⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

My thoughts and prayers go out to #voyager1, which after journeying for half a century to reach interstellar space is still expected to answer fucking work emails

Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/24/24138949/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-recommendations-setting-disable

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.

@cstross Yeah, the players I remember were basically portable hard drives that you could install Rockbox on.

It wasn’t great - but it replaced the Discman-class devices, which weren’t without their flaws either!

@cstross @anthony_steele there are even two legal version of Perl/Tk -- Microsoft Visual Perl/Tk and SCO Open PerlWare (a cornucopia of choices compared to version control, where the only fully licensed system is MSFT Visual SourceSafe)

@cstross online clothing retail is dominated by boo.com

flash became the runtime platform for the web (they never made javascript go fast) macromedia bought adobe and won the browser wars by hollowing out MS IE

It's my birthday today!

I'd love to get a ref to a favorite computer science/software engineering read.

Perhaps a paper that is just neat and elegant; maybe a dissertation that you don't fully understand but is a mountain you feel compelled to climb; or maybe a blog post that gave a nice term for a concept you haven't seen articulated before?

Voyager 1 Sends Clear Data to NASA for the First Time in Five Months
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voyager-1-sends-clear-data-to-nasa-for-the-first-time-in-five-months-180984209/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Smartnews @smartnews-Smithsonianmag

We've rewritten Firefox's crash reporter in Rust! 🦊💻

This version supports native cross-platform GUI rendering. 🚀

Dive into why we chose Rust, the challenges of designing an app for when the browser fails, and its impact on developers and users.

https://mzl.la/3WjmOOS

Oh God and by God I mean Cthulhu, this is the time line in which the Intel Itanium didn't fail, Macs still run on Power architecture (Apple was eventually acquired by IBM), and Microsoft OS/2 4.0 runs everywhere on MIPS, Alpha, and SPARC workstations. Linux is nearly extinct thanks to restrictive embrace-and-extinguish commercial bootloader licensing terms ...

In the dotcom 1.0 future, shoppers tote a laptop to the supermarket so they can use their CueCat scanner to collect internet discount coupons over the supermarket wifi (which blasts them with ads).

The Teledesic satellite network got funded so you now have 9600 baud roaming data on your Microsoft PocketPC phone.

But pets.com mailed you a third dead Rottweiler this month, instead of the cat food subscription you ordered: the SKUs are cross-linked and freight shipping from China takes weeks.

And they wonder why news is in trouble....
Majority of Americans now use ad blockers https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/?utm_medium=share&utm_content=article&utm_source=twitter via @theregister

Daughter recently had one of her milk teeth fall out. She put it under her pillow expecting a quid from the tooth fairy. All I could find was 47p, because nobody actually carries cash anymore. Swapped the tooth for the 47p plus a "tax bill" showing 53p deducted. She's gotta learn

@otfrom @simon_brooke Exactly for this reason, somebody made a convenient bot to retrieve archived copies of G content; just insert the word "dump" in the URL e.g. https://www.dumptheguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/israel-unrwa-staff-terrorist-links-yet-to-provide-evidence-colonna-report

Rwanda

The Prime Minister must have bullish internal government legal advice saying that all appeals can be easily dealt with within 10-12 weeks, including to court of appeal and supreme court.

Or perhaps he does not.

It's not by giving them money. Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will *never* love you back. It *can't* experience love - only fear.

34/

Europol issues a press release (after a meeting in the U.K. of all places, which is not a member of the E.U.) voicing their opposition to end-to-end encryption.

It's not really anything new though, they've always been big fans of mass surveillance with nothing in the way of safeguards.

As you might expect, they walk their parade of terribles to try to intimidate people, and even manage to betray the fact that their intention is to engage in very dubious accuracy profiling. Take note of that.
QT: https://eupolicy.social/@khaleesicodes/112313278771284699