The place I work at I wouldn’t say is “over staffed” but it is maybe “wrong-staffed”.

They have a full time “scrum master” and from what I can tell all she does it share her screen so people can awkwardly tell her which tickets to click on, and she calls on people in order during the morning meeting. That’s a whole-ass job. Meanwhile, devops is like crying blood because there’s like 2 of them managing decades of systems, and no senior engineering roles have been backfilled after people left for years.

If fines scaled with wealth that might create an incentive for the police to harass rich people instead of poor people. It won’t, because the police serve the wealthy, but it’s a nice day fantasy.

I’m so tired of every job posting frothing at the mouth over AI. “We’re ai native” , “we want employees who are excited about ai tools”, “agenic workflows”

Just fuck off.

Even if all of this stuff was a real productivity increase, who is keeping that extra production? Not the workers!

I use nano for quick edits. I don’t know more than the basics of vim, and don’t do a lot of editing on the terminal so I haven’t needed to.

Fuck Spotify. I’ll buy albums (drm free, mostly from Bandcamp), pirate, or go without.

Today is bandcamp Friday, too. Bandcamp passes their cut on to the band.

People are lazy and don’t think very much. Spotify is right there.

Also enshittification: it was better to draw people in, and then they made it shittier and people stay

I buy music (mostly from Bandcamp). Now I have a big library and no subscription fee.

I don’t know a lot about how fingerprinting works, but some of what i’ve read is pretty insidious. Some things could probably be obfuscated, but some of what the trackers use has legitimate purposes as well. Your application may serve different content based on the screen size, or fall back to an older library if such-and-such API isn’t supported.

Personally I’d rather make targeting advertising and tracking illegal, and gut the whole thing to avoid the arms race.

So you’re going to make it illegal to call getBoundingClientRect and then pass that information to fetch through any mechanism?

You’d have to kill a lot of JavaScript and CSS for that to work, and then a lot of legitimate function goes away.

Done much web development work?

I’m pretty sure for fonts they can tell because they have different widths, which affects page layout, which can be measured.

There’s a lot of stuff like that.

Best would be make it illegal and give the law teeth. Solving it technically will always be an arms race.

Modern social networks are pretty trash, but I don’t have an iPhone so this is a non starter.

Even so, I’d rather just… text my friends.

Jury nullification is still a thing. If someone smashed up some waymo property, find them not guilty.

I really would prefer our laws had teeth and the leadership of Airbnb and uber had had their lives ruined.

Windows is pretty bad and their management are soulless husks.

They could rip out all the AI garbage and I wouldn’t trust that they learned anything. Fuck 'em.

Linux is free and meet all my needs.

You’d think more libertarian types would be more in favor of walkable cities, biking, and such.

Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

It’s hard to make a full judgment without knowing more details but “the pay is good and it’s easy” isn’t really a compelling justification for “and I help evil manifest in the world”.

I knew a guy who went to work for palantir a bunch of years ago. Was always friendly at work. I asked him “but what’re you going to do if they do bad stuff, like spying on people?”

He just shrugged. Didn’t care. The money was good.

I don’t know if this alone is proof that’s a bad person, but I think it precludes him from being a good one.

Conservatives don’t care about being correct or consistent. They say things for effect. They follow their feelings. Something inside them is broken and ruined. They project constantly onto others, because introspection would shatter their flimsy ego.