The Enshittificator (YouTube video)
Via.
A hilarious and spot on attempt to drag you to Breaking Free:
In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the
Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report
shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is
possible to turn the tide. Together with more than 70 consumer groups and other actors in
Europe and the US, we are sending letter to policymakers in the EU/EEA, UK and the US.
Target's new CEO unveils his turnaround plan
Or, he could, you know, actually listen to what your former customers are telling you and decide to embrace them, rather than alienate them.
I'm spending a lot of time today reading up on Model Context Protocol and "best practices"
when using MCP (which, gotta say, is different from the MCP acronym I grew up with).
Which... this conversation on Metafilter. caviar2d2
opined:
Having developed software for 30 years, if I look back, most of the software
being developed in the US today has a negative net impact on society and people.
flabdablet
observed that writing code has not been the bottleneck:
Surely all it will take to clean those Augean stables is devising some way to
scale today's excretion rate to at least 10x.
on which Sparx riffed:
I love this!
"Observe! I have invented a hose of such intense pressure that it will clean
the Augean Stables!"
"Amazing. Those stables are disgusting. Wait - don't you think you should use water?"
"I need all the water to keep this baby cool."
"So what are you using?"
"Just some other stuff I found. The stables are full of it."
Since there's currently an orchestrated push to destroy anonymity on the Internet: Politico:
Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn
The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires
some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open
letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies
being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.
California Assembly Bill 1043: AB-1043 Age verification signals:
software applications and online services. apparently makes it illegal to configure an
operating system without confirming the user's age, similarly for Colorado Senate Bill SB 26-051:
AGE ATTESTATION ON COMPUTING DEVICES
Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian: The world wants to ban children
from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all, in response to the
toot linking to that
Alan @metaphase@toot.community asked
@taylorlorenz Who is paying for the lobbyists for this seemingly worldwide
campaign for the legislation to install identity surveillance everywhere
"for the children"?
And why, even in blue states, are the politicians always so eager to enable
tools so easily abused by authoritarian, fascist governments
Uncle Duke
@UncleDuke1969@universeodon.com
Don’t put ants in your ears
Or bees in your anus
Lick a porcupine once
You’ll find out what pain is
And there’s just one last thing
One final reminder
Please don’t put ground-up wasp nests
in your vagina
Today's Timdle putting the beginning of the Discovery Channel up against Anna Wintour's Vogue era, *and* the Glee pilot episode against the world population hitting 7B, feels unfair...
https://www.timdle.com/daily
On Saturday evening, Charlene and I were sitting out on our front patio eating dinner and
watching drivers run the Mission & Mountain View stop signs (spending some more time
gathering video of this in order to make a montage to post to Facebook and NextDoor titled
"those fucking bicyclists" is a fantasy project).
The social media comments on the news of two recent killings of cyclists on rural roads
around Petaluma are filled with "yeah, that road isn't safe for bicycles, I don't know what
they were doing there".
We hear that the city has over 200 requests for traffic calming and safety improvements in
their barely funded safe streets programs.
But here we have an example of where a metropolitan region of 1.5 million people has decided
that killing people for convenience is not acceptable.
Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic
death.