And why only Meta? Google's YouTube is brimming over with scam ads. Google is even more liable because it's not simply providing a platform where the scams are posted as content; it's taking money from the scammers and placing their ads.

Google does so knowingly. People are reporting the ads via the provided workflow and describe the scam. Yet the same scams persist. In spite of being informed about scammy advertisers, Google takes their money.

I would say that Facebook do have a valid point if they say that they are not liable for posted scammy content, even that content manipulates their algorithms in order to reach users. Google do not have any similar such defense.

Because that's not how any of this works.

Obviously! Please fill in the blanks.

This was civil injunction & damages case. For court to declare judgement against Google (or any other company) someone needs to sue them. That's expensive and people in EU are not nearly as sue-happy as people on other side of Atlantic. Many courts in EU also have loser-pays model so there is huge financial risk in suing huge multinational corporation whose final legal bill might be bigger than person's lifetime earnings. And depending on country they might not even have personal bankruptcy available to discharge that.

This also heavily relies on recent CJEU ruling (WebGroup/Coyote, 16 June 2026, C-188/24) which essentially opened up the E-Commerce Directive's liability shield that platforms have been relying on so far. Essentially it said that that platform's are not necessarily neutral hosting providers when they control the algorithms that determine the dissemination. So I would expect more rulings to come, but it will take time.

Microsoft Windows is so bad that most consumers just throw away their old computers and buy new ones when Windows stops working. The more persistent ones will search through some forums for solution, or nowadays try to work through something with AI.

> The AI industry is vile

Or is this just Apple looking no less vile than usual?

TXR is not abandoned. Though I have not published any commits in over a year, I am not unresponsive. There are not external issues being ignored.

Someone in the IRC channel reported that GNU Groff dropped support for PDF generation, which affects some makefile steps for doc generation. Affected downstream distros can work around that. Also a minor ./configure script issue: failure to detect int_max_t. Doesn't cause any actual problem; fixed it locally (unpublished).

The last couple of releases featured some important work: tail call optimization in the compiler/VM.

These days it is somehow hard to sit down and work on things like this because of how icky the world of computing has become lately. Getting a feel for how permanent of a thing this is.

Here is a log of unpublished commits over the latter half of 2025 and early 2026. Looks like I made some compiler fixes and improvements that are worth releasing. I see that I also scrapped the precedence demotion rule in the infix system in favor of new heuristics.

  f6e52fd3b (HEAD -> master) configure: fix failure to detect int_max_t.
  2ccd3143b configure: don't test for frexp or modf.
  e639c14bf doc/tests: correction to quadratic-roots function.
  c1df57975 struct: implement obj_struct_p via class check.
  8df1b655b cobj/struct: devirtualize equality substitution.
  dbc280857 structs: streamline special slot handling.
  3662f241e streams: implement shutdown-stream.
  77c99b74e streams: treat pid and handle independently in pipe_close.
  741efcad8 streams: track input direction in pipe streams.
  36ec87269 streams: add shutdown to strm_ops_init macro.
  53b697951 socket: use new enum for shutdown constants.
  469b6b947 streams: start of implementation of shutdown function.
  8e2f03d31 getopts: New :usage clause in define-option-struct
  daeb0e2c4 Nicer expression for flexible struct allocations.
  9be8ce734 New function: hash-seq-map.
  30ebc21ee New function: hash-seq-to.
  e04e62fdd Vim: no need to specially treat macrolet and symacrolet.
  9b0fc769c Clarify status of expander-only operators.
  be8ada1fb infix: replace precedence demotion with prefix coordination
  c72f7f3de infix: revise the precedence demotion rule.
  00074cf43 compiler: tighten elim-renames.
  a5d908edd tagbody: slight code rearrangement.
  6c42d4d4d tagbody/prog: use sys:blk and static blocks.
  44977153f compiler: bug: end instruction balance in bjmp handling
  57dd07d5a compiler: fix broken sys:switch compilation.
  46073a8ed compiler: new optimization for rename-like reg moves.
  204d31699 compiler: bug: merge-jump-thunks: invalid block deletion.
  27b4bf3ca (tag: txr-302, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Version 302.

In most of the history of the TXR project, it has been my predominant practice not to publish commits except at releases. I actually have a staging repo that is the upstream of all my local repos (in various virtual machines and whatnot). I rewrite history from time to time between these repos and the staging repo, like when a change made in one environment breaks something in another, requiring a fixup.

Thank you for TXR

My goodness, gzip is intelligent! Enjoy your job while you have it; put on some hip hop music and practice your pivoting.

Also, renters of well-behaved, toilet-trained, quiet pets are subsidizing renters with ADHD children.

ADHD creates the founders that create the returns that pay for the operations of the site we are reading.

Neither do you apparently:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/adhd/symptoms...

"Hyperactive means being too active and having too much energy. It may include disruptive behavior."

"Run around or climb in situations when it's not proper."

"may include" - do you really want to argue the side that ADHD children exist in a proportion that damage apartments that noticably increase the cost on tenants without children? Is that what your imagined ADHD child is doing, just ripping apart the walls?

Both generalizations seem to be intentionally exaggerating to make their points.

Those symptoms wouldn't be listed if they weren't clinically validated. Unless you think you know better than the doctors who wrote the book on it (wouldn't surprise me at all if you did).

You think you know that ADHD children cost other renters significant money? Have you raised children? ( It wouldn't surprise me at all if you haven't )

With a big help from some non-ADHD children. However, in all seriousness, most rental damage caused by children likely gets covered by damage deposits, or else charged to that unit.

So why would you not just do the same with pets? Pets soil the common areas of a building, requiring ongoing maintenance that can't always easily be charged back to a particular unit, so I can understand why some rentals would impose surcharges.

Maybe they should start with something easy, like building a simple wall.

> ~ asks a question about a value and gets back a number or a label, never text. Here it is a probability, and the if fires at >= 0.5.

In other words this could be done in plain Python using:

  if squiggle_probability(msg, "customer wants refund"):
    ...
  else:
    ...

The ~ operator does not apply special evaluation rules to its argument expressions, and so can be a function, and that function can also roll in the probability thresholding (another closely-related function can return the raw probability).

The Lisp rules of thumb about when to use macros and not to use them apply elsewhere, such as here, but are not well known.

It's vaguely analogous to why ray tracing goes backwards.

Which is also not obvious especially given the way it's presented is that it goes forwards.

The naive explanation from the top of my mind (I used to know it better years ago, when I was toying with writing raytracers): because viewport is fixed, an it's much less rays to trace if you cast from viewport pixels in various directions, than if you cast from light sources in every direction and throw away ~99% of them as they never pass through the viewport. Plus, you get spatially uniform image this way, whereas realistic take would oversample the bright parts before giving you any samples for the dark parts.

Nope! Interest rates significantly affect house prices in an environment in which houses are are affordable by large numbers of people to whom interest rates are of paramount importance.