CodexArcanum

destroy their ass

You seem so nice online, I never would have predicted this degree of violent foreplay. And making them lose to you at Catan first, that’s some kinky shit!

The enshittification cycle Doctorow discusses is specific to online companies and services, but does have a certain general form that is applicable more broadly. But it isnt just “service degrades over time due to the tendency of profit to diminish.”

It’s about platforms, aka markets, aka middlemen. An online service doesn’t just exist to serve customers. Initially, the platform holder caters heavily to customers and to suppliers. Netflix offers a seemingly unlimited buffet of video for a low monthly fee, but also they seek out content creators to license their works and hire them to make new exclusive works. Epic Games store, same deal: free games for customers, huge exclusivity deals for publishers.

Enshittification happens when you get big enough to play the sides off each other. Publishers are captive to your platform for access to the audience, the audience is captive for access to your exclusive content. Older companies sold directly to stores or consumers, making it easier to just put the squeeze workers or customers.

By controlling the platform/market, you can extract wealth from every aspect of it: degrade customer experience, lock in and underpay producers and employees, and if you get big enough you can even start bossing around the government. Look at how much Amazon makes by forcing shippers and postal providers to cater to them.

That dynamic is somewhat novel. Markets are traditionally regulated, controlled, (and profited by) the government. David Graeber talks about the origins of markets under monarchs in order to centralize sales of goods to supply armies more readily. The modern capitalist understands that if you own the market, then you’ve won.

I’m not sure if I should bring up the homeless vets with PTSD who’d love someone to talk to, for hire or not, qualified or not; or if I should make light of asking my own friend for hire about coping with the depression and anxiety of living in a world that the ultrawealthy have immiserated for their wealth.

The rich are worried about people hating them for being rich while everyone else is burning out from the stress of coping with living in situations that are literally depressing.

Maybe people don’t need to feel better about it? Maybe the rich should be afraid and feel like shit? Maybe the poor should be angry and upset? Maybe people on the internet use humor to cope with difficult situations and being a wokescold finger-wagger about it is counterproductive?

You: has a bad opinion

Nobody:

I feel like y’all aren’t ready to hear that Earthbound is 31 years old. The “new” thing you love, inspired by the retro thing you loved, is now retro and inspiring the next generation.

THANK YOU! Goddamn, nothing makes me feel more like an old man screaming at clouds than this stupid “Nobody:” meme.

Woke up a 1, then remembered i live in a genocidal regime collapsing at the end of history, and I still have to show up to work for several hours of meetings. So I’m at about a 7 now, as my day truly starts.

I feel like its a mixed bag. Certainly there’s an infinitely higher chance of someone randomly noticing a backdoor in OSS than in closed source simply because any OSS project in use has someone looking at it. Many closed systems have dusty corners that haven’t had programmer eyes on them in years.

But also, modern dev requires either more vigilance than most of us have to give or more trust than most of us would ideally be comfortable offering. Forget leftpad, I’ve had npm dependencies run a full python script to compile and build sub dependencies. Every time I run npm update, it could be mining a couple of bitcoins for all I know in addition to installing gigs and gigs of other people’s code.

The whole industry had deep talks after leftpadgate about what needed to be done and ultimately, not much changed. NPM changed policy so that people couldn’t just dissapear their packages. But we didn’t come up with some better way.

Pretty much every language has its own NPM now, the problem is more widespread than ever. With Rust, it can run arbitrary macros and rust code in the build files, it can embed C dependencies. I’m not saying it would be super easy to hide something in cargo, i haven’t tried so I don’t know, but i do think the build system is incredibly vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A dependency chain could easily pull in some backdoor native code, embed it deep into your app, and you might never realize it’s even there.

Also, I’m quitting tomorrow and you’re in charge of MysteryTool maintenance. I’d start by upgrading the .NET version, that baby’s still running on Framework 4.5!

As discussed previously, browsers are quite complex and so adding a new feature (subtitles) is actually adding several features, on top of existing features (video player) that aren’t really (arguably) core to the web experience.

(I think olds like me want to believe the web is still “for” text and static images, but the majority of users today are (allegedly) all-in on video.)

Anyway, what sub-features make up “simple” subtitles? Oh the usual: where are they sourced? What format? What language? What encoding? (Utf8 one can only pray) Left to right support? Asian character support? What font are you using? System fonts? Are they widely supported? Does any of it work on mobile? Who holds the relevant patents? Etc.