

That’s really a problem in some of our federal states


If you pay attention to your pet and maybe read a little bit about them, you can already guess what they want to tell you. No need for AI here.


Doctorows concept is talking about platforms and social media sites and not Netflix:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
There might be a lot of Netflix clones, but YouTube is the only video platform that is relevant. And you can see how they screwed over their users and the content creators then screwed over the advertisers.


You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term “enshittification”. He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can’t. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.
A huge amount of why normal office workers like using AI, in my opinion, is that they never learned how make even simple scripts which would have helped them in a lot of their tasks.
Most office workers do not have the access rights and programs to run scripts. I know how to write them, but there is no way that local IT would allow me to run python on my work machine.
My need for control/understanding stuff I create
And that is really important from a mental health perspective: People are being held responsible for their work. If something does break that they’ve built, their boss & coworkers expect that they are able to fix it and that the error will not happen again. If you understand your system, you are able to do that. If you are responsible for some kind of AI-driven house of cards that you do not understand and can’t fix, that is really bad. It’s triggering some kind of imposter syndrome
Isn’t it obvious? There is no vaccine. We’ve seen human-to-human transmission even with short contacts like a flight. It’s able to kill people. And we know that at least in the USA the government will not do anything to protect the people.


Just imagine the mental state of those people following racist AI-slop accounts on fucking Facebook. How braindead do you have to be?


We’ll see more initiatives organized end-to-end by small groups of smart people, with virtual teams/coalitions forming to bypass “archaic” processes and deliver meaningful results. We’ll see a lot of sloppy failures along the way too, but the overall trend seems clear.
The thing is: It’s great to work in a small group of motivated smart people. But it’s really, really hard to hire a small motivated group of smart people and keep it motivated. And it’s even harder if you’re not located in one of those fancy towns where everyone wants to live or in a business that is really attractive. If your company is in a lesser known part of the country building important, but boring stuff, you will have to deal with not so smart and not so motivated people.


Stuff like this is banned in my country because it totally is not safe in traffic. Elect some not-crazy people, dear Americans, and they might give you sensible legislation.


Implement GNU Terry Pratchett on your servers:


Als Privatnutzer bekommt man ja eher seltener gigantische Mengen an Papier per Post. Das sind dann maximal ein paar Briefe pro Woche und dann ist es auch total egal, ob die OCR 10 Minuten pro Brief braucht. Und wenn du als Firma wirklich noch eine größere Menge an Briefpost zu verwalten hast, dann ist ein Raspi definitiv die falsche Wahl


The question here: Where are those people going? Are they finding other jobs in their field? Are they sill unemployed? Moved to other jobs outside of tech?


The problem in our situation right now is that diplomacy kind of failed and that we are dealing with bad faith actors and states who are not really trustworthy. We’ve seen Putin agreeing to the Minsk peace treaties while preparing for another big attack on Ukraine. We’ve seen the USA electing Trump and going batshit insane.
So two of the major powers have kind of abandoned the idea that diplomacy is worth anything. You can’t trust Putin, you can’t trust Trump. So you need to be able to defend yourself.


Google is also abusing its monopoly to push Chrome. They are sabotaging other browsers on their sites while showing Chrome ads.


Take a look at all those dashcam subreddits and Youtubes and you will see that dashcams can also be problematic. There are so many videos showing random persons doing something on the street or people having medical issues. And there are also those creepy stalker sexual harassment accounts who are filming women in public with their cams


I’m actually sure that this will change the practice. This basically means that every german can get a nice little rebate from their travel company if their hotel is not changing something. That means that every german travel company will pressure the hotels they are using to implement some kind of process to deal with those pesky lounge chair reservations.


That really is not looking good for Russia. It looks like they have lost important capabilities in their air defenses. We know that Ukraine is able to strike their refineries, and Russia does know that Ukraine wants to strike them. It would totally make sense for them to deploy air defense to protect such a strategic target as the Perm refinery.
So if Russia can’t defend their refineries, something is wrong with their air defenses. And if Ukraine can destroy the russian industry at will, Russia won’t be able to fight this war forever


Yeah - people love to shit on Mozilla while posting from fucking Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.


The bad news is that this is a reaction to the recent incident where a Obsidian plugin contained malware and it became obvious that their plugin system is quite unsafe
Since AI is a buzzword with no actual meaning behind it covering several technologies: What do you actually want to ban here?