In 2020, I took a Gmail account I had used for almost nothing and dedicated it to two purposes in life: to subscribe to the Arlington List and to email people on the Arlington List privately.

(The Arlington List is the storied high-volume discussion list of the town of Arlington, MA.)

I subscribed and just let it run. I have not gotten any non-list email at this address in years, nor have I sent or received any private (non-list) emails with it in years - something like 3.

Of the emails I have ever received - 99%+ being list traffic, Gmail assigned:

• 20,668 to "Inbox"
• 26,565 to "Forums"
• 2,605 to "Updates"
• About 300 to "Promotions" which I unassigned before realizing I should capture this.
• Some non-zero number to spam, but how many I don't know because I wasn't monitoring it closely and some got auto deleted I think. I think I caught a few dozen over the years.

Now, these categories aren't exclusive and Gmail won't tell me how many emails are in my account total, so I have no idea how these actually break down. [Edit: it figured it out! 39,895 total.]

Also some comparatively small number of list emails might have been reassigned by me in early days.

But basically this is what Gmail's default "smart" filtering did left to its own devices, in the easiest of all possible cases.

In case it weren't clear, this is inexcusably wrong. All emails came from the same sender and were clearly all marked as being part of the same service - both in the human-readable parts and with all the conventional header fields for identifying a Mailman list to the recipient server.

This test reveals that Gmail's smart filtering is profoundly terrible in a way which is invisible in normal usage. You would never find the misfiled emails if there were other sources they would be lost among. There would always be an excuse for why it misfiled them.

Without other senders, it demonstrates that Gmail can't reliably file things sensibly.

Weird anthropology of science question du jour:

If there's a research journal article published in the Jan 1969 issue of the journal, what is the plausibly latest possible date the manuscript was submitted to the journal?

It was a toxicology mouse study published in a pharmacology journal, in the US, if it matters.

I'm not interested in how long it would take to go from manuscript submission to publication *today*, I am specifically interested in this historical point in time. And I know there can be effectively endless rounds of revisions requested, I'm trying to get a last plausible date the manuscript might have been submitted, allowing for whatever uncompressible timeline there would have been in the 1960s for preparing and publishing a hardcopy academic journal. So assume it had the shortest possible reasonable timeline for approval.

From @nprofile1q... at https://resiliencymentalhealth.com/2026/03/17/armani-rejects-behavior-modification/

When I say Behaviorism Is Vastly Harder Than It Looks, this is what I mean.

You know how cold it is? It's MINUS zero. That's even colder than regular zero.

Hey, is anybody else getting their phone blown up by scammers/spammers on #Signal? I have two Signal accounts, and one of them – the rather more public one I use for business – has been getting a spam message on average every 15 minutes around the clock starting about a day ago, each time from another account. This is vaguely annoying but mostly just mystifying.

(I also got three plaintext SMS scam messages in the same time frame, which that number never gets.)

I'm wondering if it's a product of some sort of targeted if ineffectual malevolence I should take personally or just the weather on the internet these days?

If the problem is my Signal number was spidered off my professional website, is there a clever way for me to expose it to potential customers on my website while protecting it from harvesting?

Also, I'm super curious how spamming/phishing on Signal even works. Are these being sent by actual humans lovingly hand keying each of these messages, or is there an API so a computer can do it? Can *I* interact with Signal programmatically?

nNNNGGGGGGGGG

What is the order of precedence in CSS selectors of the space vs the comma?

Ex:
.myclass h1, h2 {...

Does that mean

.myclass h1 {...
.myclass h2 {...

Or does it mean

.myclass h1 {...
h2 {...

?

Hey, #Germany! I just learned about ehrenamt which was described as a special legal status for those engaged in socially beneficial unpaid labor, "which provides tax benefits and relaxes requirements for receiving unemployment benefits". (From this: https://hachyderm.io/@papiris/115634929515585230 )

Could somebody who knows clue me in to what those tax benefits are and what the requirements are for receiving unemployment benefits that are relaxed for ehrenamt? This sounds like a *fantastic* idea, and I'd like to know more about the details, aber ich hab kein Deutsch.