flipgimble

I think this is a symptom of Big Tech and VCs scraping the bottom of the barrel to extract as much capital and social control from what remains of the good will for technology as a whole. They are literally running the internet into the ground. The popular backlash is brewing. I see this in increasing opposition to flock cameras, anti data-center activism, or generally against companies that extract, exploit and control instead of contributing to the common good.

Doing a quick search in comments, and I see the prefix “enshit” used 5 times so far. That is telling.

For most of my adult life technology was associated with unquestionable improvement and progress. We got used to a series of “revolutions” where you felt that your quality of life improved, even if a few ruthless and amoral business people amassed all the resulting wealth. We assumed that is just how the system works.

But now technology is just as likely to be associated with scams, rug-pulls and using investor capital to capture a market and destroy competition. We are being trained to assume trickery with every software update, forced terms of service change, or company acquisition. Not to mention the absurd corruption when tech billionaires collude with incompetent politicians. It’s just a trend in sentiment I’m seeing that goes against the “just build anything and the world will give you billions” cheerleading from 2000s.

I’d never support a repressive theocracy like the current Iranian regime and will not cheer on their propaganda operations.

But let’s not confuse this Iran conflict with a legitimate war. Only congress can declare war and appropriate funds for a war. What we have is a rogue authoritarian executive that was incompetent enough to ignore military assessments and be manipulated by Netanyahu to strike.

People should protest like there is no tomorrow when la senile demagogue is destroying the international world order, free trade and freedom of the seas. That is not the same as rooting for the enemy!

SDF font rendering was an industry standard maybe from 2007-2010. and you probably won’t believe what happened to OpenGL since then. Don’t even look into at what people are doing with GPUs these days, you won’t like it one bit!

But they are not equal for everybody, that’s the point of corruption. If you are part of some in-group then you may have to pay lower bribes initially, and generally get away with more corruption to your benefit. But over time you will find yourself on outside eventually and enduring higher costs. Authoritarianism is inherently volatile, threatening and unpredictable, with only those in power making profit in the short term.

the "global damage" is largely because these tariffs were arbitrary, lacking strategic planning, and highly inflationary creating a turbulence tax. The frequent reversals and selective granting of exemptions showed that its another tool to enrich the Trump family, cabinet and their business associates. In other worlds the rest of the world stopped trusting the US and started making trade deals on their own.

'Another internal email reads: “One of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone under your desk in the middle of Chemistry :)”'

As a parent this makes my blood boil. This is how a drug dealer talks. Fuck Meta for optimizing their own profit with their massively automated attack against human psychology and attention.

I know what you mean about the country being split politically, but I think using the 50% number is a misleading illusion. Only 31.8% of the voting-age population voted for Trump, so 68% did not vote for these policies.

I get that we often assume that the non-voting population is as evenly split in their support as those who voted during the election. But I think that is going to be wildly off the mark as well. Why? current presidential approval ratings are net -15%, and 2025 elections showed avg 15% swing in district that he won in 2024. His biggest support %s are from old people, and lowest among young voters.

My prediction is that we will see political ads playing non-stop showing ICE brutalizing main street America, and showing how tariff driven inflation is destroying paychecks. The mid-terms will be a dramatic correction which is why you are seeing the ground work to call everything illegitimate or rigged, and attack our established means of voting.

It’s more accurately the “truck stop bathroom wall” of the world under new management.

The "Epstein class" of multi-billionaires don't need AI at all. They hire hundreds of willing human grifters and make them low-millionaires by spewing media that enables exploitation and wealth extraction, and passing laws that makes them effectively outside the reach of the law.

They buy out newspapers and public forums like Washington Post, Twitter, Fox News, the GOP, CBS etc. to make them megaphones for their own priorities, and shape public opinion to their will. AI is probably a lot less effective than whats been happening for decades already

The content on YouTube should qualify it to be preserved as a treasure of humanity. Think of all the college lectures, conference proceedings, sporting events, citizen journalism, podcasts that are the backbone of new communities and cultural revolutions. It is the modern version of public access TV and expresses a close to compelte spectrum of human interests.

At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness.

and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.

I grew up in communist Poland before the fall of the wall in 1989 is just one story among many from this year that sounds like an echo of what my parent's told me they had to grow up with.

That so many Americans, in the self proclaimed land of the free, voted for this reality under the delusion they were against "socialism" is the most historically illiterate thing ever.