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

Car key fobs are such a fucking racket. Nobody will program one without buying a new fob. Nobody will do it for less than $300. Absolutely zero reason why this couldn't be done safely by an owner.

I was genuinely stunned but the steam deck seems to have convinced him that linux can be a viable OS.

Alex: why the fuck does lenovo vantage keep reappearing?? Windows won't let me remove it and says I don't have permission

Me: because its a windows 'app' and MS doesn't trust users anymore

Alex: and wtf give me back my show desktop button

Me: ayep. can't even move the taskbar either.

Alex: ... Do you wanna just put linux on it for me?

Me:

Me: ... You serious?

Alex: I don't want pop-up ads in my OS so yes

Me: I-- sorry give me a sec. You /want linux/?

Alex: well windows 10 is about to lose support in a year so yes.

Me: ...

Me: just want to triple-che--

Alex: yes I want linux. Why is this weird? The steam deck works fine.

Me: ... I- I just haven't been asked before that's all. _(:3」∠)_

Alright. I didn't want it to come to this, but I've run out of options.

Long story short, the short shifts I've been working lately simply aren't enough to cover the bills (roughly $360). Of course, my wonderful bank is going ahead and posting them to my account anyway and causing overdrafts ($128 so far) on top of everything else.

I've gathered what money I had set aside, but it's still not enough.

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, but I understand if you can't/don't want to.

basically this

"Listen," one guard said, "I know we have only just met-"

"No," the other guard said, "we've worked together for years!"

"-but you can trust me when I say-"

"I can't, you have the curse that's opposite from mine!"

"I don't care for you at all."

"Well, I... oh... I love you too."
#TootFic #SmallStories #Microfiction

baking soda

The Queen is no strange to requests, you better have some food to offer though, else she might steal a lick off you.

Nala maw art!

#mawshot #voreart

Ohmigosh Ohmigosh happy #MawShotMonday! 😀 Here are two #mawshot peices by @psychoseby@twitter.com of Taris and Elizabeth! These were done in a livestream and it really fun! I'm super jazzed about Elizabeth's throat tattoo 😍
#vore #maw

Lentille pour voir la vie en pixel art

Anyone know an easy way to show a full screen image in windows 95?
I thought I could use mspaint but it turns out it adds a 1px border in full-screen mode.

I could write a simple win32 app but that seems like a lot of work for something this simple

I just received my new work laptop (#Apple #Macbook Pro M3, ~€2000) just to discover that it does not support dual-monitor output despite having multiple video ports.

For a feature that even the cheapest laptops (and older MacBooks) have had for years, Apple now asks you to buy the MacBook Pro M3 Pro (€2500) or M3 Max (€4000).

This is essentially €2000 #ewaste. Not so "pro" after all.

Well, jsut playing around here. very simple shapes ^^

#art #sculpture #fox #totem #bear

Good news everybody, companies can now place adverts in your Start Menu that lead to executable code. 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.