CodexArcanum

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.

Reminds me a bit of the old default Gtk look. Or maybe early Java Swing… The flat look, primary colors, and some other elements to me; it’s very nostalgic. Not sure of any themes that fit it though, sorry, haha

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.

10 Want to hear a basic joke about loops?

20 GOTO 10

I just ditched it last month, finally. For Codium though, I’m still not committed to a retvrn to emacs. Exciting though, should be a new version out soon then! Edit: well, maybe not that exciting. I just checked the link and of course its like 95% “improvements” to the forced Copilot integration.

Ooh, I’d been looking at wasmer but wasmtime looks easier and more appropriate. Thanks for the suggestion!

Also wow, a D programmer in the wild! I used to really like that language before I got into Rust (my beloved).

Literally have a dozen other tabs open about how to embed a WASM engine into my Rust game. At least I’m not (currently, at this time, right now) writing my own language or trying to embed a prolog engine.

Physically Based Rendering (the freely available book) won its authors a special Academy award in 2014. That book is still the teaching standard for ray tracing so far as I know. In the intro, they discuss Pixar adding ray tracing (based on pbrt) to their RenderMan software in the early 2000s.

A Bugs Life and TS2 could have benefit from some of that, but I’d guess Monsters Inc was the first full outing for it, and certainly by Nemo they must have been doing mostly ray tracing.

import birthday;

let myAge1 = 4;
let sisterAge1 = 2;
let myAge2 = 44;

let sisterAge2 = birthday.deriveAge(myAge1, sisterAge1, myAge2);

print(sisterAge2);

Any bugs should be reported upstream. Please open a tracking issue to sync changes with eventual upstream fixes.

Yeah I’m only still lurking there for the porn, and frankly, lemmynswf is getting better! Still not enough thirsty gooners to really support a diverse biosphere of onlyfans models, instasluts, and tiktok thots, but growing all the time. Also has the problem most of Lemmy does that like 4 posters are responsible for 95% of the content.

Stock growth, not user growth. Valuations are all made up, and the oligarchs are orchestrating for tech stock values to plummet so they can go shopping for user data, cheap employees, and tech stacks. (In that order)

Oh don’t worry, I get myself involved in plenty. I prefer to make problems at the architectural or “leadership” level though.

America: let’s disband the CDC, FDA, USDA, any set of letters we can that might regulate something. all the livestock dies from preventable diseases

Meanwhile, China: wHaT dO wE dO wItH aLl ThEsE cHiCkEnS?

Wildly, in C# you can do either and it has different results. I believe a bare throw doesn’t append to the stack trace, it keeps the original trace intact, while throw e updates the stack trace (stored on the exception object) with the catch and rethrow.

In C#, you can only throw objects whose class derives from Exception.

This is incorrect. The C# is valid. Throw in a catch statement simply rethrows the caught exception. Source: I’ve been writing C# for 20 years, also the docs.

I won’t act like MS absolutely didn’t steal core concepts and syntax from Java, but I’ve always thought C# was much more thoughtfully designed. Anders Hejlsberg is a good language designer, TypeScript is also a really excellent language.

PETA isn’t going to like all those für loops

At least the names are extremely self-documenting. Some of those German variable names are long enough they might even be self-aware!

I’m being sarcastic but not by much. Nordic countries do have much better digital id systems and the EU overall looks to be following their model.

https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/

https://www.openbankingexcellence.org/blog/eid-and-the-eu-digital-identity-frameworka-scandinavian-perspective/

He’s complaining that a number isn’t unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn’t supposed to be unique and he’s complaining that it’s not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.

But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they’re supposed to be used.

But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just… so many of them.