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As a lifetime chronic sales-shopper, sales at grocery stores are becoming way more predatory and difficult to take advantage of. One of the main offenders is the "you have to buy 5" of the things to get the discount. This has always existed but now it's like half of the available sales. Not super realistic for a single person household. The other one is requiring an app and "scanning" coupons to add to your card. This doesn't even work on my phone. Like my phone can scan QR codes (I've eaten at restaurants that require it) but it doesn't work for these. I asked an associate about it and they're just like "just take pictures and show the cashier and have them adjust it" and I'm like I'm not going to annoy the gently caress out of the cashier, they didn't ask for this either. So in addition to the general inflation of goods, stores are taking heavy steps to make any kind of savings a huge pain in the rear end.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:05
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I just saw the "buy 5 and save" deal for the first time in my life and it was on like, a specific flavor of 8oz boar's head cheese. Who is buying 5 of those? There were only 5 on the rack!
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Jul 3, 2023 19:10
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i remember being happy and having hope for the future and now im sad (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 3, 2023 19:13
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you know im sure god is porbably a pacifist which means i can probably kick their rear end
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Jul 3, 2023 19:23
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Jelly posted:As a lifetime chronic sales-shopper, sales at grocery stores are becoming way more predatory and difficult to take advantage of. My local grocery store has taken to repricing everything for holiday weekends. I'll admit I live in a bougie/touristy place, but its a loving Vons charging seven dollars for a jar of jam.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:25
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Lurk Ethic posted:Windows 11 is a downgrade from its big brother. Want to open a picture? Cool, here it is, and here’s a row of thumbnails of the other pictures in the directory, that covers up the bottom part of the image. Okay you can close it I guess. Here it is again the next time you open a picture, keep hiding it every time like a chump. Want to turn it off entirely? gently caress you, ingrate. Have you tried Irfanview?
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Jul 3, 2023 19:27
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i was in the grocery store the other day and every single bag of iceberg or romaine lettuce was wilty, there were like 20 tomatoes total, and the hot dog buns i picked in the insanely crowded aisle turned out to be over 2 weeks out of date and seriously hosed up looking when i got to the cash register this is a fairly bougie area, and my grocery store is a Kroger offshoot, and it's been like this for like 3 years now. I understood during COVID but what the gently caress is going on that I have to go to whole foods just to buy lettuce reliably
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Jul 3, 2023 19:29
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HappyHippo posted:Have you tried Irfanview? yeah this, i dont mean this to feel like a pile on but it feels weird to expect the default microsoft OS to do anything useful at all besides run the programs you've put there.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:41
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AARD VARKMAN posted:i was in the grocery store the other day and every single bag of iceberg or romaine lettuce was wilty, there were like 20 tomatoes total, and the hot dog buns i picked in the insanely crowded aisle turned out to be over 2 weeks out of date and seriously hosed up looking when i got to the cash register US Agriculture + Trade has spent the last 50+ years building a network of commerce for food. Most of the food you eat is not grown in America. Why? An excuse to trade. As a result, US farms have dedicated so much of their operations to foreign interests -- Soy Beans, Canola, Castor, Corn, etc. So much so that things such as Lettuce are in basically non-existent growth supply for national markets. Can we blame covid and globalization? Kind of. Covid forced major every government to start thinking about its own people foremost. It's hardly a mystery why a country might shift its food production so that its o own citizens benefit primarily. Can we blame capitalism? 100%. As countries production powers for domestic supply weaken (such as the United States' existing obligations to places like China) they are left with the choices: Make less profit, or make less profit AND also restructure your operations to meet a much-less-profitable domestic need. Capitalism means that no farmer will take EITHER option. Hence we have no lettuce. But there are plenty of soy beans if you need those. edit: Just kidding, you can't buy them, they're earmarked for international markets.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:43
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I know people were already poo poo talking smart TVs but someone got me one as a bday gift last year and I had to get rid of my 12 year old TV, and it is the worst thing that has happened to me. I want to think the person who got it for me thought they were doing something really cool for me but I keep wondering if they secretly hate me. Not only do I have to see loving ads and the layout is just ugly as hell but the apps crash randomly and sometimes my TV just starts having seizures and/or locks up. I hate it so much.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:58
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My SmartTV constantly runs out of memory just streaming poo poo and becomes 1% speed until I painfully navigate the menus to clear the cache
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Jul 3, 2023 20:07
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AARD VARKMAN posted:My SmartTV constantly runs out of memory just streaming poo poo and becomes 1% speed until I painfully navigate the menus to clear the cache Sounds pretty dumb to me 
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Jul 3, 2023 20:08
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thin blue whine posted:I know people were already poo poo talking smart TVs but someone got me one as a bday gift last year and I had to get rid of my 12 year old TV, and it is the worst thing that has happened to me. I want to think the person who got it for me thought they were doing something really cool for me but I keep wondering if they secretly hate me.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:09
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So far my smart tv has been ad free, but the fact that it self updates means one day it will definitely turn to poo poo
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Jul 3, 2023 20:10
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The paramount app is the worst app in the history of streaming apps
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Jul 3, 2023 20:12
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AARD VARKMAN posted:My SmartTV constantly runs out of memory just streaming poo poo and becomes 1% speed until I painfully navigate the menus to clear the cache My Fire stick will only update itself or the apps loaded therein when I want to use it. It's sticking out of my tv with an external power source 24/7, but no, only when I'm trying to use it is when the updates have to be installed. The same thing on my partner's smart tv, have to press Update and sit there watching the progress bar instead of it just doing it at 3am. Like c'mon, I know you have telemetry showing when I'm not using the device, just push the update and leave me alone already.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:13
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AARD VARKMAN posted:The paramount app is the worst app in the history of streaming apps
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Jul 3, 2023 20:15
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Jelly posted:I don't know if you mean content or utility but I've had it for like 72 hours or something and I'm already pretty unimpressed with it. My biggest draw was Lower Decks but I'll probably blast through most of the newer Star Trek content like Picard and New Worlds and then cancel it unless people tell me there's some other must watch stuff. It's the app I hate. I'm in the midst of watching both DS9 and Voyager having finished TNG earlier this year and across my FireTV, phone, and android smart tv there is no other app that takes longer to load, that never remembers what you've watched, that plays almost a minute of unskippable ads between episodes.... gently caress, sometimes it gets stuck playing the audio from an "iCarly" trailer repeatedly over top of the star trek I'm trying to watch!
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Jul 3, 2023 20:19
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We got showtime added to paramount for some reason and not only does the content suck, the app will lag like crazy and eventually just dump you on the main page.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:33
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I wanted to watch Everything, Everywhere but saw it was a showtime thing so I went to the account page to try and update my trial and it's like "this will forfeit the trial and bill you immediately"
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Jul 3, 2023 20:36
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Crimson Harvest posted:yeah this, i dont mean this to feel like a pile on but it feels weird to expect the default microsoft OS to do anything useful at all besides run the programs you've put there. The best part of every microsoft OS since DOS has always been replacing its pieces with actual good software
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Jul 3, 2023 20:45
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i got a free 4k Crapple TV as part of a promotion for subscribing to some Direct TV streaming service for a few months after ATT bought them or something like that, and thank christ i have that thing other than the remote using swipes instead of arrow buttons to move around, the thing works and performs perfectly, it’s a true workhorse that never lets me down. and saves me the headache of the LG WebOS garbage my TV runs, which i’m pretty sure is the same software that Palm made for those creepy blonde woman commercials before selling it to HP to use for SmartPrinters. god knows how it ended up in LG TVs after that. i used to have a chromecast which was basically abandoned by google after a year and would just stop working for months when netflix released an update. also tried an amazon fire something or other, and holy poo poo it must be named that because the only thing anyone should do with their janky rear end products is set fire to them. don’t get me started on how godawful the youtube apps are for TVs and phones these days compared to the browser. basically have to keep a laptop around so i can airplay that poo poo to the Crapple TV.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:46
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I am very familiar with the business end of streaming and know people who worked on each and every single one of these apps. I can authoritatively say all these apps suck because being good was not a requirement and that’s not a joke or hyperbole of any kind.
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Jul 3, 2023 20:56
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Jelly posted:I don't know if you mean content or utility but I've had it for like 72 hours or something and I'm already pretty unimpressed with it. My biggest draw was Lower Decks but I'll probably blast through most of the newer Star Trek content like Picard and New Worlds and then cancel it unless people tell me there's some other must watch stuff. Star Trek is the only thing worthwhile on Paramount+ and even that they’re loving up by selling off chunks of it.
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Jul 3, 2023 21:03
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Bad Purchase posted:other than the remote using swipes instead of arrow buttons to move around, In settings, under Remotes and Devices, the first option lets you change that to click only.
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Jul 3, 2023 21:16
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Jelly posted:As a lifetime chronic sales-shopper, sales at grocery stores are becoming way more predatory and difficult to take advantage of. Trying to feed yourself on the cheap as a single person has gotten worse and worse. My big example is fast food coupons. When I moved to my current place 3 years ago, probably 1/4 of any given flyer of deep fried crap was at least $1 off this sandwich, or Buy sandwich and get drink free, and so on. Now, 99% of the time, there is nothing for a single person. The whole page is "2 Can Dine for $X" and "Family Bucket for $X". This wouldn't be so bad if fast food didn't universally suck poo poo once reheated. gently caress it, I can't even eat fast food anymore because my insides decided to get shittier for no reason and decided overnight that I'm celiac now, or something similar, jury's still out, but my thirties has been one big kick to the balls after another. Also I've had the same dumb tv for like 10 years and it's too small and there's like a permanent smudge on it that's just big enough to annoy me and y'all have made me terrified to buy a new TV. Every couple weeks my stupid laptop basically becomes unusable for a whole day while downloading and implementing updates I didn't ask for; I don't want my loving tv to be the same way, and I sure as poo poo don't want to see ADS when I turn it on!
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Jul 3, 2023 21:17
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ikanreed posted:I can't tell if this thread exists because things are actually shittier or we're all getting old and nostalgia blind. The thesis of this article is also true for everything that is not an online platform, because capitalism paradoxically chases eternal, exponential returns in a closed and finite system. This means that all goods and services which have had their non-integral surplus value extracted already must eventually cannibalize themselves as well in order to continue their zombie lurch towards that forever-multiplying return. If they don't do this, they will be devoured by a competitor who is, or by a private equity firm that will strip it for parts and bankrupt it. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
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Jul 3, 2023 21:32
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SlimGoodbody posted:The thesis of this article is also true for everything that is not an online platform, because capitalism paradoxically chases eternal, exponential returns in a closed and finite system. This means that all goods and services which have had their non-integral surplus value extracted already must eventually cannibalize themselves as well in order to continue their zombie lurch towards that forever-multiplying return. If they don't do this, they will be devoured by a competitor who is, or by a private equity firm that will strip it for parts and bankrupt it. Case in point there...  Inevitably batshit insane rightwing sites are free and articles debunking that poo poo from regular news sites go the paywall route. skooma512 posted:My Fire stick will only update itself or the apps loaded therein when I want to use it. It's sticking out of my tv with an external power source 24/7, but no, only when I'm trying to use it is when the updates have to be installed. The same thing on my partner's smart tv, have to press Update and sit there watching the progress bar instead of it just doing it at 3am. Same here. I only use my smart TV at lunch time and after work. But inevitably it will want to update, and will take me out of whatever I was doing to prompt me to "update or skip." Just update it when I'm not watching. It's not like I can tell it to "ignore".. if I skip it will prompt me again next time I want to use it. I remember when software was just released and complete. Now everything needs constant updates. Why does Youtube need to update, I was watching videos fine yesterday. And why does it need to update RIGHT NOW, while I'm wanting to watch it. My TV is basically on all the time since you can't turn it completely off without unplugging it (always a light shining even if the TV is powered off). And god forbid you want to see what they changed... everything is always bullshit like "made changes to improve stability." Verdugo fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 21:45
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AARD VARKMAN posted:Kroger offshoot, and it's been like this for like 3 years now. I understood during COVID but what the gently caress is going on that I have to go to whole foods just to buy lettuce reliably That's half the problem. Almost all stores are now under Kroger or Safeway and they are doing the telecom monopoly share thing. The shortages made me start growing my own lettuce and tomatoes and I like em so much better now. Lettuce grows very quickly and I set up a simple hydroponic system for em. Year round truly fresh lettuce now.
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Jul 3, 2023 21:47
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I really liked how simple Chromecasts were. When I bought a new TV I figured I should get the newer Google TV with Chromecast so I could play 4K content and maybe use Steam Link or some other cool apps. The Bluetooth was too laggy to use as a Steam Link, the device had memory leaks and would slow to a crawl and reboot randomly (even in app-only mode), the home screen was riddled with content ads, the old Ambient view would take 5 minutes to trigger (you could hack this to be shorter, but how about an option to make that the default), AND unforgivably, I would have to initiate casting from my phone twice for it to work properly. You put "Chromecast" in the name of the product you nitwits. The solution was to toss that piece of crap and get a Chromecast Ultra off eBay. It's night and day: ambient mode by default, no content ads, 4k HDR, no remote, no random reboots. Now I just fret for the day when they kill support / don't allow it to be used for YouTube. Hopefully someone figures out an open source solution / device before then.
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Jul 3, 2023 22:43
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Verdugo posted:Case in point there... Oh jeez. Well, it's an important enough argument that I'm going to do the probably super annoying thing of posting the text of it here for posterity in case it gets permanently paywalled. If this is too cumbersome and mods want to delete it I'll understand. Does SA have a functionality to collapse long text into a "click to unfold and read more" blurb? In any case Doctorow's points are sound, but his call to action is a joke. He delineates how and why capital is continually devouring everything and making GBS threads it out worse, but his only proposed solution is basically "make sure your Senator gets an email from you about this!!" The Enshittification of TikTok by Cory Doctorow 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. When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: For many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results. This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90 percent of the time, they don't search anywhere else. That tempted in lots of business customers—marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them. This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing more than 45 percent of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31 billion "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search. Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement for sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer. Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45 percent in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50 percent ads. This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of poo poo. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle. This is why—as Cat Valente wrote in her magisterial pre-Christmas essay—platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things.” This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you'd have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can't agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it. Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, whom Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying full-text feeds inside Facebook's walled garden. This made publications truly dependent on Facebook—their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds. Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of non-consensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you. Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook's cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue. Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves. But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters. It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won't rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they'll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marveling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website, "TheFacebook": I don’t know why. They “trust me” Dumb fucks. Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time, and energy into. Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won't tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you'd figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice. The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned. But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket. The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one. The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers—as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it. Which brings me to TikTok. TikTok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.” But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, TikTok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good. By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, TikTok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like YouTube and Instagram. Now that TikTok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to YouTube and Insta. Yesterday, Forbes's Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that TikTok employees use to push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds. These videos go into TikTok users' For You feeds, which TikTok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that TikTok thinks will add value to your experience—the rest of the time, it's full of videos that TikTok has inserted in order to make creators think that TikTok is a great place to reach an audience. "Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands—those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships—at the expense of others with whom it has not." In other words, TikTok is handing out giant teddy bears. But TikTok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. TikTok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. TikTok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it. "Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it—that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money. In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and "projects" handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves. But deception only produces so much "liquidity provision." Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking. Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money. The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the holders hoped to convert their tokens to real money. For TikTok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that TikTok's format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for TikTok to circulate on rival platforms). Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: TikTok will withdraw the "heating" that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven't asked to see their videos. TikTok is performing a delicate dance here: There's only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users' feeds, and TikTok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to. Tiktok won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time TikTok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing. This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its "monetization" changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it's hundreds, perhaps thousands. I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet's longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end. In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature—say, Caller ID—it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style. The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network—spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have "monetized" its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the "From:" line on email before you opened the message— charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening—but they didn't. The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn't want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off. They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers' messages would be delivered to willing listeners' end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see. The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "woke shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them. As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It's just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter's sinking ship by the threat of deportation. The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: When Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure. Twitter is not going to be a "protocol." I'll bet you a testicle (not one of mine) that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter's "monetization" strategies. An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York, and Chicago. For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don't pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, "It is better to buy than to compete." This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon's own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it. The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile, while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies' products, like Chrome. Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin's landmark 1998 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.” Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today's Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren't good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former. Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown "panic" over the rise of "AI" chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool—that is, a tool that won't show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see. Now, it's possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like TikTok's pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it's hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite. Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock—a new competitor like TikTok that penetrates the anticompetitive "moats and walls" of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising—can send it into wild oscillations. Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: Enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other. And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit—the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought and preserving the data you created. The Netheads were right: Technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom—our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.
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Jul 3, 2023 23:25
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You could have just linked it on doctow's website which isn't paywalled
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Jul 3, 2023 23:28
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Lurk Ethic posted:Windows 11 is a downgrade from its big brother. Want to open a picture? Cool, here it is, and here’s a row of thumbnails of the other pictures in the directory, that covers up the bottom part of the image. Okay you can close it I guess. Here it is again the next time you open a picture, keep hiding it every time like a chump. Want to turn it off entirely? gently caress you, ingrate. Looks like you can turn this off in settings: 
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Jul 4, 2023 00:19
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TVGM posted:Looks like you can turn this off in settings: Oh nice, thanks! I def googled this before, and on their support forums they basically just said "welp, you're stuck with it." They must have added that setting later. HappyHippo posted:Have you tried Irfanview? I'll check it out, thanks 
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Jul 4, 2023 00:33
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ikanreed posted:I can't tell if this thread exists because things are actually shittier or we're all getting old and nostalgia blind. I do grapple with this internally a lot. I've read a lot of old text; the ancient greeks have texts that echo basically the exact sentiment of this thread (the wine was better when I was young!!) though sometimes the context differs (very few people itt complaining about ~the kids~ which is refreshing at least - every society to leave a historical record leaves a record of them complaining about how kids now suck). And to some degree, I think it's true! We're getting loving old, and this thread is a testament to our encroaching senility. But the ancient greeks and everyone between then and now were also not facing an impending biosphere collapse and its associated baggage. Are we special? Does this mean there is merit to our gripes? I like to think so, but then, hasn't everyone always felt like they are special?
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Jul 4, 2023 00:43
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funeral home DJ posted:No poo poo take a walk through your local big-box hardware store and look at the hosed-up chunks of wood they call "lumber". It's hilarious how badly warped the wood is and how impossible it makes it to fix dumb poo poo. The last time I bought wood to build a workbench, even the plywood wasn't close to being rectangular. Then when I got it all assembled and started applying stain it was covered in hundreds of oily boot prints that were invisible before and too deep into the wood to sand away.
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Jul 4, 2023 01:09
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Bad Purchase posted:i got a free 4k Crapple TV as part of a promotion for subscribing to some Direct TV streaming service for a few months after ATT bought them or something like that, and thank christ i have that thing Are you me  
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Jul 4, 2023 01:22
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Bad Purchase posted:seriously, tonight i searched youtube for "tonetta pressure zone" and among the first page of results was loving diablo 4 build videos You probably know this but to anyone else, don’t sleep on his other stuff. It’s really good. https://youtu.be/N2saA6OzGFg
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Jul 4, 2023 01:45
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Lurk Ethic posted:Windows 11 is a downgrade from its big brother. Want to open a picture? Cool, here it is, and here’s a row of thumbnails of the other pictures in the directory, that covers up the bottom part of the image. Okay you can close it I guess. Here it is again the next time you open a picture, keep hiding it every time like a chump. Want to turn it off entirely? gently caress you, ingrate. picasa owned (and still works, even though it's not supported). Everything by voidtools is a fantastic search engine. in line with the thread, my old ipod touch is from like 2011 and is still razor fast and zippy, where every other ios thing just gets slower and shittier by the year.
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Jul 4, 2023 02:02
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Tunicate posted:You could have just linked it on doctow's website which isn't paywalled ah, but that would require me to not be dumb as hell and also knowing that it existed somewhere else
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Jul 4, 2023 03:29
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