zebrask @zebrask@schelling.pt

The email says they will provide students and staff "the support they need to process this and other recent events."

I can only hope that this support takes the form of a course in statistical literacy and a warning against reading the news, but somehow I suspect it is just going to attempt to validate the narrative that it is right to think about extremely rare violence and to spend our precious life trying to reduce extremely small but salient risks. 🙁

Seriously, I'm sorry that the media tricked you into caring about unimportant stuff that you can do nothing about, but please don't take it out on my inbox.

Looking it up, about 5 people died and maybe 20 were injured, about half of those hospitalized. According to the CDC, the low end estimate of deaths/hospitalizations from flu this year so far is 2900 / 53,000, for a 50 day period. So it's killing 10x and hospitalizing 50x as many people as that shooting *every single day*, and the only mention of flu I see is not a dedicated email, it's item 5 in a monthly newsletter. And I don't even think they need to send me that.

My kid's school decided it was very important to email me about a shooting in a night club in *Colorado*, thousands of miles away from me.

When I asked them to please separate their emails into separate mailing lists for things like, "Friday is a half day" and things like, "Here is a thing that happened in the news", they acted like it was their solemn duty to tell everyone about some random shooting that happens to be in the news and didn't even happen at a school.

Are you able to describe what it feels like when you are hungry? If you were trying to explain the sensation of hunger to an alien, what would you say?

@jefftk I'm no expert but it seems like the practical problems would be minimized if they used opengraph tags to generate the previews, and were more efficient about how they do those fetches.

They should still respect robots.txt if performing automated actions, but with efficient preview generation I imagine people would mostly not care.

@jefftk I agree that that would satisfy the contract, but it seems a bit rules lawyer-y to suggest that they can solve the problem by changing to a nearly identical action taken in response to user action - unless you think most instances never *display* the link previews that calculate.

From a practical point of view, the problems identified in this thread don't seem like they would be solved by fetching in response to user action: https://better.boston/@crschmidt/109412294646370820

@trollishdelver Gonna be really hard to get largest army in a city with that many knights...

@jefftk Would this still be a issue if Mastodon lazily built its link preview caches only after the first user requests the link?

Is the issue the total number of requests, or the fact that they are happening automatically, whether or not a specific user requests them?

Just a friendly reminder from your local natalist, but having kids is really enjoyable and satisfying. 🙂