The BIGGEST mistake in the history of the public internet was in letting Marc Andreesen get away with adding the IMG SRC tag to NCSA Mosaic in 1992/3-ish.
The second-biggest mistake was allowing browsers to automatically load all images in a web page.
In both cases, the perpetrators should have been tarred and feathered, publicly mocked, then tarred and feathered again until they repented.
We should ban video from the public internet. It's the only way to be sure.
@ysbreker @cstross Programmers by and large share the general ignorance of systems under selection.
Email begets spam because the cost to send an email is zero; if you can make any money by sending email, it drowns.
If you want to make the thing work, you've got to acknowledge selection and build it so anti-social behavior rapidly acquires intolerable costs without building it so that it's a machine for enforcing normalcy.
What we've got is a machine enforcing the normalcy of advertising.
@8r3n7 Junk mail makes its money from the people paying to send it, who are operating on belief. (You can't prove people didn't come to your store because of the weekly flyer and people do use the coupons so it works, right? If you stop sending the flyer, people will stop coming!)
I get laminated discount cards and offers with every order, some places. Someone has a business as a successful parasite on the place I order from; it happens to involve sneezing flyers.
Charlie Stross
ysbreker
Graydon
Account: Computers
Poligofsky 🇨🇦 .. 🚫🤖