of emails that "execute arbitrary coode or send information back to its masters". And it's much cheaper than using the Post Office. (Google's quite good at detecting such email and either blocking it or putting it in "Spam" filter, but I suppose you'd see that as Google trying to stop a competitor.)
@dalias @lauren

@lispi314
"Emails get blocked as spam trivially."
Only someone who hase never worked on anti-spam software would say that.

"many spam operators operate off gmail's own servers"
Outgoing spam detection is also non-trivial.

I suppose next you'll be castigating Google because some of its Cloud customers send spam.

<flame-on>
Don't make mountains out of mole hills. Concentrate on the real problems.
(And don't make blanket statements about things you don't understand, such as anti-spam)
</flame-off>

@dalias @lauren

@lispi314
>> Only someone who hase never worked on anti-spam software would say that.
> I have, though most of my experience with them is as a user/administrator, not a programmer.
In other words, you have no idea how difficult it is to block spam, either incoming or outgoing.
> Enough gets blocked that it is nontrivial to get through lastingly
Have you any idea of the volume of spam that major providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo receive and mostly block?
I thought not.

> Mail spam is an expense with an uncertain return.
If this is true, then why is there so much spam? (See above - most of it gets blocked ... at one point ~90% of email traffic was spam but nowadays I think it's ~50%)

> Surveillance capitalism through ads is a guaranteed return
What is your definition of "surveillance"? Showing adverts based on search queries is hardly "surveillance".
@dalias @lauren

@lispi314
> > In other words, you have no idea how difficult it is to block spam, either incoming or outgoing.
> That is logically inconsistent with the notion that I had to personally handle how much I received.

You've made my point -- spam is non-"trivial" (to use your word) to stop and plenty got through to you. Gmail et al can do spam detection at scale that's almost impossible for individual mail servers (e.g., detecting bursts of similar messages).

Anyway, if spam weren't effective, we wouldn't see half of email traffic being spam. Only a tiny fraction needs to reach a susceptible target to make it pay off.

If Google can make money from targeted advertising, that is a Good Thing -- I'm looking for some goods or services and a company wants to provide me that goods or service. It's not surveillance, any more than it's surveillance if Visa sends me a (paper) advertisement for Japan Airlines because I've bought a ticket to Tokyo from United Airlines (something that United Airlines knows, Visa can perhaps infer, and JAL doesn't know but wants to target with its advertising -- this is also a Good Thing because JAL economy has more legroom than United economy, and if I didn't know that, I would be paying more for an inferior service).

Good-bye

@dalias @lauren

@robpike @dabeaz MTS had something like readline built into the terminal handler (you could grab a line from anywhere on the screen, modify it, and enter), so the line editor was almost a full screen editor... for quite a while, nobody saw the need to develop a full screen editor, but eventually it was done.

(One wonders why unix didn't do something similar, but instead required every interactive program to use readline and provide its own recall system)

@sun
On the off-chance that you're not a troll: “DEI is not lowering the bar, it is widening the gate.” ... "DEI *raises* the bar, since you have a bigger talent pool ..."
https://hachyderm.io/@aronow/113875619118750711
@mattblaze

@sun Maybe you could learn from this really smart guy? (Whose experience matches mine, even though I'm not as smart; in fact I enjoy being the dumbest person in the room)
@mattblaze

@jwz
I can manually remove a follower on Twitter:
Profile -> Followers -> (click on one follower) -> More ("...") -> Remove this follower.

Presumably, this can be automated.

@lauren

I don't have joy at anyone's death; but I wish there were a better way of expressing my feelings that it's nice to no longer have that person making things worse for society (I care more about what they've done recently, such as blocking a public option for health insurance).

True respect and the usual platitudes are, unfortunately, indistinguishable. :(

@lauren
I have friends whose political views I strongly disagree with but we get along fine because they're not trying to *implement* those views - and we can have fun debating over a beer and then move on to other topics.

Politicians (such as Al Gore) can get along fine with other politicians they disagree with because they operate in a world of "win some, lose some" and often have to compromise a lot to get anything done, on the theory that half a loaf is better than none; and - with the costs of electioneering in this country - that often means a lot of compromise of principles. But I have to live with the consequences of all those compromises, so my opinion of a politician is legitimately very different from Al Gore's.

For any given politician, it's hard to tell how much they're compromising in order to get enough donations to get re-elected - and whether they're doing this because if they don't get elected, the alternative is far worse.
Yes, I'm being cynical^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrealistic.

@siderea @rachelnabors
In data modeling, there's often an "impedance mismatch" between the data design and the the various uses of the data, and an application needs to deal with that -- I've seen far too many apps that expose the structure of the data model, to the immense confusion of the users. No configuration language (of which CSS is an example) - which is just a fancy way of specifying parameters - is going to handle that kind of mapping between semantics and appearance. Modulating the appearance based on other constraints (such as your example of window size) is an additional mapping for which configurations will only be partially successful.

@siderea @rachelnabors
Wouldn't a "correct" solution have required content-based "abstract" markup, rather than appearance-based markup? As Brian Reid (who designed Scribe) observed "Most people won’t use abstract markup even if you threaten them" (slide 34 of http://www.reid.org/~brian/markup98.ppt , referenced from http://xml.coverpages.org/mt98-papers.html#reid - he gave that talk at other conferences also)