Giorgio Sironi @giorgiosironi@qoto.org

Hahahahaha.

The wonderful @caseynewton and @zoeschiffer in Platformer today:

> On Blind, a pseudonymous network for discussing workplaces, current and former employees were asked to vote this week on whether X’s product was better or worse than Twitter’s was a year ago. At press time, 79.4 percent of employees said the product was worse.

This is worth $10: https://www.platformer.news/p/twitter-is-dead-and-threads-is-thriving

Zoom’s CEO justifies return to office policy by arguing employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom. 🤦🏾‍♂️

https://www.businessinsider.com/zoom-ceo-employees-return-to-office-2023-8

Many return to office policies are such a 180° turn that they seem more designed to be soft layoff mechanisms than any sort of productivity boost.

Amazon is asking people who were hired as remote workers are now being asked to come in to the office regardless of how far they live from the nearest office. So some employees have started quitting since they’d have to move homes to comply.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/22/amazon-employees-are-quitting-after-they-were-told-to-relocate-states.html?trk=storyline-feed_main-feed-storyline-activity-card_feed-article-content

More excellent coverage of the exploitative labor practices behind #ChatGPT (and the like) and their impact on workers in Kenya:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai

Corey Doctorow: "Mastodon is far from perfect. But I only have so many hours in the day, and only so many days left in my life. I would much rather spend those precious hours making a open service better than using a temporarily superior closed one. I have seen that movie. I know how it ends"
https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

This is the least surprising headline I’ve read all year.

A broken clock fixed by taping a working clock over it is a metaphor for every codebase you’ll encounter in your professional career as a software developer.

You don't make a carrot-cutting machine that can handle all the random shapes carrots come in. You make a variety of carrots that grows straight, you make a soil mix that's mostly sand, and you plant using extremely regular spacing and density.

Then the problem becomes how to cut the now pretty uniform carrots and reject the "bad" ones.

Same goes for any automation: you don't make a computer "do art", you devalue the concept of art itself, you muck up the relationships between artists and everyone else. You screw up licensing and the concept of credit for work. Then, you can have computer generated imagery for a low cost API token.

Google killing the web, one “proposal” at a time https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/ 💩

#ditchChrome

The @music 𝕏 handle was just seized through eminent domain by X Corp. from Jeremy Vaught after he had accrued 11.4M followers over 16 years.

So much for 𝕏 being the "best place on Earth for great content creators". 🙄

#DeadTwitter

#FOLLOWFRIDAY for these key accounts in the #bbc first experiment in the Fediverse:

@BBCRD

@BBC5Live

@BBCRadio4

@BBCTaster

@Connected_Studio

@BBC_News_Labs

Writing Rust is like buying a car that's delivered as a box of individual parts – nuts, bolts, frame components, etc.

All the parts are well-labelled and only fit correctly in exactly one way, but the labelling is done using an inscrutable system of hieroglyphics, and the limited assembly instructions are written entirely in Tamarian.

Enjoy your vacation! #DontLookUp