Yet rife. My complaint to a major UK provide was rebuffed with the blatently false assertion that the email promoting a website refresh was an essential service email.
I think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.
If you lose an account due to negligence, it's on you, not the service provider.
Spam/junk folder is not "ignore" folder. You need to periodically check the contents of the spam/junk folder to see if any legitimate emails fell into that waste basket.
That "Mark as Spam" facility not only moves the offending message into Jink/Spam folder, it also allows the Email Service provider to identify that type of email as spam, so future incoming messages that match that may criteria can be categorized as spam, so they'll go into spam folder automatically, rather than into the Inbox. You can find them in the Jink/Spam folder.
However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.
So you need to be careful what you "Report as Spam". It is different action from "Mark as Spam".
"Report as Spam" may also prompt the user to "Block sender", so one must be careful not to block legitimate senders, though this action can usually be undone, as the Mailbox Settings will track the blocked senders so that lost can be corrected by the user if needed.
Gmail has a good trick that most users don't know or notice: In the Spam folder, the user can see a warning at the top of each email that explains why Gmail sent it to Spam.
So user can figure out why legitimate emails got wrongly flagged as Spam, and can prevent such future legitimate emails from falling into Spam folder: User can do this either by adding the sender to Contacts list (Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Spam folder), or by creating a filter to identify and action that message (flag it as Important, or label it with a custom category label, or move it to a specific subfolder, or forward it to another email ID).
>However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.
This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When companies like Walmart or Paypal or LinkedIn or Comcast or whoever spam thousands or millions of people, if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer
Or you got hacked by a spammer.
> even if you also happen to send legitimate emails.
And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email.
> if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPal email is far more important than being protected from PayPal spam, prevented from employing my own protection.
And it uses automated mechanisms to read every Gmail email, so it can train its AI LLMs and to serve more focused ads to its users.
So if a user receives PayPal emails and doesn't mark them as Spam or block them, I'm pretty sure Google interprets that as a user who uses eCommerce websites, and a good target for ada related to that market.
Sure, you can manually unmark them as spam, and gmail should respect that preference as well. But for the rest of us, it would be an improvement if Paypal was sent to spam by default until they were forced to stop sending spam.
I already have a ton of gmail filters and folders, most of which I rarely check.
Any organization that continues to send marketing material after someone clicks Unsubscribe (with maybe a grace period of a few hours) should have all of their email considered spam for everyone by default. If they continue or ever start sending marketing materials afterwards because of some new bullshit category, all of their email should be considered spam by default as well. If their Unsubscribe process is more complicated than one or two clicks, you should be able to report this as well, and... you guessed it, I think all of their emails should be considered spam by default for everyone.
Obviously I don't expect Gmail to do actually do this (except maybe by accident sometimes lol). But I wish they did.
My bad. I meant to say: "Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Inbox (they won't go into Spam folder)" (even if you had marked earlier emails from that sender as spam, but later added that sender as a Contact, so thenceforth they'll get treated as legitimate emails, not spam).
But if you have some filter for that Contact, that takes precedence.
I mean if said company first spammed you and you marked them as spam, then it is on them. No different than if someone sent you a bunch of unwanted letters and you threw them out, but one of them happened to be relevant. It's on the organization sending you junk.
Right, and I think that if they send spam, all email providers (especially gmail, the largest provider) should mark all their emails as spam by default. They are doing what is described above at a large scale, so large-scale reactions are needed.
Of course, if you manually mark them as not-spam, then gmail should respect your choice as a user.
I read through the speech, I'm still not sure if this is adopted or not. I found https://www.eu-inc.org/ which seems to be the origin of the proposal, but mentions a final implementation for 2027.
Just heard about this initiative as a European, I don't have an opinion yet.
> Just heard about this initiative as a European, I don't have an opinion yet.
Same! I'm cautiously optimistic, but need to await the criticism from the Americans before I can fully know what to think about it. I'm sure it'll pop up here any time soon, NYC is just about to wake up.
One disgust-moment I had was when AI narrated nature documentary on BBC or BBC-like channel and faked as David Attenborough. Now people may say "he got a great voice, even after he is gone we should have his voice" (he is old but not dead right now, thankfully - protect David at all costs), but I kind of changed my mind. I think AI should not fake stuff to us. So no fake-narrations either - what you see is what you get, at all times. On youtube this is now rampant; I need a minus AI version for youtube since AI just wastes my time.
Funnily enough the BBC have something of a standard when it comes to presenting foreign-language speakers through an interpreter that would have worked well here, AI or not, and that's to play the original speaker slightly before but quieter than the translation. You can hear their true voice and their intonation, but you still get the translation.
Agree with you on voices. I love Attenborough but I would strongly prefer that when he stops working or passes on we not recreate his voice or likeness with AI. It’d ruin his legacy because it’ll leave me with that feeling of disgust when I hear his voice, the exact opposite of what he’d want.
Off topic, but do you comment on reddit under the same handle?
Yes, it is an unpopular opinion around here, but pretty much in the tech world.
I think this is because most of the users/praisers of GenAI can only see it as a tool to improve productivity (see sibling comment). And yes, end of 2025, it's becoming harder to argue that GenAI is not a productivity booster across many industries.
The vast majority of people in tech are totally missing the question of morality. Missing it, or ignoring it, or hiding it.
An example would be YouTube's video IDs. It's custom-fit for a purpose (security: no, avoiding the problem where people fish for auspicious YouTube video numbers or something: yes).
Another example would be a function that sorts the numbers 0 through 999 in a seemingly random order (but's actually deterministic), and then repeat that for each block of 1000 with a slight shift. Discourages casual numeric iteration but isn't as complex or cryptographically secure as UUID.
How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.
We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved.
I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has.
I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.
> In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved.
Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets.
> I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget....
You forgot the "For the brief period of time their produce is in season."
Only selling what you have, when you have it removes a lot of costs from food supply chains. If, like the local grocery, those small, local, organic producers had to keep you fed 24/7/365, their prices would go up - by a lot.
I am also pretty confident that those small, local, organic producers aren't the source of most of their customers' caloric demands.
I live in a part of the world where the healthcare system is also spread across the society in a more equalitarian way than what you describe.
I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable.
Locally, it's having a community of farmers that grow different things that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept eating exotic food only very occasionally.
Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair.
Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
When I go to the grocery, food is available to me at any time of year.
Your friend's apples are only available for ~2 months/of the year. The supply chains that feed the world have to work year-round, and all the people that work them expect to get paid. Availability adds to the cost.
> What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today
I have a very hard time believing that the average apple from the 50s had 94 * 10 = 940 calories.
Which is the whole problem. Your friend's apple orchard is not a replacement for the modern grocery. It's a seasonal supplement that replaces the cheapest and easiest part of a diet - in-season produce.
And he has to work insanely hard all-year-long to do it.
> Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
Carbohydrates are way cheaper, but the distribution of nutrients you can get for any price has not gotten cheaper proportionally. Then you factor in choices, like paying rent vs eating healthier, etc etc.
> What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair.
>What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today.
At least an order of magnitude more calories? Just to be on the same page, you're saying that apples in the 50s had at least 10x as much calories as they do today? :DD
You realize an apple is ~10-12% sugar by weight, right? The rest is just water and fibre. So an apple with an order of magnitude more calories would mean a solid block of sugar. (alternatively, an apple that's 10x the size, but we have photos of 50s apples, and they were roughly the same size as today)
>I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has.
I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared meals, etc.
i'm always a little surprised by how low my cart total is when i just go into the store to refresh a few produce items. that said, eating healthy certainly hasn't gotten any cheaper. i've paid $1+ for a single onion which feels absurd
There are very few areas where it's physically possible to live like that.
And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.
reply