Meanwhile today Dutch kids get these extremely large screens at the front of the class to stare at all day for every little thing, the day's schedule, everything. Huge screens, some stretch nearly the entire width of the classroom, with about a third of desks within just three meters of it. All day.
That period was encoded in a symbol string, i.e. it is a bit string.
Today we encode everything in bi-symbol strings.
This was not common when Gödel crafted his incompleteness theorem. And at the time it was a novel approach for setting up a context for testing the limits of computing.
Some people can still be struck by it as novel when reading the proof, because in context it was, and still feels that way. But today "symbol string" representation is ordinary and pervasive.
This site is almost impossible to read on mobile unless you have good vision. Normally I can just hit the button in my phone browser to read it in reader mode, but this site doesn’t support that either. It’s a shame.
I am surprised that in 2026 more websites don’t seem so concerned about responsive design, especially when the goal is to read the content.
One thing I have never understood in this current age is how in the world so many companies, including ones that handle confidential data like banks, don’t require a user to verify their email address after it’s entered. I have an unfortunately very generic email address that’s easy to mistype, and I am almost every day receiving order receipts for expensive vacation hotels, bank transfer or wire transfer confirmations, a very long list of things that I should not be receiving simply because the companies sending those emails never had the user verify if they entered the right email address. They are legitimate emails, they are often addressed to someone with the same first name as me but a different last name, so that person simply typed the wrong email address accidentally.
It’s bonkers to me that there’s any developers out there working for these companies that never thought to implement simple email verification.
I have a very early gmail address. A very common first name plus two letters. It is almost unusable by now. Invoices, subscriptions, important documents about some persons real estate dealings. They all end up in my inbox.
I have around 20 or 30 google accounts attached where i am the backup email address. Those people forget their passwords or stop using their accounts and i get email notifications about that. No confirmation from my side necessary.
I set up a new address that is less likely to end up with this problem. But migrating away from the old one is not easy…
> I have around 20 or 30 google accounts attached where i am the backup email address. Those people forget their passwords or stop using their accounts and i get email notifications about that. No confirmation from my side necessary.
Does google not require a verification when you setup a backup email address?!
You can add any address as a backup email address for a google account. And for some reason there are a number of people that just attached my email address, possibly by mistake.
Exactly the same situation with me in terms of gmail address (although my names are less common).
I get so many other $MY_NAME emails, including bills (including multiple credit cards and things like Afterpay), deliveries, medical details/reports, family communications, etc, etc.
And it's very clear that quite a few online services blatantly don't verify email addresses, they just assume the email is valid and allow the person to start using it.
Because confirming the email introduces friction. And everyone is optimising for low friction even if it risks private data leaks, which you can always blame on the user for typing their email wrong.
Yes it is insane. I am in same boat and have received mortgage applications, police details, applications for police jobs, massage receipts you name it. Many would be considered important leaks of customer data.
I have even had founder level emails that presumably are confidential sent to me because I share the name of someone operating in tech.
I respond or report when it's obviously some real person running a small group but for large monoliths there is very little to do except quickly reply to corporate email.
Really wish there was some kind of high level discussion about building something for this specific problem of non malicious wrong person same name errors.
Google could do it it's just not something that is monetizable at a scale they care about IMO and I have not been able to think of a way to make this work operating outside of email monoliths.
What Google has done, is add profile pictures for users, so if I'm emailing girlfriend@gmail.com I get her picture, but if I email giirlfriend@gmail.com, I see someone else's pfp which is enough to get me to realize I've spelled it wrong. I'm sure there's more they could be doing, but they're aware of the problem at least.
Commend your effort to actually contact the companies to let them know the error. I stopped doing that a long time ago when I stopped getting response or stopped getting any kind of meaningful reaction that I was actually trying to do something good by reporting it.
>It’s bonkers to me that there’s any developers out there working for these companies that never thought to implement simple email verification
Other POV: I simply do not use email — like at all (don't even have a SPAM account anymore) — if your website requires me to enter an email address just to buy something, I WILL find a burner/temporary email that will allow the transaction script to proceed ("10 minute email").
I am personally grateful when a store allows me to proceed with a guest transaction [i.e. non-login, non-email purchase] — even if that means I might need to "call in" should the transaction be flagged/delayed [usually isn't].
Intentionally not giving examples to avoid hacker/targetting, but many US clothing manufacturers offer these frictionless (and legitimate) purchase pathways.
I am dismayed that it is legal to create an account attached to an email without validation of that email. It should be straight-up massive fine illegal to send any email other than account confirmation until validated. Validation emails should have a "do not contact me again" that works with a single click and a massive fine if it does not.
I get this stuff all the time. Once, I got the information someone requested about a drug company helping cover the cost of a drug for a lower-income individual (who was apparently the one who mistyped his email address). It included his name, city, and some other personal information. The drug was only approved for one medical issue. Total HIPAA/HITECH violation.
They didn’t have a HIPAA coordinator by title, so I got to explain how to avoid this to their legal department.
This is intentional. Email verification is friction, so it gives users a chance to reconsider whether their purchase is really necessary. This is bad for business, because they’d prefer if you were impulsive.
Also, people usually type their emails correctly, especially these days with auto-fill. So not sending confirmation emails is optimizing for the happy path.
I know e-mail has a faster round-trip, but they also don't ask you to confirm snail mail.
I think it would be quite annoying to have to verify my purchase everywhere, just like how I don't wanna sign up to every single merchant online. Let me purchase as guest without having to enter OTPs.
Technically you cannot implement a proper Y-combinator in Lisp (well, I'm sure in Common Lisp and Racket there is some way) because the classic Y-combinator relies on lazy, not strict, evaluation. Most of the "Y-combinators" people have implemented in Lisp/Scheme/JavaScript/etc are more accurately described as the "applicative order Y-combinator" (also Z-combinator)
Funnily enough, you also cannot* implement the Y-combinator in Haskell (probably the most popular language with lazy evaluation) because the type system will not be happy with you (the Y-combinator, by it's nature, is untyped).
The Netherlands is a different kind of environment because there is a calculated policy of not doing anything that could reduce home values. This trickles through all policies for any action that could meaningfully solve the housing crisis.
I exaggerate but the tax structure is such that it encourages using your home as an investment vehicle. We'll see where things go with it but proposed changes to box 3 rules taxing unrealized gains may effectively destroy the possibility of saving any money in something that isn't your primary residence or a pension...
The kind of coffee you drink can make a huge difference as well. Filter coffee is typically larger in volume so there’s more acidic liquids going in to trigger your heartburn. Compared to espresso which is usually a smaller volume. It can be a huge difference in heartburn between coffee types.
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