Amikke @Amikke@qoto.org

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

Question: Why do most programmers/developers use a dark theme while writing software/code?

Answer: Because light attracts bugs.

Bad idea: an external floppy drive that can appear as a mass storage device of arbitrary size. The way it works is it has a little screen, and you use that to configure how big you want it to be, then it formats the proper number of 3.5" floppy disks.
Then when the PC tries to read a sector that's not on the current disk, the display will just prompt you to insert disk #47 or whatever.

Made a dumb website so I wouldn't ever have to Google "tm symbol" again.

https://symbol.wtf

my new burger restaurant concept is inspired by modern software. the options for mayo are "yes" and "maybe later", and if you pick maybe later, the chef stands at your table with a squeezy bottle, threatening to add mayo to your burger when you least expect it

This is absolute madness.

https://xkcd.com/2916/

I completed all four digits for my clock! It runs surprisingly smooth. The transition from 23:59 to 0 moves the most parts, so I expect that to have the most friction.

Meta Platforms Inc. has announced it has purchased the competing social media giant, Mastodon LLC with plans to rebrand the eponymous 'Mastodon Network' into a wider 'Threadiverse'

This move comes as a shock both to shareholders and existing users. When asked for comment on the acquisition, Mastodon founder and CEO, John Mastodon was quoted as saying "OH GOD, I'M GONNA MASTADOOOOON!"

Read full article >> goatse.cx

dying laughing at terry cavanaugh’s tea-making simulator

https://downpour.games/~terry/a-proper-cup-of-tea

Hey everyone!

I'm working on a video to see what the Linux community (or at least people who follow me) actually use.

So, I created a little form, hosted on my Nextcloud (hopefully it's up to the task...)

It's only up for 2 days, so don't hesitate to share it around, it will help me "touch grass" and see if my preconceived notions are confirmed, or invalidated!

https://nextcloud.thelinuxexp.com/index.php/apps/forms/s/XQRzMrs8QTtCjDfSyP4koA9o

Of course, it's all anonymous, no personal data, it's just for the purposes of creating the video.

Future

TIL that some CCTV systems will have a tummy ache if you happen to expose them to a QR encoded antivirus test string.

https://www.revk.uk/2020/01/eicar-test-qr.html

Pleased to report that I am now receiving only 12 copies of every delete message from threads.net. A remarkable improvement!

Countries, where Police force commander in-chief fired a 90mm anti-tank grenade launcher in Police Headquarters

It is so cringe when i hear people hijack general less descriptive terms like "neurodivergent" to mean really silly arbitrary things like adhd and autism... we already have descriptive terms and that word already means something useful before you bastardized it.

#ADHD #ADD #AUTISM #NEURODIVERGENT

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) can be divided into 3 categories, depending on where the authority resides:

- Secret key (did:key, did:pkh).
- Server (did:web).
- Blockchain (hundreds of them).

With a #DID derived from a secret key you can truly own your identity. Unfortunately, key rotation is not supported, and if you lose your key, you lose everything. This can be partially mitigated with distributed key generation techniques that make key recovery possible if only M of N shards are available, but they are complicated.

Servers can rotate keys, but they can also suddenly disappear, and again you lose everything.

Blockchain-based systems support key rotation and don't have a single point of failure (if done right). Sometimes they are called "servers with superpowers". However, popular ones are not suitable for the job because writing to them is very expensive and their clients need powerful computing devices and a lot of storage.

Is there a way around that? Yes. Blockchains can be very lightweight and they don't actually need a cryptocurrency, miners or stakers in order to work. There is a simple consensus algorithm known as Proof of authority, and one of the Fediverse competitors, Bluesky, seems to be planning to build such system:

https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc

>We are actively hoping to replace it with or evolve it into something less centralized - likely a permissioned DID consortium.

They are afraid to say the B-word, but "permissioned consortium" is exactly what it is. Of course, their identity #blockchain doesn't have to be the only one in existence. I think in the future we might see quite a lot of "identity cooperatives" of different shapes and sizes. Perhaps even a universal client, curl for identity, can be developed.