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Enshittification, as always, is the word here. It’s important to point out because to disenshittify(?) the product would need to turn back the wheel, including profits. Line go down.
With all the other lines going down, they literally cannot course correct here in any way that would matter to the consumer to rebuild trust. So much of their model is built off of force feeding users and directing their behaviors, the thing they absolutely hate.
I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.
I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.
I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.
Hah, it’s funny you ask this because I’ve been dealing with it lately.
US citizen living abroad at the moment. I have a middle name which is just, you know, vanity or whatever like it is for most people? My father’s father’s name but it doesn’t have particular meaning to me and I don’t necessarily like it. Still it came to be on my passport and I can’t recall if I did it purposefully, or if I was just filling out information, or if it was required because it was on other documentation like my birth certificate.
However it happened, it’s on the passport so now it’s on all my official documentation here in the EU. It gets picked up by every system and I can’t drop it, I have to keep propagating it because it needs to match the official documentation. It gets put in with my first name so now I’m just getting used to being “First Middle” “Last”. This is made more unusual by the fact that the country I’m in does not have middle names. All my friends are like, “Oooh, exotic!” and it’s like, no … just silly American things …
Generally though this doesn’t affect anything whatsoever, it’s just an oddity. I have simply never thought so much about my own middle name in my life and now it haunts me.
I used to work in the financial industry where it was mandated for compliance reasons that we take 2 (TWO) solid weeks of vacation. Reason being that if you were doing anything funny like cooking the systems, either people would catch it when they took over your duties or your absence would cause a discrepancy when you were unable to keep up your shenanigans.
I only had 2 (TWO) weeks of vacation. So in an act of mercy the company decided to bend compliance so that I only needed to take one solid week off and the other week was mine to take at another time or split up as needed. You know, rather than give me any more vacation time.
I have this working theory that the cloud to butt extension was the beginning of the downfall.
It was the point where the techies began to see the absurdity of the “just jam X into it” trend of technology development and got so frustrated at it they developed a childish (affectionate) extension to vent their disgust. Came out around 2013ish or so?
And over the past ~decade and a half, have we not seen that born out to the extreme? It’s around the time I felt myself start to get cynical and stop following tech news.
I agree. The problem is complex and layered, I don’t claim to fully understand it myself, but the problem is that innovation came to mean “innovation on creating capital” and not “innovation on serving the customer”. If you haven’t read Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shosana Zuboff, I highly recommend it. It lays a lot of the groundwork for what Cory Doctorow would go on to call enshittification.
On top of that, or maybe underneath it, is the idea of disruption. It has long been joked as “ignoring regulations” which has very much become true. When you can’t exploit the current systems you create parallel systems where you are in control of the playing field. Disruption to innovation, innovation to disruption. To the consumer it’s just disruption.
What we’ve ended up with as a result over the past decade and a half or so is a market that is not beholden to the consumer at all. We’ve long known that boycotts are fairly ineffective aside from some occasional groundswell on “culture war” issues, but it doesn’t feel like we’re the market anymore. Look at Nvidia’s recent presentation at the CES which wasn’t even about consumers at all, it was about AI and datacenters mostly. They fully dictate the market at us now and we’re just along for the ride.
BUT to my hopefulness above, there are still a few ways to break free of this, I don’t believe things are so bad as that yet. There does seem to be a real choking point for the consumer, Microsoft is another good example. They continue to leverage their market position but people are rapidly exploring options away from them wherever possible. I don’t think we’ll ever truly see a “year of the Linux desktop” the way some people expect, but the slow erosion is real. Another article I think about a lot is the breaching the trust thermocline which theorizes that customer trust is not a linear system. Executives like to believe that once things begin to sour they can simply make a change to correct course when the course was already lost some time ago.
Call me optimistic, but I truly believe there’s going to be such a tech boom once the market outside the US is insightful enough to look backwards and point their finger at the things that worked well and that people actually wanted and iterate off that instead of this failed path, dead end.
I used to have a little notebook when I was younger where I tried out every option for every game and wrote down my top 3 favorite choices for what looked best on each one.
Nevertheless, the information is accurate (that was the place and the state of the country when she was born). And if you click on Estonian SSR (currently live on Wikipedia), you will immediately see on the top of the page:
(From the article) “Estonia was occupied twice by the Soviet Union between 1940-1941 and 1944-1991. When the country regained independence in 1991, it restored the republic founded in 1918. Estonia’s official position is that the Republic of Estonia was illegally and de facto occupied by the Soviet Union but never ceased to exist during that time.”
I understand your points, but the surface level of reading here is important because it is how most people will consume this information. Arguing over stuff like this is the exact justification that could be used in an attempt to subsume them back into Russia, a thing the Baltics are quite touchy about, and understandably so, especially in light of all that’s happened in Ukraine.
I expected nothing and I’m still disappointed,
We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed
Do we?
capability is outpacing our current ability
JFC you are so high on your own supply.
A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute
So you want your shitty tech to be the scaffolding that underlies all human thought?
Fucking tech industry has come to assume that all disruption is innovation and it’s not. It’s just disruption. Go stuff yourselves.
This is exactly why I’m an abuser of parentheses when left to my own devices.
For example when writing code, it doesn’t matter that the compiler acts as a strict system underlying it that may or may not conform to my expectations. I want the human reading the code to understand my intentions so I’m going to group things until it’s logically clear at a glance.
FIFA’s reputation really in shambles here =/
My favorite new dark pattern is the one where the website forces you to either accept the cookies or pay/subscribe.
There seems to be some argument around whether this is technically legal or not, it seems to worm its way around the written guidelines just enough but certainly goes against the spirit of it.
The fact that “Reject All” is an option, has always been an option, gives the game away entirely.
As someone who formerly worked phone support, let me assure you we love the dumb, easy ones. Everyone wants an easy win and bonus when it kicks you to the back of the call queue.
I still have a lot of mistrust for the TPM, but that’s OK, my paranoia has room to accommodate everyone.
I used to love this game but I always got stuck in the graveyard. I realize the secret now it to just never take the obvious path and look for something secret, but that shit is mean when you’re 12 years old. I never got into the village of women or upgraded to the Shooting Star T_T
Just as well, I watched a friend beat it years later and the end game looks absolutely brutal!
Not sure I really understand what you’re asking. Looks like a hippo to me?
https://archive.org/details/zooo-eur-manual/mode/2up
It’s funny, the German section calls it a rhino, but the Spanish section calls it a hippo. Definitely a hippo if you ask me.
EDIT: Oh, sorry, I had to stare at this a bit more. It is the man, he’s in the manual on page 6, https://archive.org/details/zooo-eur-manual/page/6/mode/2up
My Christmas present to myself was a 2TB NVMe to pop into the system JUST for retro gaming.
RetroArch backend with ES-DE frontend (until Launchbox relents and focuses on a Linux release …)
All that space to hoard the bulkier PS2/GC ISOs and already at 100GB+ of metadata scraped in put into ES.
I’m old enough to be nostalgic for it, but even if you’re not, there’s something truly magical about the earlier gens, especially the later handhelds like PSP and 3DS. Game design had come a long way and was sufficiently modern without some of the harsher edges of older retro stuff, but still hadn’t given in to excessively evil design patterns. The graphics are clean, if still a little bit crunchy, which I find charming. They’re compact experiences that understood (in the time) the need to be put down at any moment because you could be doing something else or running out of battery. Place that in stark contrast to the modern mobile gacha nightmares that hammer your attention constantly trying to get at your purse strings. Did you remember to do your dailies? Has your party returned from the deployment?! ARE YOU WASTING TIME BY NOT REDEPLOYING THEM! Better check in with the game!
EDIT: Curren recs,
EDIT EDIT: I found an absolutely FANTASTIC repository for ROMs, too. Won’t post it here for fear of drawing too much attention, but DM me and I’ll give you the link when I get around to it.
It’s even worse than all that. The video is worth a watch if you have the time, he gets his hands on the leaked source code via accidental exposure on the Apple store, but then also covers other extensions that exhibit this same behavior as well as Microsoft Edge that just has it built into the browser. That’s right, even Microsoft is getting in on this by having their baseline browser without any extensions hijack the affiliate codes. It’s all so brazen …
“since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family”
Yeah, because cats know how to evade the fascist state. All Cats Are Beautiful …