bazfoo

As with all things, this is a context where the important information was on-platform and the emails were opt-in subscriptions. YMMV.

> It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.

On the contrary. Each send costs. This adds up. It also adds cost to the overall processes involved due to unbounded growth in possible recipients.

Reputation with service providers is another concern. Google, for instance, will punish a sender's deliverability if enough recipients never open emails. Failing to clean your list impacts the ability to deliver to active users.

> What percentage of your addresses never phone home?

These were an extreme outlier. Such that it's simpler to send an email communicating the pending removal unless they opt-in.

> So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.

These decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Links themselves are also tracked. Those users also weren't actively clicking emails either.

On the system I was cleaning up, something like 20% of outbound emails had _zero_ engagement.

> You know, I wonder if there's something here that a next-generation language can't get in on, some sort of help to provide to the developer who says "OK, I'd like to upgrade this package for people, could you please help me ensure that I'm not going to break anybody in the process?"

Russ has proposed a "go release" command that is intended to help with that process. It's probably simple right now, but has lots of room to grow in that direction.

See: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-cmd

On the flipside, I see a lot of tools pushed that are more complicated, less flexible, and far buggier than the old tools. And then inevitably in a few years they're deprecated in favour of something newer and shinier and the old tools are still perfectly fine (e.g. Make).

I concur with the sentiment.

The risk is still there for dependencies, but it helps that the community for the most part follows "a little copying is better than a little dependency" as an adage.

I'm in Australia and looking at a box of plain Ibuprofen. It also recommends limiting to a few days at a time unless told otherwise by a doctor.

While the joke is relatively amusing, it would be better to seem more useful solutions contributed to the ecosystem like depscheck [1] for Go.

[1]: https://github.com/divan/depscheck

I found myself doing the same thing for Ansible.

The problem I ran into was where I wanted to test service restarting in a systemd based environment. Older releases using sysvinit work perfectly fine.

I'm having trouble finding data that is using the same methodologies. The CIA World Fact-book specifically seems to be lacking data for Australia.

It would be good to see some solid data, because one thing that surprised me while travelling in the USA was the extreme poverty I saw just down the road from extremely wealthy neighborhoods.

Not to say that Australia doesn't have its own set of problems, particularly in Indigenous Communities, but this seems to operate at a wholly different level.

And you can have something fun like the following in your bashrc to allow attaching to your running emacs daemon any time you need in the terminal:

    function semacs() {
      emacsclient -t -a "" "/sudo::$(realpath $@)"
    }

It seems to me that the explicit separation (and vagueness) of 'compter' and 'computer system' seems intended to have the latter cover networks. But perhaps you're right.

Are there any good pointers to where the amendments have actually expanded surveillance capabilities? I've been going through the amendments and comparing them to the original bill, but so far I'm finding a lot of rewording.

For instance, the definition of computer[1] that is being suggested to allow monitoring of the entire internet is:

  computer means all or part of:
    (a)  one or more computers; or
    (b)  one or more computer systems; or
    (c)  one or more computer networks;
    (d)  any combination of the above.

Whereas the old definition[2] was:

  computer means a computer, a computer system or part of a computer system.

Both of these seem equivalent in my eyes. If so, the horse seems to have already bolted years ago.

Frankly I have no idea where to go from here. How does one talk to your local MP when the details of the proposed legislation are so muddy?

[1]: http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w...

[2]: http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2014C00613/Html/Text#_Toc3...

Had this happen recently. The error logs and console output ended up not being particularly informative, so I downloaded and installed the Steam client again. Sorted out whatever kink was hanging the client at start, and the game library was still intact.

I've developed this habit as a consequence of using history to understand the context of a piece of code. Big commits make life harder for future maintainers.