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.

xAI is getting picked because their company is encouraging and enabling sexual abuse and child porn generation on a massive scale. When called out on it they turned it into a commercial feature, and whined how they are being prosecuted for free speech. Now they are trying to politicize it [1]. Garbage behavior.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/elon-musk-can... this/685606/

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.

http://killedbygoogle.com/ - most Google products are for the temporary career advancement of some exec or product lead.

Their only real product is advertising, everything else is a pretense to capture users attention and behaviors that they can auction off.

Google subscriptions and services are so terribly mismanaged that I will be staying away, no matter how incredible this shallow fork of vscode may be.

I remember a previous story months ago about Gemini that had Google PMs trying to hype their product, but it was all question about how nobody knows how to get Gemini API keys with any number of paid subscription.

On top of that how long until it’s https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?

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.

The “American boss” can also over-staff and then fire as they see fit and call it innovation. They hire way more people than they can employ long term, especially during another hype-driven tech bubble. They can get a few billion extra when they sell a company with 1000s of employees instead of 100s. Right after acquisition it’s time for mass layoffs because of “market conditions”. So employees work lives become another asset in speculator’s spreadsheets.

When hackers hear “innovation” they probably think of solving an existing valuable problem better. It seems economists and CEOs think of innovation as finding a better way to extract maximum mental labor for the cheapest price. Then use that to maximize the value of their own equity, at the expense of society if necessary. If you’re building a heavily isolated bunker in Hawaii or New Zealand, you’re not exactly signaling you care about the rest of humanity’s well being.

As someone who works in tech outside of the SV bubble this sounds like epicenter of marketing VC “enshittification” as being somehow “innovation”.

Because to use lambdas you're asking the language to make implicit heap allocations for captured variables. Zig has a policy that all allocation and control flow are explicit and visible in the code, which you call re-inventing the wheel.

Lambdas are great for convenience and productivity. Eventually they can lead to memory cycles and leaks. The side-effect is that software starts to consume gigabytes of memory and many seconds for a task that should take a tiny fraction of that. Then developers either call someone who understands memory management and profiling, or their competition writes a better version of that software that is unimaginably faster. ex. https://filepilot.tech/

My company issued a warning to developers to stay away from Gemini Code, mostly because the subscription model is such an impenetrable mess. Google AI Pro apparently does not give you any access to Gemini Code, nor do various Google Workspace subscriptions.

Google as a company seems to have become an incoherent set of exec fiefdoms and their personal campaigns. I wouldn't be surprised if Gemini Code will join https://killedbygoogle.com , and re-surface as something else in due time. Anthropic and OpenAI are much better focused on the developer experience.

I was rather disappointed and confused that the "Google One" or "Google AI Pro" subscription does not give you access to use Gemini API keys, and you can't use this Gemini CLI either.

Google services have become a patchwork of painfully confounding marketing terms that mean nothing and obfuscate what they actually provide.

If I'm reading this right, the last full zim archive of all of english wikipedia is wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim which is now about 16 months old. Is that right, or is are another more recent sources?

The current US administration is actively trying to interfere with Wikipedia and censor public speech or information that is detrimental to their disinformation campaign. [1]

Do you know if there is an effort to publish more recent archives ? Or do you have any advice how outside developers could jump in to help with that project?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799302

What he means is that Germans are less susceptible to the SV bullshit artists that are hyping up their bubble unicorns for VC money, inflating companies with workers just to sell them at peak of the hype before cutting all those “positions” and then en-shittifying the product.

Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.

I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.

Cursor overwrites the “code” command line shortcut/alias that’s normally set by VS Code. It does this on every update with no setting to disable this behavior. There are numbers of forum threads asking about manual solutions. This seems like a deliberately anti-user feature meant to get their usage numbers up at all costs. This small thing makes me not trust the decision making process at Cursor won’t sell me out as a user.

only if the rest of us do nothing and let them remake the world. It seems likely since the rest of us seem to be disconnected socially which makes any collective action more difficult. Its almost as if the fake "social" media was meant to starve the world of meaningful connection that could lead to sustainable action.

If ever an article needed an artist's rendition.

I'd love to see the massive jaw structure to see how afraid I should be for my toes if some crazy billionaire decides to do a Cambrian Park. This worm is about a foot long after all.

Not the op or the author but any and all developers will make mistakes. Experience just moves the threshold of obvious mistakes into less obvious ones. What’s impressive is that the author built a system and presumably opened it to community feedback which could potentially lead to better result than an experience developer working in solitude and worry over security for years. I appreciate the honest disclaimer at the top as well.

On teams I work on I usually socialize the ideas that it’s not mistakes that matter, but the speed of discovery and fixing that is important. Then it’s important to establish self-enforcing systems that make sure they never happen again. That is linters, unit tests, type systems, CI/CD etc. I jokingly call this humility-based development.

I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies and seen many examples of a disfuncional culture. I’ve seen in those places that PMs solve most problems with the one tool at their disposal: meetings. Incentives for promotions are such that the bigger your meeting the more important you are. I’ve been in hi dress of hours of cross functions team meeting where 1-2 people did any work, and usually the PM talked the whole time, while 10-20ppl are on mute and only sign off at the end to show they indeed exist. The end result see teams of dejected engineers that don’t have time for actual technical work, and are asked to give estimates or commitments on the spot without any research or even understanding of the code. I’ve seen PMs reject technical designs because they didn’t like the number or “points”, and engineers just had to reformat the same ideas into different “tickets” to satisfy some inscrutable PM aesthetics. Entire projects delayed and derailed because of lack of understanding and pointless status signaling rituals. On the other hand I’ve worked with brilliant PM who protected the team from such nonsense and helped them stay focused on the right goal. These people are invaluable as much as the others are detrimental.

Its fairly obvious that an anonymous stranger on the internet, or a politician proselytizing for their punative economic policies is _not_ that type of friend. But it seems some people derive a great deal of satisfaction out of imaginging themselves as knowing better how people should live their lives.

I think the story highlights a problem irrespective of the messenger. Some people cannot help but judge and opine on other's behavior where they have no context, or any moral basis to render that judement. We do this all the time in private, but politicians, or public figures, use the same propensity to pass devastating and life hampering policies, or inflame public opinion against a group of people. All I'm really hoping for is a wide spread culture of more humility and compassion in how we communicate in public, despite the exact opposite tendencies capturing the current herd mentality.