Frost, Wolffucker 🐺 @IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net

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.

Buddy, you do not know anything about the Internet.

@IceWolf Awooooooooooo ~!

okay fedi I have a dumb idea

If I have a DVI-I Dual-Link cable, e.g it has 4 pins on the right surrounding the longer...part, whatever it is

Can I just remove said 4 pins and effectively have a DVI-D Dual-Link Cable?

(I'm tryna connect a GTX 1060 and have no HDMI or DisplayPort cables so DVI is my only option, but I didn't realise this 1060 had DVI-D only)

ikea

demon light

I just had the most star trek moment ever.

I put a file on an iPad to hand it over to marketing.

I didn't put the file in the cloud. I put it on the tablet and gave it physically to them.

>frontier release the first new ship for elite dangerous since 2018, the python mk2

> it is available on may 7th for £10 worth of ARX (in game currency, usually used for skins/decals)

>or i can wait til *august*

eat my entire ass, i hope anyone with a mk2 in open is perpetual gankbait for a month straight

what comes to you mind first when you think of Yamaha

- posted by Ielenia

Everyone's discussing the danger of "AI" taking out jobs, but nobody nearly as much talks about the transitioning phase (for lack of a better term), in which humans are employed to check the "AI" output for correctness

These errors have become so subtle and hard to spot, that the attention span required for it wears out any human supervision very quickly. And it makes these subtle errors at speeds we cannot and will never be able to keep up with

People already work unfulfilling jobs at scale. Now imagine working your butt off to get a degree, only to watch a computer do your job for you and do it wrong in the most unnoticeable ways because you've checked out after 3 hours, but work to check keeps piling up

Just like running this "AI" scam burns through money and resources, if it is deployed in this way, it'll burn through the human factor as well. And so it begs the question: When (not if) the "AI" bubble finally bursts, what will remain of it to salvage?

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

you could reasonably translate this as either peeping or squeaking (as in cute small noises) but apple translate has an innovative idea

But first they must catch you

Yaaaaayy they are here and I'm so pleased with how it looks!! It feels very comfortable and the printing feels quite soft to touch! :D

They are available here: https://artofmaquenda.etsy.com/listing/1719692189/but-first-they-must-catch-you-unisex-t

#watershipdown #rabbit #art #mastoart #maw

pretending sports doesn't exist