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Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.

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Want to unsubscribe from this email? Ok, you can do it in one click, but we have 16 categories of emails we send you, so you'll still get the other 15! It's a dark pattern for sure.

And by unsubscribing, you just gave us a signal that you are active.

They’re sad they can’t point that particular marketing hose at you, anymore, but appreciate confirming your validity as a lead they’ll sell to data brokers.

1.3076744e+12 -1 is a lot of categories to click.

1,307,674,368,000

[ ] 231,846,239,211 “Messages related to wetland fauna migratory patterns and their impact on commodity spice markets, also Pepsi advertising”

e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point

Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it

Nothing to do with Google.

(Apologies if this is pedantic, but:)

The letter "e" (for "exponent") has meant "multiplied by ten to the power of", since the dawn of computing (Fortran!), when it was impossible to display or type a superscripted exponent.

In computing, we all got used to it because there was no other available notation (this is also why we use * for multiplication, / for division, etc). And it's intuitive enough, if you already know scientific notation, which Fortran programmers did.

Scientific notation goes back even further, and is used when the magnitude of the number exceeds the available significant digits.

E.g., Avogadro's number is 6.02214076 × 10⁻²³. In school we usually used it as 6.022 × 10⁻²³, which is easier to work with and was more appropriate for our classroom precision. In E notation, that'd be 6.022E-23.

1.3076744e+12 is 1.3076744 × 10¹². The plus sign is for the positive exponent, not addition. You could argue that the plus sign is redundant, but the clear notation can be helpful when working with numbers that can swing from one to the other.

The use of E notation for scientific notation dates back to 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation#:~:text=wh...

It’s also pretty common on scientific and graphing calculators; the first time I saw it was in junior school in maths.

And if you just add them to your spam filter, it won't even work easily, because they deliberately shift around the domains and subdomains they send from every so often.

I just use a unique address for each service. Any email that gets leaked or is getting unsubscribe resistant spam is added to /etc/postfix/denied_recipients :)

Appending "+label" to the username part of an email address is legal and will be delivered to the username mailbox.

Doesn’t sound like a very fun hobby, TBH.

no the op, but I find great joy in looking though who sends me spam (based on the unique email used to sign up for each service)

I think it scratches a similar itch to putting up a game camera to see what sort of vermin are running around in your back yard.

You inevitably catch LexisNexis shitting in your herb garden and leaving squirrel carcasses lying about…

Luckly they don't seem to shift the addresses they send to, so if you own the domain you use for email you can make dedicated addresses for each service you sign up for. Then filter based on the `to:` field.

this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.

I agree this would be a good use of an LLM (assuming that it was running locally). I wouldn't put one in charge of deleting my messages, but I could see one being used to assign a score to messages and based on that score moving them out of my inbox into various folders for review.

I'd be really interested to see a comparison between LLM spam scoring and a traditional spam scoring algorithm because an LLM is essentially a spam generator. Can that be used to make a better spam detector?

Same can be achieved with a catch all domain and a sub for every service you use. Cost $13/year. Extra protection: now if you lose access to your email provider, you still have access to future emails.

Thanks again for unsubscribing! This is your weekly reminder that you are still unsubscribed. As usual, we've included a little bonus for you to enjoy at the end of this unsubscribe-reminder e-mail: a complementary full edition of this week's newsletter!

Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.

Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.

Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.

So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.

I've taken to "Archiving" apps like this on my Android phone. When I need it, I can un-archive it to use it. Keeps the list of things trying to get my attention a little bit smaller.

I just hellban every app from sending any notifications, except for a select few. Apps get like a one strike policy on notification spam. If they send a single notification I didn't want, I disable their ability to send notifications at all.

Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.

Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.

> YouTube was the worst offender before for me.

Uber. Hands down. I'm using it a lot less since they started sending ads on the same notification channel as my ride updates.

Another technique for me is to avoid apps like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. I run them all through mobile Firefox with uBlock origin and custom block scripts that block sponsored posts and shorts. This combines well with having Youtube's history turned off which prevents the algorithmic suggestions.

I give apps a one strike policy on notification spam. If they do it at all, I'm uninstalling it until I actually need to use it next (if I can't find an alternative). And the same goes for getting in my way to beg for a review on the app store: that's a shortcut to getting a one-star rating.

The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.

This is the way. You get one chance, app. If you send me an unwanted notification, you're done. You have to almost treat these apps as attackers.

Why even give most apps even one chance? For almost every app I have zero interest in ever getting a notification from. I see no reason to give them an opportunity to annoy me even once.

Honestly because I won't remember to go into the settings page and disable it. When a notification comes in, there's a quick route to disable forever, otherwise I have to go preemptively digging

Why do you even need the United app? They have a website.

This is why whenever you try to do anything significant on a web site with a phone, they tell you to "Download our app". Detection is very good now. Slack can see right through desktop mode, cheater, and will redirect you to the app regardless.

Never had that issue on Vanadium browser, or Brave or even Firefox. I personally refuse to download an app if there is a website for the same. For a long time I was even using door dash in browser.

Why use a website at all, then? United has a reservations 800 number and you can print your boarding pass at the airport.

I get the sarcasm, but it's like comparing apples to oranges. Calling a number and talking to people is vastly different to clicking some buttons on your phone. App/website have almost same user interface, just different ways to get to that interface. Calling the number is totally different interface.

Often there is an extra fee to use the 800 number. (I'm not sure about United, but some places do that)

Boarding pass. For the airline apps, it probably is a good assumption that most people want to get a notification that their flight is delayed, or started boarding, etc..

They don't advertise it, but you can many times add the Apple Wallet pass from the website. And it actually sends you flight change notifications too.

Unfortunately the Apple wallet boarding pass is often out of date with any gate changes. The app will update immediately.

Sending ad notifications is a recent trend, normally Apple guidelines don’t allow it, but they know that Apple cannot much fuss about with all the regulatory pressure.

It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.

When I get email like that, I mark it as spam. That trains the spam filters to remove their marketing email from everyone's inbox. I see it as a community service.

That behavior is what finally got me off Facebook awhile back.

Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.

LinkedIn does the same thing re emails, notifications, etc that they send. I think I turned off notifications that connections had achieved new high scores in games they play on LinkedIn. Absurd.

I especially like how they add it to the bottom of a widget with hidden scrollbars, just to make it totally missable that they added them at all!

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