For me it’s a texture problem. I didn’t notice until I was prescribed some high fluoride stuff that’s a mildly minty blue gel which is infinitely preferable to most toothpastes I’ve tried (for those curious, it’s a Colgate 5000ppm fluoride toothpaste, prescribed by my dentist because of temperature sensitivity)

At my current university, I am firstname.lastname-4@university. My previous university, a much smaller one, I was fortunately firstname.lastname@otheruniversity, but the email client informed me there were two other people with my name there. It’s wild because I didn’t think I had a super common name.

I was talking to a friend recently about how the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism reminds me of a dark and a hollow version of how communities work. Earlier in the conversation, she used the phrase “communities are when 1+1 = 3”, i.e. when the collective output and capacity is greater than the sum of its parts. Data works a lot like that — you’re completely right that overemphasis on the value of individuals’ data misses the point