Youtube, twitter, and reddit have obviously been in the news a lot recently, but every day business applications also seem to just keep getting worse. Got new PCs at work which means version updates, and pretty much everything we use (autocad, adobe acrobat, and ms office, mainly) all seem to run much slower, despite the computers having substantially higher specs. Love that I can't use any old versions or alternatives because they refuse to grant me admin access.
I love capitalist innovation! Why make things better when you could just make them worse and charge more?
I tell idiot neoliberals this all the time. Yes capitalism rewards innovation more than any system in history. That's true. But the innovation it rewards is "innovative new ways to make profit" not "innovative new ways to make the world better." Innovation for innovations sake is worthless and the rapid enshitification of the Internet is a great example
I mean, a group collecting money to cover a loss for one of it's members isn't a bad concept. It's just the
leeching money and trying to cut out claims that sucks.I mean, a group collecting money to cover a loss for one of it's members isn't a bad concept.
Not at all, but the concept wasn't invented under capitalism either. It was however, distorted under capitalism into another mechanism to siphon resources away from those who would both help their fellow members of society as well as the people in need of that help. The "insurance" as we know it today. (Not disagreeing with you, to be clear.)
Speaking of, does anyone want to join my tontine??
At one point insurance was an important innovation that, along with other financial developments like joint stock companies, enabled capital-intensive, high risk/high reward endeavors in ways that weren't nearly as possible before. It's just that that point was in the late middle ages.
Every service needs an app and you can’t use their service without the app and the app was put together by an intern that was actively being sexually harassed by the CFO. And if a company has had an app that’s functioned for 5 years they’ll update it now every 8 months in a way that either breaks all functionality or puts in an awful redesign that has basically the same outcome
And if a company has had an app that’s functioned for 5 years they’ll update it now every 8 months in a way that either breaks all functionality or puts in an awful redesign that has basically the same outcome
I'm still upset about this happening to the weatherunderground app years ago, it was perfect for my needs and then they fucked it all up for no reason.
But surely you don't need it to know which way the wind is blowing
I'm still mad Apple bought Dark Sky and apparently never integrated their tech because Apple Weather is dogshit
Spotify has gotten worse every six months for like 4 years. I hate it.
Part of the reason Foobar2k is my favorite audio player is that it hasn't changed significantly in the entire time i've used it
Don't fuck with perfection. I use foobar to transcode my FLACs to Vorbis so I can listen to them on my Rockboxed Fiio M3K
Apparently the advertising money is drying up because internet advertising flat out doesn't work, so now all the massive monopolistic platforms are trying to monetize their shitty platforms before the funding runs out and they all crash.
Which is once again a reminder that all fundamental internet utilities should be run by the Post Office or something.
hey bud, as long as homestarrunner.com still works what do I care about your tweeters and youbtubs
I checked that site on a whim recently and I was so happy to see it's still around
I wonder if this will lead to a more fragmented internet like what existed in the early 2000s.
god I hope so. But I don't think they will be that lucky.
Itll just be centralized worse imo but i think people will use it less
would be cool if everyone spent more time outside, dating apps ceased to exist, etc.
The laws of movement of capital prevent that. When capitalism is in crisis, the bigger fish wins and proletarization takes over as larger companies acquire smaller ones without the market cap to survive the crisis, and everyone who had aspired to succeed independently will be rendered another proletarian. We'll be seeing Meta buying up many of these services that are floundering.
Maybe...but Meta fucked up with VR...they may not have the capital, which means the consolidation will be kicked upstairs to Wall Street.
If Meta doesn't have the Capital to do it, who does? Is the entire world and everything in it going to be owned by Amazon and Blackrock in the not-too-distant future?
All your clicks belong to and have to be approved by [THE CLOUD]. Can't run a local app, or even a local OS anymore. It is all being beamed 1500 miles away to Dr. Evil's undersea layer.
Was just thinking about how the internet sucks so fucking much now lol I
It's frustrating seeing the twitter drama lead so many people to try to get into that blue website, rather than Mastodon, because people are conditioned that only capitalist-backed things exist. Same deal with people still using Windows I guess.
Federated services just seem really resource and labor inefficient too. Not to mention that the whole anti-censorship extreme privacy scene has been tainted by hate speech, misinformation and cp.
The most pressing problem is the lack of a coherent business plan for what are glorified bulletin board systems with addictive design patterns and surveillance. I just want a big dumb phpbb at this stage.
yes, software quality just keeps getting exponentially worse and I've been complaining about it for a while. Stuff like microsoft office, visual studio etc are essentially the same programs they were 20 years ago, but they seem to somehow require computers that are 100x more powerful and are unbelievably buggy. It's just not sustainable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
I was just talking about this with some of my CS meet-up people in our virtual hangout. The group is most 25-45 in age from all sorts of backgrounds and stuff, and we all agree it's bonkers pretty much every program are so bogged down with features and functions that are used by like .0001% user-base but add an 100X in load times and performance costs.
Not only are these programs full of bloat, I can only imagine the code that makes these things are just full of hacks and "fixes" that need to be reworked from the ground up. I think the craft of building software has been negatively impacted by the whole "get it done" mindset of startups rather than "get it right" of yesteryear.
I've heard people suggest that the craft of software development has been hobbled by Moore's Law. The available computing power has increased so rapidly that there has never been pressure on devs to produce clean, elegant, efficient software. Instead they just produce endless spaghetti code and the problems and inefficiencies are hidden by the available compute power.
That makes a lot of sense. I can certainly see the market incentivizing doing spaghetti so "it just works"/"Automagically" or whatever. I understand the problem space for programs and software has increased exponentially but it's weird to think our problem solving has not. That's one thing I always respected about older tech is that they had to know what they were doing to get the most out of things. Not to say it was some golden age of software but I think there is a noticeable difference.
Ideally I would like to believe in a decent world (not even our commie leftist utopia) we would be applying the lessons and efficiency of modern tech to tech problems. I would reckon that pretty much everything written these days could have some serious performance improvements if they were in a manner that valued performance. I really do think "THE MARKET"'s focus on "deliverables" and just makes stuff worse. Why write good code when I could write code that gets my manager off my back?
It's weird, because usually if you don't have to worry about performance, it's easier to make readable code. I think feature bloat correlates to Moore's Law though, because of the economic incentives to use more computing power for little reason. The spaghettification just follows because of rushing to implement all those features.
While this is extremely true and I think probably worth about 2/3s of the blame, I still think that there is a 1/3 blame on software engineers turning out to be second-rate (people pursuing the field just because it pays well attracts a lot of low-quality coders) AND our general unwillingness to unionize and push back against the managerial types to say that we practice a craft and it deserves to be done to a standard. We should be embarrassed.
Of course a LOT of software devs are bazinga-brained shitheads. Or if they aren't then at least they hold the opinion that they're paid so well that they don't need to unionize or care about these other things. I have seen that opinion start to shift these past few years. Even software devs are beginning to form basic class conscious thoughts even though they haven't been able to act upon them. Quite a shift from even just five years ago.
It's cheaper for companies to force end users to upgrade their hardware, than it is for the software companies to hire more people to optimise software
Really starting to think we shouldn't have loosed that blood-dimmed tide
The ease with which witch hunts can form is frightening. Even when streamers and influencers try to keep their followers under control it can rapidly become clear how superficial the parasocial relationship is; Cliques within the fandom will merrily go off on vicious witch hunts even as the streamer they're "defending" begs for them to stop.
I remember the bad old days on Reddit when we "Found the boston bombers" or utterly ruined that person with all the plush animals. I don't even remember the details it was so long ago, but Reddit was forced to implement anti-brigading and anti-witchhunt rules after a few high profile disasters.
Yeah that was something. There was also some actress who posted nudes and people found out where she was within a few hours by analyzing I believe the plastic covers for the power sockets on the bathroom wall.
I don't remember the details, this was back in like 2009-2010. If the reddit museum or history of reddit subs still exist they might have it written down somewhere. I really don't remember any details, just that it was roughly the same time as the Jurassic Park Jeep incident.
It might have been this, and the witch hunt was against the neighbors, but I'm afraid it was just too many lifetimes ago. God, nothing seems real anymore, how was 2016 seven years ago?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/256guq/kathleen_a_little_girl_with_early_onset/
I actually can't stand it anymore. Everything is so infected. Yesterday I watched a MrBeast video out of curiousity and it sent me into a doom spiral. The kids are fucked.
It's gives me existential dread to open YouTube in incognito mode and see the raw front page. MrBeast videos released less than 24 hours ago already have like 10M views.
I use my young cousin as a yardstick for what kids are into these days. I know all kids are different, but this one in particular loves Tesla cars and Mr Beast. He even bought a bottle of prime on eBay for like £15. I feel so bad for him. Advertising has melted his brain. There's no reason for a kid to be obsessed with an energy drink brand. There's no reason for a kid to really even like a Tesla. Car kids when I was growing up all liked the big fat trucks or the super fast sports cars, which makes sense because really they are impressive feats of engineering and look pretty sleek. Tesla's are just some overmarketed and overrated electric car.
TV basically isn't a thing anymore. No more shows about fantasy worlds and interesting characters. No stories that play out over an episode. Just YouTube, an endless supply of advertisement sludge, with maximised attention grabbing short term stimulation. I really do fear that this next generation is going to turn out utterly brain-dead. I'm only the generation before that and we're all total fuckwits already.
Eh the Teslas kinda make sense. Back when I was a child the Dodge Viper was the fastest, coolest, most amazing car in existence. The Dodge Viper was a piece of shit then, and it's a piece of shit now, but I still think it's one of the coolest cars ever made.
Teslas are garbage, but they're still cool.
caliper comment, but you can also very obviously tell that the younger generations look different
tbh all the generations do, even the ones from the 1950s and stuff, and it's very obvious that the ones in the 60s/70s are the healthiest looking ones (in the US)
Hmmm. So you mean like muscle mass, BMI, wearing glasses and so on?
I think in general we look different because now people from lots of different places are getting it on and starting families. Even when it's just a white person from Germany and a white person from England there's still some degree of your offspring looking 'new'. I moved from a more rural area to the countries capital and you can really see that the kids of people who live rural look like they always did, going back to Ye Olden Days, whereas city folk's kids who've interbred with people from outside of their home town just look more modern in the face. Not in a bad way, they just simply look different.
Look at the Hollywood starlets through time - it's not just shifting beauty standards but also just that people who look like that don't really exist in the same numbers anymore. Same goes for models and actors these days - they have a more alien look about them (again, not in the pejorative sense) - just in the sense that now especially with the globalisation of beauty standards, the hottest people from one country are now able to fuck the hottest people from the other country, and both of those people might be operating on whatever beauty standard the American beauty industry has set. It means certain features are super pronounced like cheekbones and stuff.
Idk, maybe this is all bullshit. Just a hunching.
something i've fantasized about, as taking a collective hammer to the knees of enormous asshole software companies, would be if the schools/colleges/universities etc all switched away from proprietary software. right now, i know the decision makers are getting insane discounts and kickbacks and whatever the fuck to agree to enterprise licenses for things like MS Office, ESRI, Adobe so that those programs are what students learn to use in writing articles, creating/processing data, doing analysis, copy editing, visual design, etc. it's all done under the justification that "these programs look good on a resume", but it mostly creates a dependency. also, if you leave school to become self-employed, you're SOL or you have to start kind-of anew with FOSS.
when i was in grad school i did a supplemental concentration in digital mapping that, looking back, was clearly run by some buck-the-system types... because the 3 course curriculum was entirely developed around using only open source software. all QGIS, free / open data sources, open mapping projects, open source scripts for developing our own interfaces for interactive maps. it was wildly empowering and it made me realize how only learning how to do things on proprietary software is extremely limiting for the student in a way that is difficult to recognize by the student and really only services the software company, which is getting devoted customers out of the deal.
anyway, clearly the machine that makes proprietary software the default has been wildly successful and seems deeply entrenched at this point, so it would have to be part of a much larger reform for our school systems to transition away. but i imagine once it started, those companies would be on the road to collapse.
Similarly, when I did quantum chemistry the school insisted on teaching students almost exclusively on GAMESS rather than GAUSSIAN, despite having licenses for the latter (GAUSSIAN has a bad rep because any criticism of the company results in the license being revoked.) Sure, no GUI was a pain, but I got a much better idea of what I was doing and what the molecules looked like and how that related directly to the math than I would have in Gaussian.
i can't really do that without doxxing myself because of the way the course was set up. however, i can list/link the resources we used which have their own documentation. The class was generally self-taught/online, so we relied heavily on existing documentation.
- QGIS The application for managing, processing, analyzing all geographic data. This is the program to bring all of your data into. That data can then be filtered down to exactly what you need and exported as an image/pdf for web or print.... or you can export just the data set for use in interactive online maps. It's highly versatile so it can be very intimidating at first, but the user community is very helpful. https://qgis.org/
- Leaflet A JS library for developing mobile friendly interactive maps. Great documentation and the tutorials are strong. https://leafletjs.com/
- Leaflet-Omnivore plugin For adding the data file generated in QGIS to your leaflet drawn map https://github.com/mapbox/leaflet-omnivore
data
- Natural Earth A source of free shapefiles / geographic data sets for administrative boundaries, rivers, lakes, landforms https://www.naturalearthdata.com/
- OpenStreetMap A map of the world that has tons of data from contributors around the world, which can be downloaded and then used in developing your own maps. https://www.openstreetmap.org/
there are a lot of tutorials for QGIS, especially for beginners on YouTube. I would recommend starting with something small. Like a map of just your state/province that shows the major rivers and streams, labeled.
My manifesto starts “MATLAB and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”
mfw the contradictions smdh
