Jenn Dolari @dolari@driveinsaturday.org

#StarTrek

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

@jacob "The Commission also finds that instead of using noncompetes to lock in workers, employers that wish to retain employees can compete on the merits for the worker’s labor services by improving wages and working conditions." Oh I bet that felt good to write

You would see
The biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say "AAAAAAAAA" 🎶​

Imagine the euphoria of getting this patch right and finally getting some sensible data back. Outstanding work.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

I've been following this story since NASA's press release about the tech failure in December. I don't know why I'm so fond of the Voyager project. Probably because it's an amazing project that started before I was born, and I feel I'm very unlikely to see the beginnings of a new project like this. Cheers to the brilliant minds that engineered the solution based off of files written by people who haven't worked at NASA for decades.

And safe voyage, you two buckets of bolts.

During the pandemic, many office workers had no choice but to go home and work.

Four years later, a growing number of businesses appear to be allowing employees not just to work remotely, but outside of Colorado.

https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/20/colorado-remote-work-workers-comp/

I cried at the Voyager news today. I also know why.

Because for every techbro out there, there's a talented engineer quietly working to make things actually better.

That gives me hope.

Hope is in short supply these days.

Well, the secret's out. As many of you suspected, I am indeed Banksy. Need proof? Here, I'll give you the inside scoop of how I came up with my name. It's a combination of bank (my favorite place to withdraw money from) and syrup (because I like to pour maple syrup on pancakes lol).

#WritersCoffeeClub - Do you agree with Rose Tremain, who said you shouldn't plan a book's ending; it must be earned?

Earned by whom??? By the author? By the story? By the characters??

Anyway, it's not how I plan my stories: I see all of them as a film first (often several times) before I start writing. So even if I don't do a proper outline (or mindmap - a mindmap is better, really), I have a plan for the story. It might change a little during the writing process itself, but not much.

Ooooooo...

NASA recovered a space probe's 47-year-old computer with about as much memory as my old Commodore 64 over a distance of 15 billion miles so it can (hopefully) continue to do science work, and it reminds me of how much ingenuity used to go into computers back when the assumption was you couldn't consume the water and electricity of a small nation just to power Ask Jeeves.

My brother and I were driving through this small decaying town called Barnett, Mo, and we passed this old mill that looked very old, and grown over. It was covered with cool old signage, and looked really interesting, but there were 5 older people sitting in front of it by a table, and a hand painted sign that says Toxic Club. So, we drive back around, because we had to know, so we pull in, and ask "What is the Toxic Club?", and they say they are just out there most days with coffee and donuts to make sure that people get something to eat, and drink and have someone to chat with. That doesn't sound toxic at all, it sounds lovely.

Last November, NASA's Voyager 1 sent home garbled data, and engineers traced the problem to the flight data subsystem (FDS). The problem turned out to be a single chip in the FDS memory. They couldn't repair the chip but could move the affected code into sections and store them in different parts of the FDS system. They tested the new system this week, sending signals to the Voyager 1, 22.5 light-hours away. It worked, and Voyager 1 is back.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/