Mmmmmmm baking engineer…

How do you know? Apparently you’re not capable of reading the label!

So, despite the ingredients being listed, you’re still confused? Do you have a brain injury?

Barely any information on it? My guy, are you blind?

in the EU with “honey blend” you’d expect a blend of different types of honey

And, in the US you’d expect it to be something blended with honey. Different expectations, neither one of those expectations is unreasonable.

as it wouldn’t be allowed to be call honey unless it was pure honey

Right… and it’s not called honey, it’s called “Texas Honey Blend”. If it were honey it would be called “Honey”.

Having to decipher “made with real honey” to mean “its not real honey” is just fucking odd.

You don’t have to “decipher” that, you just have to look at the fact it’s a blend, not honey. The “made with real honey” is just additional confirmation that yes, it’s not pure honey.

Flip it over and look at the ingredients and its just a list? Why no percentages?

Because different food rules? Why percentages?

Gourmet stuff comes in all sorts of weird packaging

Gourmet stuff doesn’t come in bear-shaped plastic bottles.

No rules for food labelling is wild.

It would be, if it were the case. But, that’s definitely not the case here. It’s just different from the rules you’re used to. The core of your comment seems to be “this is different than what I’m used to, and I’m shocked!”

It isn’t that bad.

It says “made with real honey”, which is a pretty big clue that it isn’t real honey.

It says “texas honey blend”, again indicating that it’s honey blended with something.

And, as for “gourmet” it’s in a plastic bear-shaped container, it’s not a luxury item.

If people want to buy stuff made from high fructose corn syrup, shouldn’t they be allowed to do it? How much more obvious does it need to be that this isn’t pure honey?

I don’t know of any company that just runs mail servers. If you’re running your own mail server, you’re likely doing it on a small virtual instance. Adding web to that is easy. If you want a web frontend for email, there are plenty of options, although personally I just use IMAP.

The whole reason that Google exists today is that their PageRank algorithm was a great way to identify good content. At its basics, it worked by counting the number of pages that linked to a certain page. More incoming links meant the page was more useful. It didn’t matter how many relevant search terms you stuffed into your page. What matters was votes from other people, expressed in the form of linking to your page.

But, that algorithm failed for 2 reasons. One is that it became cheaper and easier to put up sites that linked to sites you wanted to promote. The other was that people stopped blogging on their own blogs, and stopped creating their own websites, and instead used walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. That meant it was hard to measure links back to a site, and that it was easier to create fake links.

So, now it’s a constant war of SEO people vs. Google Search Quality people, and the Google people are losing. Sometimes there are brief victories for Google which result in good Reddit results appearing higher up. Then the SEO people catch up and either pollute Reddit and/or push Reddit links off the first page.

It would all be really depressing even if it weren’t for generative AI being used to pollute everything. With LLMs coming in and vomiting their content all over everything, we might be forced back to the bad old days of Yahoo where some individual human curated lists of good things and 99% of content was invisible.

I run my own mail server. It’s a pain in the ass and I don’t recommend it. But, trust isn’t really the issue, and the only certs I use are from Let’s Encrypt.

Yeah, but it’s bullshit and I’m calling it out, and I’ll continue to call it out, so stop it.

807 is too big for a typical auditorium.

Imagine an auditorium filled to capacity with people standing at the back and crouching in the rows. At the front of the auditorium a Microsoft spokesman is saying “Ok partners, here’s the confidential data. Make sure nobody shares it beyond this room. Ok, so David wrote a letter to his mother Nancy on March 2nd, which included the keywords ‘prostate’, ‘cancer’ and ‘diagnosis’. If you’d like to use those words to show David some ads, go right ahead – but make sure nobody beyond this room knows this confidential information. Next up is Martha…”

800ish entities is not “partners”.

“Partners” are people you could invite to site around a conference table with you. For it to be a partnership, you need to be able to have a meaningful discussion among all the different partners. 800ish is even too big for an auditorium where you’re presenting to all your “partners”. 800ish is a small arena.

Those aren’t partners.

That would be great, as long as “pay monthly” was guaranteed surveillance-free.

Nobody should be buying single use bottles anyway if there are alternatives available.

Are there alternatives available for carbonated beverages? I guess we could go back to glass bottles. But, they’re effectively single-use too.

We’ve come a long way, so that it’s normal to take a thermos to a coffee shop and have them put a tea or a coffee in it. I don’t know of any similar scheme for carbonated beverages. I’d love it if it existed, especially if you could keep your soda-pop cold for hours.

Fair enough, they sell access to your eyeballs to their real customers, the advertisers.

But, what isn’t fair is that it’s 807 “partners”. This isn’t 807 different brands who might want to advertise to you, it’s far more than that. This is 807 different “partners” among whom are Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. who then each go on to sell access to their hundreds of thousands of advertisers.

You can’t expect to have a meaningful privacy policy when you’re sharing that data with 807 different entities.

throes

We need to talk about data as a physical object.

We need to admit that it isn’t and that that’s a terrible metaphor.

It’s still saved on disks somewhere, whether they’re a traditional HDD or a modern SSD.

Yes, often multiple copies are saved. Sometimes it is aggregated with other data, sometimes not. Making a new copy is insanely cheap, and, under the hood, even when just moving the data from the hard drive to the computer’s memory, a copy is made automatically. There’s no way to avoid copying the data.

But, to make it clear, “data” is basically “ideas”, and you can’t really treat ideas as objects. For thousands of years the idea that you could control ideas was ridiculous. You could control the physical object that an idea was expressed on, but if someone took their own time and copied it, that was a new object and the person who made the original had no claim on it.

Copyright, and its evil friends, is a relatively new concept where the government grants a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea. Stealing the physical object on which the idea is printed is one thing. But, now you can get in trouble for “stealing” the idea. That’s what you’re talking about with stealing “data”, is that what you’re supposedly “stealing” is information.

But, of course it’s not theft. When you copy an idea without permission, the person with the original doesn’t lose it, they just lose control over a copy of that information.

Treating ideas, data, etc. as physical objects just never works because ideas can be copied without the original person losing anything. This is different from physical objects where my taking it necessarily means that you no longer have it.

In other words, data was always as physical as words on the page of a book.

Not at all, because each copy of a book is its own physical object. Copying a book is difficult and requires its own printing press. Even a low-fidelity copy like a photocopy requires a photocopy machine, ink and paper. Copying data is essentially free. When copying a book required a printing press, you could sort-of pretend that ideas were objects because copying was so burdensome. But, with digital data it’s clearly ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you can’t have laws about data (i.e. information), it just means that those laws care going to have to be completely different from laws about physical objects.

Why did we accept the change in how ownership worked simply because of a change of storage medium?

Because copying is essentially free. It’s no longer an object, it’s information.

But, having said that, the storage medium isn’t a major issue. The real question is when did people start accepting that you could treat ideas as objects. Stealing a book out of someone’s backpack and photocopying a book are completely different crimes. In one case, the person no longer has the object. In the second case, they still have it, but they don’t have control over the copies of it.

Talking about data as if it’s an object or something you can own is a red herring. The real issue is privacy.

For instance, say you use a period tracker app, that is owned by an non-profit, trying to use the data to better understand women’s hormone changes so that they can get better medical care. Great! Ok, now what happens if that non-profit goes bankrupt and as part of the bankruptcy proceedings sells its data to Meta or Google so that it can afford to make payroll. Well shit, your data is now owned by them, and you’re out of luck.

A privacy rule handles that situation better. You can give the company access to your private data, and then revoke that access later. If your data is something they own, they can use it however they like. But, if you own your own privacy, it doesn’t matter if the period tracker app gets bought out or goes bankrupt or whatever. The data they have isn’t something they own and can sell, it’s private data that they had temporary access to.

Quantum computers aren’t fast, they’re very slow.

Eventually, if things keep progressing, they’ll be able to do certain things like factoring primes faster than conventional computers. But, the clock rate will probably always be abysmal.

Kindles too. You can jailbreak them and get a shell. They’re so much more useful when they’re jailbroken. They can read multiple other formats, they can get books from a fileserver on your local network, the jailbroken reader app is better, etc.

Yeah, it used to be just web servers in a data center. Bigger systems used mainframes. Consumer electronics used custom RTOSes or other custom boards. Now it’s everywhere. It’s used in the biggest systems, like the computers that power virtually every Google product, and the smallest systems. It’s almost not worth it not to use Linux when building a tiny device because it makes the dev cycle so much shorter.