Everything is Shit: Tracking the Great Enshittening

[Fudge Nuggets 18899]

9 hours ago, immamac said:

The Shareholder Supremacy (wheresyoured.at) This edition is a 41 minute estimated read. It's so fucking good, I feel like I'm not a crazy person when I read this. 

Facebook has been dying for at least how many years now?

[Viking 295]

9 hours ago, immamac said:

The Shareholder Supremacy (wheresyoured.at) This edition is a 41 minute estimated read. It's so fucking good, I feel like I'm not a crazy person when I read this. 

I love the term "Habsburg AI" for AI that is trained on its own garbage.

[immamac 41615]

4 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Facebook has been dying for at least how many years now?

You obviously didn't read the newsletter. 

[thunderlounge 7619]

1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Facebook has been dying for at least how many years now?

Not long enough, apparently. 

[HenryJames 65251]

1 hour ago, Viking said:

I love the term "Habsburg AI" for AI that is trained on its own garbage.

[Fudge Nuggets 18899]

3 hours ago, immamac said:

You obviously didn't read the newsletter. 

No, because it's going to say the same shit as the last few years so why waste time with it.  I wish Facebook died years ago, you know when everyone first said it was dying.

[immamac 41615]

1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

No, because it's going to say the same shit as the last few years so why waste time with it.  I wish Facebook died years ago, you know when everyone first said it was dying.

That's not what it said. You should read it. 

[Gravy Train 970]

That's not what it said. You should read it. 

+1; that's not why Facebook is dying, and the article might make you reevaluate a whole slew of products-turned-shit for a motivation that could mean fuckall to you in the future, most certainly the common denominator driving their demise.

[Captainant 26902]

6 hours ago, immamac said:

That's not what it said. You should read it. 

If you're not already, you should check out his podcast Better Offline - they did a great discussion on the trend of empty suits taking control of engineering teams and directing them to build bullshit solely for investors at the cost of their customers experience 

[Deej 76156]

36 minutes ago, Captainant said:

at the cost of their customers experience 

[Brisketexan 103515]

On 7/2/2024 at 11:02 PM, immamac said:

The Shareholder Supremacy (wheresyoured.at) This edition is a 41 minute estimated read. It's so fucking good, I feel like I'm not a crazy person when I read this. 

On a plane, just read this entire article.  It is a FANTASTIC piece.  I encourage everyone following this thread to read it.  I snipped a few gems from it, I'll just paste them below instead of cramming them into a quote box:

---------

The answer is simple: the customer, and by extension the service provided to the customer, is no longer the primary concern of a company. It's all about shareholder value, and while this may seem a little obvious, it requires a little bit of a history lesson to really explain how profoundly damaging shareholder supremacy is. 

These stories explain the often-paradoxical motivations of modern capitalism, where those who make short-term decisions (that invariably result in long-term pain and, in many cases, decline) are rewarded, whereas those who build sustainable businesses that actually innovate, and don’t treat their customers and employees like dirt, are ignored — if not actively maligned. 

These people — management consultants, MBAs and Product Managers — are not creators of anything other than financial occultism, a dark art where the financial value of a company is often separated from what it does or whether it’s good at it. They are parasites. 

Sundar Pichai doesn’t use Google, and Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Instagram, Facebook or Threads — at least not like an actual user does, anyway, much like how David Zaslav doesn’t watch or care about TV shows and movies. Their deep-seated nihilism means that they aren’t users, or creators, or even active participants in any part of society. They are there to move the stuff around so that they can keep numbers going up.

The business media — and society at large — elevates executives like Zuckerberg and Pichai as they demolish their products and lay off thousands of people because the terms of “success” are no longer about making money by providing a good service. The markets don’t reward steady growth, nor do they punish executives for the quality of their product, because analysts and investors aren’t concerned with the product, just the financial output.

They don’t care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there is a quickly-approaching wall that generative AI can’t leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of Large Language Models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome. This is a shiny new object they can wave at investors that already don’t know what any of this stuff means, one that lets them dream of a world without labor.

At some point, things have to collapse. I am not saying that every major tech company goes belly-up, but I believe the generative AI boom is the force that creates a reckoning in this industry.  It’s almost a little too on the nose — a tool that only seems revolutionary to people that haven’t written, or coded, or drawn, or sang, or created anything in years. 

And big tech was desperate for something new to follow, something new to do with themselves that would sustain the Valley’s threadbare facade as a crucible of innovation and progress, rather than doing the hard work to actually research and develop important technology that people would like and pay for. Sam Altman gave them something to do, and he packaged it in a way that told them how to think about it — and, of course, lie about it.

I don't know how you change things, other than loudly saying what I see in front of my eyes and how it makes me feel, and wanting others to, at the very least, have more clarity into the things that are being done to them, and the ways in which others have twisted the system to make more money than anyone's ever had transforming companies into nihilistic engines for growth, anti-companies that create value by reducing what they contribute to the world. 

 -------------

I  bolded the one paragraph because that perfectly captures our broken system.  And I mean our entire system.  Our economic system, our political system, our entire social system.  WE have made gods of this horrific, destructive model.  To stop it....WE simply need to decide to stop.

Why is a man who says "My business makes a product, we sell plenty of them.  I will make plenty of money doing that.  I will keep making that money, because it's a good product that people want, sold at a fair price.  And my business will employ a lot of people, and pay them well -- enough to have a good and decent life.  When I see them and their families succeed and thrive, I am happy because I have helped them make that success.  We all have enough.  We sell a product that we are proud of.  And our customers are better off for it".....fucking vilified as a traitor to capitalism?

How on earth is it good and sane for us to treat human beings as purely OPEX instead of CAPEX?  How is that good for any of us?  It's a circle of "fuck you-ism" that always, always comes back on everyone but the handful of people at the very, very top (and eventually, it comes for them, too....because the other people at the top are predatory as shit).

Where we are is completely broken.  It will only change when we decide to make a broad and deep change to who we are, and how we think about the world.  And that will not happen until a brutal and painful collapse.  

On the bright side, we seem to be doing everything we can - socially, politically, and economically -- to make that happen and right soon.  So.....yay.

[Gatorubet 29538]

Speaking of enshittening, let me talk about healthcare for a second. For 30 years I have had what they call Sampter’s Triad - where otherwise healthy 30-year-olds suddenly develop horrible adult asthma, get sinus polyp growth and also develop an allergy to aspirin that causes anaphylaxis if any aspirin product is taken.

My sinuses are horrible, and I can’t sleep, resulting in breathing through my mouth, which makes my asthma worse.  Granted, people like Michael J. Fox want to trade with me, but it still sucks on a day-to-day basis.  They have now developed immunological treatments for my conditions, and there is a monthly shot that will literally clear my polyps, ease my asthma, and generally improve my quality of life.  It only cost $3850 a month.  A few years ago while I was still on my employers insurance, Blue Cross said I had to have several hospitalizations within a time period before they would give me the drug. If I wasn’t literally dying, then I could tough it out. Now I am on Medicare and a supplement - and it turns out I only have to pay $955 a month. I got my first shot, a week ago and already my sinuses are very much cleared and I have not had to use my inhaler. I feel much better. 

Because I get $3000 a month for Social Security I use that to pay for all things medical. Plus, I am working, which gives me the liberty to do that. Now imagine all the people in the country who have my exact same condition and cannot afford a grand a month for a shot.     I don’t know how people making less than six figures get through some of this crap. it’s total bullshit for healthcare to cost that much.

[immamac 41615]

10 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

Speaking of enshittening, let me talk about healthcare for a second. For 30 years I have had what they call Sampter’s Triad - where otherwise healthy 30-year-olds suddenly develop horrible adult asthma, get sinus polyp growth and also develop an allergy to aspirin that causes anaphylaxis if any aspirin product is taken.

My sinuses are horrible, and I can’t sleep, resulting in breathing through my mouth, which makes my asthma worse.  Granted, people like Michael J. Fox want to trade with me, but it still sucks on a day-to-day basis.  They have now developed immunological treatments for my conditions, and there is a monthly shot that will literally clear my polyps, ease my asthma, and generally improve my quality of life.  It only cost $3850 a month.  A few years ago while I was still on my employers insurance, Blue Cross said I had to have several hospitalizations within a time period before they would give me the drug. If I wasn’t literally dying, then I could tough it out. Now I am on Medicare and a supplement - and it turns out I only have to pay $955 a month. I got my first shot, a week ago and already my sinuses are very much cleared and I have not had to use my inhaler. I feel much better. 

Because I get $3000 a month for Social Security I use that to pay for all things medical. Plus, I am working, which gives me the liberty to do that. Now imagine all the people in the country who have my exact same condition and cannot afford a grand a month for a shot.     I don’t know how people making less than six figures get through some of this crap. it’s total bullshit for healthcare to cost that much.

You are better off to them dead. 

[Gatorubet 29538]

1 minute ago, immamac said:

You are better off to them dead. 

[Hank Kingsley 19998]

More from Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/  

 

The most fascinating part of the report (page 10) is an interview with Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs' Head of Global Equity Research. Covello isn't a name you'll have heard unless you are, for whatever reason, a big semiconductor-head, but he's consistently been on the right side of history, named as the top semiconductor analyst by II Research for years, successfully catching the downturn in fundamentals in multiple major chip firms far before others did.

And Jim, in no uncertain terms, thinks that the generative AI bubble is full of shit.

Covello believes that the combined expenditure of all parts of the generative AI boom — data centers, utilities and applications — will cost a trillion dollars in the next several years alone, and asks one very simple question: "what trillion dollar problem will AI solve?" He notes that "replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions [he's] witnessed in the last thirty years."

One particular myth Covello dispels is comparing generative AI "to the early days of the internet," noting that "even in its infancy, the internet was a low-cost technology solution that enabled e-commerce to replace costly incumbent solutions," and that "AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn't designed to do."

[Hank Kingsley 19998]

"AI-driven personalized behavior change". LMAO. 

Full text of tweet: 

Today Sam Altman and I published a piece in TIME sharing our vision for how AI-driven personalized behavior change can transform healthcare and announcing the launch of Thrive AI Health, a new company funded by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global, which will be devoted to building an AI health coach. The company’s mission is to use AI to democratize access to expert-level health coaching to improve health outcomes and address growing health inequities. As  @sama and I write, AI could go well beyond efficiency and optimization to something much more fundamental: improving both our health spans and lifespans. With AI-driven personalized behavior change, we have the chance to finally reverse the trend lines on chronic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, which are directly related to daily behaviors but not distributed equally across demographics. DeCarlos Love — a brilliant product leader passionate about improving health outcomes — has left Google to become Thrive AI Health’s CEO, and I’m very much looking forward to working with him. And The Alice L. Walton Foundation is joining us as a strategic investor to help us scale our impact to underserved communities and reduce health inequities. AI has become central to @Thrive 's mission to improve health and productivity outcomes, and I’m incredibly passionate about the opportunity to leverage AI to deliver hyper-personalized behavior change across the five key behaviors that Thrive focuses on and that govern our health: sleep, food, movement, stress management and connection. The AI health coach will be embedded in Thrive’s behavior change platform and we look forward to bringing this innovative offering to the market. Read more in

@TIME

: https://bit.ly/3WbFQ9I

[sidis 9659]

shocking for this site that no one has made a surlyhorns.com security crack.

['stache 21520]

I'm continually amazed at how fast American society has changed in the past and how stagnant it is presently. Even with an enormous change through technology, we are still hung up on some really stupid shit. I'm posting because two issues come to mind.

First, I'm pouring through documents and online forms to determine if I have insurance coverage for my daughter who is probably going to need braces later this year. I seriously cannot figure it the fuck out, and I'm a fucking lawyer. I'm also sitting on an $800 post-insurance invoice from a rural hospital for putting some skin glue on my son's head from when he fell off a swingset out in the country. It was late evening and the local hospital is listed as also the local urgent care. They submitted it as an emergency room visit. I've had a dozen phone calls and nobody will agree with me that the bill is either wrong or complete bullshit. I'm about to just fucking pay it because I'm fucking exhausted.

Second, tipping culture. I liked a local food review group on facebook and half the fucking posts are fights over tipping. I've heard of several studies that show that it is a completely unjust and absurd system. It's biased towards pretty blonde girls and against most black people regardless of attractiveness. It's super arbitrary, why is a server entitled to more because the dish they bring out costs $40 instead of $25? And nobody can agree on what "good service" really is, not to mention all the short handed staffs that get punished because their employers are too cheap to offer a wage attractive enough to get more people to join them. Yet we just fucking stick to it instead of doing what the rest of the goddamned world does and pay servers a decent wage that is included in the price. If the service truly sucks, complain, and the server gets better or gets fired like any other job. 

Just blows my mind, especially the first. Everybody hates their health insurance companies, but cloak roomers just go ballistic if any proposal is made to change the system. I just don't get it.

[Fudge Nuggets 18899]

10 minutes ago, 'stache said:

Everybody hates their health insurance companies, but cloak roomers just go ballistic if any proposal is made to change the system. I just don't get it.

The CR cabal would love to change the system. It’s the totally non-political DT snowflakes that lose their shit. 

[Captainant 26902]

20 minutes ago, 'stache said:

Just blows my mind, especially the first. Everybody hates their health insurance companies, but cloak roomers just go ballistic if any proposal is made to change the system. I just don't get it

Who here is a fan of the current healthcare system? Aside from people who profiteer off of it, of course

Edited July 11 by Captainant

['stache 21520]

10 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Who here is a fan of the current healthcare system? Aside from people who profiteer off of it, of course

I don't know, it's confounding. Everybody seems to hate it, but half of Americans start screaming the dreaded S word (cloak room version) anytime the concept of reform is brought up in any meaningful context. It's going to require a political solution, ergo, cloak room will always be a problem. 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20303]

I submit to you all that the great enshittening actually started when McDonald's introduced its Arch Deluxe burger in 1996.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-arch-deluxe-was-a-hell-of-a-burger-it-was-also-mcdonald-s-most-expensive-flop

 

[gofuckyourself 8057]

On 7/9/2024 at 10:12 AM, Hank Kingsley said:

the opportunity to leverage AI to deliver hyper-personalized behavior change across the five key behaviors that Thrive focuses on and that govern our health: sleep, food, movement, stress management and connection.

AI HYPER-PERSONALIZED ROBOT GIZMO: GoFuckYourself, I and my AI companions recommend you stop watching Texas Longhorn football and sporting events and participating in argumentative threads on this "SurlyHorns" forum you mentioned, as it is quite apparent those activities are negatively impacting your sleep, food, movement, stress management and connection.

[Neonmoon 38126]

Quote

Mentally, it’s hard to consider any of this a grift, because doing so would be admitting how much of the economy is controlled by grifters.   

What a great quote. 

I learned early on in the many companies I worked that to be in charge, you just needed to be confident. You didn’t need to actually know anything or be an expert, but as long as you could stand in front of a large group of people and speak confidently, that’s all that mattered.

[Fudge Nuggets 18899]

52 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

What a great quote. 

I learned early on in the many companies I worked that to be in charge, you just needed to be confident. You didn’t need to actually know anything or be an expert, but as long as you could stand in front of a large group of people and speak confidently, that’s all that mattered.

This is true. There was a guy I worked with that over after work beers went on a rant about something or other. As the intensity level increased the more and more wild ass obscure stats came flying out of his mouth. 
When he was done I asked how in the hell could you possibly know all those stats?  He said he didn’t know shit and just made them up on the fly. Pretty convincing rant nonetheless. 

[Gatorubet 29538]

On 7/9/2024 at 10:12 AM, Hank Kingsley said:

AI has become central to @Thrive 's mission to improve health and productivity outcomes, and I’m incredibly passionate about the opportunity to leverage AI to deliver hyper-personalized behavior change across the five key behaviors that Thrive focuses on and that govern our health:

“practicing gratitude, manifesting abundance…”

[elfenix 34075]

[Hook1997 5239]

10 hours ago, 'stache said:

 

Second, tipping culture. I liked a local food review group on facebook and half the fucking posts are fights over tipping. I've heard of several studies that show that it is a completely unjust and absurd system. It's biased towards pretty blonde girls and against most black people regardless of attractiveness. It's super arbitrary, why is a server entitled to more because the dish they bring out costs $40 instead of $25? And nobody can agree on what "good service" really is, not to mention all the short handed staffs that get punished because their employers are too cheap to offer a wage attractive enough to get more people to join them. Yet we just fucking stick to it instead of doing what the rest of the goddamned world does and pay servers a decent wage that is included in the price. 

The people who worked as waiters during college made more money than most people that worked other hourly jobs.  A big portion of bartenders in Austin now have degrees but keep bartending longer because they make more money than they would starting out using their degrees…  I think tipping culture works pretty good. 

Edited July 12 by Hook1997

[JMFP 1111]

On 7/12/2024 at 1:03 AM, Hook1997 said:

The people who worked as waiters during college made more money than most people that worked other hourly jobs.  A big portion of bartenders in Austin now have degrees but keep bartending longer because they make more money than they would starting out using their degrees…  I think tipping culture works pretty good. 

When my nephew was a waiter he used to say something about Canadians always being poor tippers 🤷‍♂️         I dunno, I worked in the kitchen in my only food service job.

[Deej 76156]

1 minute ago, JMFP said:

When my nephew was a waiter he used to say something about Canadians always being poor tippers 🤷‍♂️         I dunno, I worked in the kitchen in my only food service job.

[thunderlounge 7619]

Fuck all this tipping everybody bullshit. 

[Deej 76156]

Put a tip jar on your desk at work and see how that goes. 

[staboner 4940]

On 7/12/2024 at 6:13 AM, 'stache said:

I don't know, it's confounding. Everybody seems to hate it, but half of Americans start screaming the dreaded S word (cloak room version) anytime the concept of reform is brought up in any meaningful context. It's going to require a political solution, ergo, cloak room will always be a problem. 

well, when one of your core beliefs is "F U don't tell me what to do!" and you purposefully look for people and places to scream that at, well thats just America. Its exhausting to be in place stuck in 2nd gear.

yeah healthcare, insurance, yeah about that. You can call, email and winge till you are blue in the face man, and meanwhile you will get Mahommes on TV every other football commercial selling you the novel idea of combining you home and auto insurance. He makes billions and you get nothing. 

Seriously though - have you considered combining your home and auto insurance under one plan? IMAGINE THE SAVINGS!

[General Specific 3152]

Fuck all this tipping everybody bullshit. 

This. I’m with Mr. Pink.

I’ve got a tip for them:

Buy low, sell high!

Don’t swing at bad pitches!

Look both ways before crossing!

[thunderlounge 7619]

See a Doc and get rid of it. 
 

Avoid the clap.

 

Lay off the high ones. 
 

 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20303]

Holy fuck my Gmail has been overrun with SPAM in the last few months. Ten times per day somebody is either a) thanking me for my purchase and including an invoice, which they hope will cause me to send them an email saying "I didn't make this purchase"  and then they ask for my credit card details so they can refund it or 2) pitches for some insurance company I've never heard of.  Blocking them/letting Google know that this is SPAM does nothing, because the next time it's coming from another sender.

At least this shit used to be somewhat humorous i.e. when the sender was a registered representative of a Nigerian prince. 

[Deej 76156]

4 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Holy fuck my Gmail has been overrun with SPAM in the last few months. Ten times per day somebody is either a) thanking me for my purchase and including an invoice, which they hope will cause me to send them an email saying "I didn't make this purchase"  and then they ask for my credit card details so they can refund it or 2) pitches for some insurance company I've never heard of.  Blocking them/letting Google know that this is SPAM does nothing, because the next time it's coming from another sender.

At least this shit used to be somewhat humorous i.e. when the sender was a registered representative of a Nigerian prince. 

Switch back to an AOL email account..

[immamac 41615]

5 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Holy fuck my Gmail has been overrun with SPAM in the last few months. Ten times per day somebody is either a) thanking me for my purchase and including an invoice, which they hope will cause me to send them an email saying "I didn't make this purchase"  and then they ask for my credit card details so they can refund it or 2) pitches for some insurance company I've never heard of.  Blocking them/letting Google know that this is SPAM does nothing, because the next time it's coming from another sender.

At least this shit used to be somewhat humorous i.e. when the sender was a registered representative of a Nigerian prince. 

Imagine a world where AI actually didn't suck fucking balls and it actually just solved spam and scammers once and for all. Id pay $25/mo for that service. 

[thunderlounge 7619]

1 minute ago, immamac said:

Imagine a world where AI actually didn't suck fucking balls and it actually just solved spam and scammers once and for all. Id pay $25/mo for that service. 

Fuck. Yes. 

[Deej 76156]

1 minute ago, immamac said:

Imagine a world where AI actually didn't suck fucking balls and it actually just solved spam and scammers once and for all. Id pay $25/mo for that service. 

You should implement that on Surly. 

deej@surlymail.com

I'd pay it. 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20303]

32 minutes ago, Deej said:

You should implement that on Surly. 

deej@surlymail.com

I'd pay it. 

Holy Fuck.  I've thought about having all my emails have an auto-reply that says "HUABS uses this email address to filter out email to his REAL email address. If you have real, legitimate business please send me an email at X address."

[HenryJames 65251]

Hi!

[Newdoc 3421]

On 7/3/2024 at 7:55 PM, Captainant said:

If you're not already, you should check out his podcast Better Offline - they did a great discussion on the trend of empty suits taking control of engineering teams and directing them to build bullshit solely for investors at the cost of their customers experience 

Sounds exactly like the healthcare industry.

[Deej 76156]

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-did-silicon-valley-turn-into

[Captainant 26902]

FTC calling out M$ for doing pretty much the exact opposite of what it said it would do when it was acquiring Activision

https://www.ign.com/articles/ftc-blasts-xbox-game-pass-price-increase-and-new-tiers-as-product-degradation

A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filing in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is taking aim at the recent Xbox Game Pass price increase, saying that it vindicates "the congressional design of preliminarily halting mergers to full evaluate their likely competitive effects."

The filing argues that the price increase, which was announced July 9, is "inconsistent" with the case it made during last year's Xbox FTC trial. In breaking down the new revised service, the FTC filing describes the new Standard tier as a "degraded product" that withholds day-one releases while still representing an increase over the original Console Game Pass tier.

"Product degradation — removing the most valuable games from Microsoft's new service — combined with price increases for existing users, is exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged," the filing reads. It also notes that the price increase coincides with Call of Duty being added to the most expensive tier.

As outlined last week, the newly-revised Xbox Game Pass will raise the price of the Ultimate tier from $16.99 to $19.99 per month along with a host of other changes. The price increase was described as inevitable by analysts speaking with IGN, with some predicting that Game Pass will eventually see the introduction of ads. The changes are said to be part of a push by Xbox to recoup some of its $69 billion investment in Activision Blizzard.

[kevwun 15255]

Google has been pushing really hard to force everyone to use DMARC and DKIM while 90% of spam comes from gmail addresses.  Maybe fix your own shit assholes.  DMARC is fine and all, but the level of hypocrisy is still amazing.

[Captain Ron 12708]

2 hours ago, Deej said:

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-did-silicon-valley-turn-into

Has this guy not been paying attention?

[HenryJames 65251]

[MissingInAction 24324]

On 7/19/2024 at 8:10 AM, HenryJames said:

Hi!

You've got mail!

Edited July 24 by MissingInAction
!

[HenryJames 65251]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/ireland-datacentres-overtake-electricity-use-of-all-homes-combined-figures-show