edent

What's the worst that can happen if you were to text a friend "Heya mate, bit of a long shot - do you know anyone who can help repair a 1983 Reliant Robin?"

Best case, they know someone or can dig through their contact and help you solve your problem.

Medium case, they text back "No - has your shitbox died again? Can't believe you still have that thing :-)" and you can have a pleasant back and forth.

Worse case, you get a "no". Oh well, at least texts don't cost 12p each any more.

I just think it is nice to chat with your pals. But, sure, stick to scans of old manuals on Archive.org if you just want pure information.

The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.

The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.

But, like, you only see the people who are out and about, right?

You don't see the people trapped inside. Stuck in hospitals. Sat staring at a phone that never rings.

You never talk to people who don't feel comfortable talking to a stranger.

I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)

Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.

https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...

There's also some detailed stats for the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...

Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.

Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.

Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.

The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.

Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?

It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".

OK. If you interview the President and he repeatedly lies - is it OK to just publish that interview? Or should you push back on those lies? Do you owe it to your audience to let them know the king is mad?

The risk, of course, is that you don't get invited back. That's "The Test" in the post.

Why are you pushing back at me in a private conversation then?

Why wouldn't you do the same if I said something outrageously offensive in public?

If a leading politician says something deranged like "all crime is caused by gay people" - should the newspaper simply report that verbatim? Or should they say "the President lied today, and here are the facts that shows he is wrong"?

Sometimes it helps for institutions to point out the the emperor has no clothes. The social reinforcement of norms is hugely influential.

If you publish a podcast where your guest encourages heinous behaviour without you challenging - that's a you problem.

Saying "Well, our listeners can decide for themselves" is a cowardly cop-out.

You might not be able to change the interviewee's mind but you can sure as hell send social signals to your audience that you condemn their views or think they're ludicrous.

Case in point - why are you trying to change my mind here? You're pushing back because you want to signal to others that my point of view is incorrect. That sort of basic interrogation seems completely missing in (especially American) media.

That's not an interview, that's at best stenography and at worse sycophancy.

If, for example, an interviewee said in all seriousness "I want to shoot all dogs and make the poor eat their babies" would you expect the interviewer to go go "Hmmm very interesting. Why do you think that?"

No.

It is vital that interviewers challenge the subject. Especially when they say something profoundly ludicrous or disturbing. Otherwise they might has well just be in PR.

I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".

The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.

He passed the test.

People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.

No one is being "replaced" - that's just a racist talking point. You can look at the ethnicity statistics at https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-popula...

But, of course, ethnicity doesn't really matter in this context. There have been black people in the UK since at least Tudor times. Read Miranda Kaufmann's excellent book on the subject.

How long does someone have to live here to count, in your expert opinion? The UK invited thousands of people from all over the Empire to fight for us during WW2. They and their descendants are now as British as anyone else here.

What about the descendants of the Huguenots? Do they count as "replacing" or do you think it's OK because of their skin colour?

Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were good alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.

Contactless payments do work on Graphene - but only with the Curve app. It also requires the card-holder to be from the UK or EU.

I'm in London right now.

May I politely invite you to fuck off with your racism.

Indigenous? What the fuck are you talking about? Seriously? Why are you so happy to be racist in public?

Stop getting your news from social media. Come over to London, have a pint in a Desi pub and try telling us that we're living in hell. See how that works out for you.

I am one of the dozens of people who don't live in the USA.

Here's my blog post about how I cooked them. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/lets-eat-banana-peel/

Banana peels are delicious if cooked correctly. You can make a surprisingly tasty "facon" with them.

Go down to literally any 2nd hand phone store and buy a refurb. None of your money will go to Google and you'll have your phone at a fraction of the new price.

He's literally calling for ethnic cleansing. What word would you use to describe him?

I agree in those specific cases (and I've spent a long time inside Government trying to encourage more adoption of .gov.uk and .NHS.uk).

But when you get a text with "your Amazon parcel is delayed plz visit amazaoncom.parcel-delay.info", that looks pretty official to most people.

I dont see how org.ukpaynatwest-online is any easier to spot as a scam.

Take a look at many of the domains you see in phishing emails / texts. They're all pretty obvious if you spend all day looking at domains and considering their provenance. Most people don't.

I like the idea of highlighting the TLD - but I do wonder if it would just become an expensive boondoggle like EV Certificates.

There are some gTLDs like .bank which require a high level of verification. The applicant has to be a financial institution etc.

The problem is twofold. I've never seen a .bank domain in the wild and users generally don't looks at the TLD.

Would people be fooled by "bank.uk-natwset.com"? Probably.

I agree with you that this is definitely in be careful what you wish for territory.

The author (who is handsome and talented) is based in the UK - so tries hard not to be US centric. Hence the use of €.

As for the contradictions - yes. There's a famous aphorism "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

I think it is important to explore a problem and its possible solutions. It allows you to work where the issues are and prevents people saying "why didn't you consider…?".

Perhaps they complain because that's literally the only way to get Google to take notice?

Let's be real, AOSP doesn't exist any more. Google have closed down nearly everything. All the development happens in private, you've stopped addressing bugs raised by the public, the source of patches are only infrequently released, device trees are gone.

Wouldn't you complain?

OK, so I have a legitimate domain. I can add any subdomain I want without recourse.

projects.example.com or new.cool.thing.example.com

So nothing stops me from registering a legitimate domain, using it for a bit, then launching the subdomain `pay-your-tax.gov.uk.official.example.com`

It must be legit - it has the .gov.uk in it!

I think the "actual objection" is the hardest part.

The UK Government might legitimately object to the registration of `dwpgov-uk-payments.pizza` but should they be allowed to object to `dwp-gov-uk-stole-my-payments.fart`?

One might be obviously dodgy, the other is someone ranting about their experience. Do you think Governments should be able to object to domains complaining about them?

England have just scored the winning goal in the world cup and I want to celebrate by launching my personal tribute on Lionesses.rock

Why shouldn't that go live instantly?

A disgraced pop star has just been found guilty. I couldn't register Bob-The-Builders-Crimes.uk before the verdict and I want to get my story out now.

I've had a brilliant idea for an eCommerce website but it is 1705 on a Friday night and, because no one works weekends, I have to wait until next week before the domain is agreed.

I agree that there's no great harm in having to wait a day, or a week, for registration to complete. But in a world of instant gratification, it feels old fashioned.

I have some experience of dealing with this when working for .gov.uk

A registrar can accept an anonymous payment for taxgovuk.gtld and have it live within seconds. The spam messages go out instantly to the victims.

By the time the certificate is seen on the transparency logs and the takedown request sent, it's too late. The criminals have taken what they need and they don't care that the domain is now blocked or on warning lists.

At the risk of sounding too libertarian - do we want domain registrations to be subject to a 24 hour mandatory wait period to see if there are legitimate objections? Should registrars do strong KYC checks on people? Should certain substrings be banned?

I struggle to think of a reasonable way to prevent this which doesn't also harm legitimate users. I don't know what the calculus is between annoying the lawful and frustrating the lawless.

WordPress powered a huge number of websites. Yet the crawlers all go straight for the HTML of those sites rather than the more efficient and structured JSON API which all WordPress sites have.

If these crawlers are so smart, why aren't they following the rel="alternate" which is provided explicitly for them?