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T-Rex: Speaking of being unable to intuitively understand large numbers!

T-Rex: Which I was!
T-Rex: A couple of days ago!!

T-Rex: It occurs to me that the internet exploits that in much the same way! If I get 86,400 emails in a day, that's one email every SECOND. And if those email all say I'm a horrible person, guess what? I'm going to conclude after getting A EMAIL EVERY SECOND SAYING I'M HORRIBLE that I'm probably pretty horrible! It is absolutely going to feel like the entire world hates me!!

Utahraptor: 86,400 is a lot of people to send you emails!
T-Rex: Absolutely!

T-Rex: BUT IT'S NOT THE WHOLE WORLD. It's 0.001% of the whole world. But it FEELS like the whole world!
Utahraptor: Because we don't have an intuition for how many people that is.
T-Rex: Exactly!!

T-Rex: In conclusion, you shouldn't be too concerned with what strangers think, unless you're getting messages from a strict majority of them, which I calculate works out to at least 44,000 emails per second

What are the haps my friends

November 8th, 2021: There was a time in my life when I got about two emails a minute. It overlapped with the time in my life when I thought "Hey, it'd be a good idea to set it up so every email address at qwantz.com points to mine!" and the time in my life when I didn't know "Hey, spammers will just GUESS at emails and send messages to made-up addresses that don't exist." I ended up training a classifier to identify the non-spam that ran constantly, until I was at a CL conference talking to someone about classifying spam and he said "That's the most I've heard one person getting. Why don't you just turn off your catchall address?" and I was like "...HUH. Right. That... is a reasonable solution that doesn't require an AI classifier to solve.

One year ago today: honestly butterflies don't weigh that much, stepping on a metric ton of them is - it's just awful. i'm sorry but there's absolutely no way you do that without deliberate, malicious intent

– Ryan