That’s one of those paradoxes with human behavior around problems. If you put in effort to resolve the problem before it becomes significant, either no one notices, or they claim your effort was unnecessary because it wasn’t a problem in the first place.
Y2K bugs are a great example. Lots of effort, time, and money was spent ahead of time to prevent it from becoming a problem…and you get people claiming the whole thing was just nothing to be worried about at all and the expense was pointless.
what’s Y2K bugs exactly?
Dates with the year stored as two digits only (say, 1995 was stored as “95”), which worked fine for things like comparisons (for example: “is the year in entry A before or after the year in entry B?”) which were just done by numerical comparison (i.e. 98 > 95 hence a date with a year ending in 98 is after a date with the year ending in 95), until 2000 were the year being store would become “00” and all those assumptions that you could compare those stored years as numbers would break, as would as all the maths being done on two digits (i.e. a loan taken in 1995 would in 1998 be on its 98 - 95 = 3rd year with that system, but in 2000 it would be on its 98 - 00 = - 98th - so negative - year which would further break the maths downstream with interesting results like the computer telling the bank it would have to give money to the lender to close the loan).
Ultimatelly a lot of work was done (I myself worked in some of that stuff) and very few important things blew up or started producing erroneous numbers when the year 2000 came.
There is no glory in prevention
The message at the bottom sounds like pretty shitty move.
Message at the bottom sounds like someone trying to distance themselves from reddit and Twitter. It’s an excellent move that I support completely. It’s free, the content gets delivered to you directly upon it being uploaded, and a newsletter doesn’t want any extra data out of you other than an email address to send your letters to.
Also the comics will probably end up posted here anyway, since it doesn’t ask you not to repost them, so why does it matter?
Why not just post the comics on the website like every other comic author does. Even this comic is normally posted on the workchronicles.com website, but for some reason, the author added this to the website:
📣 ANNOUNCING
NEWSLETTER NOVEMBER!
For the entire month of November, the comics will be posted only on my Email Newsletter.
Join now. It’s free!
Stopping posting on website and posting only in newsletter, which many people including me find extremely annoying and not the right tool for the job, can’t be excused by distancing from twitter or reddit.
at least posting on website means it shows up in my RSS reader …
newsletters can have trackers and shit built right in, and this is especially true when using a service to do the mailing. this is, of course, on top of the contact info and anything else requested at ‘signup’. none of which needs to be ‘required’ when reading a web site or an author-submitted post somewhere. there’s basically two reasons to lock content behind a ‘newsletter’: a paid sub is coming, or selling readers’ data.
Just because they CAN have trackers doesn’t make them all bad. You do not know this mailing list does, so it is blatant fear mongering.
You may as well be complaining about how web cookies can be used for bad things. Is it true? Yes. Is it true everywhere? NO! And writing rules around it so ignorantly is how you get the GDPR clause where EVERYONE has a cookie warning popup and hides the tracking cookie options a couple pages in, so they STILL use tracking cookies, and now with legally “informed” consent!
The fear mongering made the situation WORSE because ignorant fucks were more afraid than informed.
Stop being an ignorant fearmonger.
GDPR requires companies to offer a “only neccessary cookies” option that is easily accessible. Anytime you find a site that works as you’ve described you can and should report them.
Also, there are plenty of options for blocking those popups and/or auto selecting only neccessary.
Doesn’t sound like you’ve been paying attention the last 20 years if you think this highly of tech companies
My opinion is about email, not tech companies. If they’re tracking you, it’s most likely not through email.
…tech companies use email all day long to link digital data together. Most people who manage a newsletter do not write their own newsletter software. In fact practically none of them do. Ergo, you get tracked via newsletter also.
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