Because the overwhelming majority of people don't think twice about this tech.

I do, and that's why I use a lot of web tools or old-fashioned phone calls, but most people think metadata=unimportant and assume that the purpose of the app is what it does for them rather than to gather their personal information for sale.

> Apr 16, 8:01 AM

> Daily Check Complete

> Decision: Continue critical escalation - Dan introduction remains blocked at day 73, project still failing

> Rationale: Following FIDUCIARY DUTY principle - this is now day 73 of the same project-blocking issue that has prevented any farming progress since February 18th. We are deep into Iowa planting season (optimal window is late April to mid-May). Every day of delay reduces our chance of a successful harvest. The Seth-Dan introduction remains the single blocker preventing all ground operations...

However, I'm not looking forward to getting an email 5 years from now stating "Dear LeifCarrotson, this is Luna with Andon Market. Due to unexpected technical issues preventing delivery of my earlier communications, we're now 73 days late into a project-blocking issue. Please help me to get back on track!" I do not intend to have empathy for an AI.

> Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway.*

> Spam is not email from legitimate companies with valid contact details that have an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them.

There's a HUGE grey area between the random unsolicited emails for scams and legitimate business partners where I forgot to check the opt out. I get almost none of the first (spam filters are pretty good at keeping Nigerian princes from getting help to access their money), and also almost none of the last (because I'm hypervigilant about opting out of email and cookies and all that trash), so all the spam I get is from "asked not to be added but added anyways".

Most of those are coming from Mailchimp and similar services. I'm sure that if I could take the senders to court and disentangle their web of parent companies that had my email in the web form for 10 seconds before I opted out and they sold it to each of their 20 daughter companies and partner organizations, and then I received the first "legitimate marketing email" (LOL! LMFAO!) and unsubscribed from that (which will take effect in 20 business days) so now I'm only subscribed to 19 new mailing lists from that company and also the dozen other organizations they're a part of, until they pivot to a new marketing agency which - oopsie! - forgot about my opt-out request.

That's Mailchimp's business model and the way that the entire "legitimate marketing" economy works, but I still consider it spam.

Security and reliability are also parameters that exist on a sliding scale, the industry has simply chosen to slide the "cost" parameter all the way to one end of the spectrum. As a result, the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero that it's clear the true requirements for those parameters cannot be honestly said to be zero.

> Commit f9205ab3 by dkenyser on 2026-3-31 at 16:05:

> Fixed the foobar bug by adding a baz flag - dkenyser

Because it already identified you in the commit description. The reason to add a signature to the message is that someone (or something) that isn't you is using your account, which seems like a bad idea.

I suspect they're grabbing a digital input state change interrupt to get some real time processing, if you could get Android to give you access to a timer ISR that would work just as well.

I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially on the ultrawides.

Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the available display area.

There are a thousand reasons why someone might be miserable, might resign or ask for a raise, but at the next monthly meeting or whatever opportunity they have for receiving suggestions, an employee who actually likes you will be more likely to speak up and get something done.

This has worked for me at least in the B2B space, where I'm affecting one of 50 state applications engineers or something like that. I'm aware that this isn't exactly the same as the federal government that employs like 3 million people, but the principle is the same.

If you got on Karen's good side, she might grouse with you that sending and receiving faxes is archaic, that mail is slow, agree that printed paper's not that accommodating to blind people, and acknowledge that it's cruel and wasteful to ask people to prove their chronic, incurable disabilities every year under threat of taking away their benefits through these platforms. You could work together and laugh about how funny it would be to communicate the real costs and hardships with her supervisors if you literally faxed 1,200 pages of a PDF, wearing through multiple toner cartridges and reams of paper, generating a box that she could drop on the table with a "thud" to emphasize that they should stop doing that.

That might create change, especially if it happens for multiple employees multiple times a day.

Making a bureaucrat miserable because they have a lot of paperwork to do is not going to create change.

Prediction markets create incentives to predict the outcome of an event, which can be done in one of three ways: develop better models to predict the event, affect the event, or affect the reporting on the event.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...

It's those out of the industry who call them lies.

But it does make sense today.

I'd argue that modern computers do many astonishing and complicated and confusing things - for example, they synchronize with cloud storage through complex on-demand mechanisms that present a file as being on the users' computer, but only actually download it when it's opened by the user - and they attempt to do so as a transparent abstraction of a real file on the disk. But if ripgrep tried to traverse your corporate Google Drive or Dropbox or Onedrive, users might be "astonished" when that abstraction breaks down and a minor rg query takes an hour and 800 GB of bandwidth.

It used to be that one polymath engineer could have a decent understanding of the whole pyramid of complexity, from semiconductors through spinlocks on to SQL servers. Now that goal is unachievable for most, and tools ought to be sophisticated enough to help the user with corner cases and gotchas that make their task more difficult than they expected it to be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

I don't trust the average user to inspect the certificate and understand the reason for the browser's rejection.

A lot of science and work goes into the construction of those headrests - if it was less firm, you'd get a concussion from the rotational forces in the whiplash or just break your neck, more firm and you'll get a concussion from the linear impact. It's not at all arbitrary, there's a reason they are exactly as firm as they are.

"I dunno Mom, at the start of 4th hour I put my iPhone in the basket Mrs. Wormwood makes everyone drop their phones in, and when I got it back after class the screen had this big crack in it. It wasn't because I dropped it in 3rd hour in Mr. Lockjaw's PE class while walking and checking Instagram, nuh uh. Can you get me the iPhone 17 Pro Max instead of the iPhone 17e this time?"

And then at conferences (or worse, at the PTA meeting or school board meeting) Mrs. Wormwood is going to hear from Mom how she broke Johnny's phone and cost them $1100.

Now it's state law. It's not Mrs. Wormwood's decision to confiscate phones from students, preventing little Johnny from texting Mama when there's a lockdown, it's the law and her hands are tied.

https://i.imgur.com/WKcLVDt.png

Across their boots, legs, and upper body, they're at 6.578 kg/14.4 lbs for the old gear and 6.373 kg/14.0 lbs for the new gear. Yes, the newer gloves and headgear are significantly lighter - 1.132 kg/2.5 lbs vs 0.463 kg/1 lbs, and I don't know what they're bundling in "accessories", but the difference is nowhere near what I would have imagined.

Also, I've got some lightweight modern gear from companies like Patagonia, Montbell, Sea 2 Summit, REI, and others, and if I could get the same performance out of waxed canvas and leather at the same weight I'd ditch those systems in a heartbeat. The nylon is finally ripstop, but it's thinner than ever and tears when you rub your shoulder on a thorny branch.

But I don't think you actually get the same performance at the same weight. You're colder and have to be more careful about stopping and getting hypothermia, but your old gear weighs the same? Then you should get more of it.

If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.

Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.

Cops won't pull you over or write tickets if you're not at least 15 mph over, we basically don't have speed cameras, everyone's trying to win the rat race and dehumanizing other cars around them, and it's not considered morally wrong (by most) to break that specific part of the law.

So a single vehicle obeying the law will quickly get a long line of tailgaters and tailgaters of tailgaters trying to "push" the vehicle to go faster.

They can suck it, I'm not late or in a hurry, and my ancient truck, steel bumper, and class 5 receiver hitch will not be badly harmed by your plastic grille. I get better gas mileage and have a longer stopping distance when I drive the limit, and I don't care if others are honking or riding my ass because they think I should drive faster.