Periodic shaking my fist at software: none of the email clients I use will say “Looks like you’re replying to no-reply at ; consider using service at as suggested in body of email.”

Customer-hostile behavior from the system (technical and otherwise) sending the original email, of course, but given it is very common customer-hostile behavior happening in one’s own product surface, might as well fix it.

Sidenote: now that cognition is abundant I wonder when we’ll start seeing “Put an automated watcher on every human user on every interaction that generates a database record and provide a constant streaming list of frustration tickets to the prioritization committee.”

The number of emails sent in the world? Stupidly large. Number of humans at a keyboard typing out emails? Much smaller, but still very large. You couldn’t possibly watch every keystroke in real time and *record scratch* oh you totally can.

If it’s rate limited by a human doing something in meatspace, and typing counts and swiping a credit card counts, you can watch *all of it.* We are nowhere near figuring out what that means for our products, to say nothing of our society.

“Society?” There was a period of intense enthusiasm for having the tech companies adjudicate all human utterances in substantially real time so they could interdict various asserted ills. One argument against: impossible workload. Insufficient call centers anywhere.

Some folks who profess to profoundly hate tech companies and all their works might again say “Wait a minute… you can detect all the wrongthink in real time? We want to have a conversation about your responsibilities.”