Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I think people working for companies like Anduril or Palantir deserve to be shunned and pushed out of any communal space on tech. These are people who willingly choose to work making the killing of other people more efficient and easy. I'm ok, happy even, with them not feeling welcome in FOSS.

OH “It is very crowded in this train” (looks around, empty seats everywhere) “so, until Kortrijk the first class is also available with second class tickets”

I think something that many might not realize about large open source projects like #nixos is that despite a huge number of contributors:

1. Number of contributions follows a power law.
2. Contributors aren't fungible, instead it's tens-hundreds of individual SPOFs.
3. Willingness to put your time to fix problems for others (not just stuff you have a personal interest in) is highly correlated with strong ethics.

=> Piss off the wrong 5 people and the project grinds to a halt within a month.

wwwhats going on with ios safari?? is webassembly broken for anyone else using it?

edit: one other person tested and didn't have issues. i do use lockdown mode (which disallows webassembly) but it's disabled for the site and things used to work that way, but maybe there's a new bug and weird interactions or something

At the end of Friday 3 May ICM 4011, the oldest Koploper still in service at , is leaving active service, after more than 40 years.

3rd most active contributor to #nixos drops from the project due to the lack of leadership from the Foundation supposedly backing the project.

Everything is fine, I'm sure the arms dealers will compensate the lost contributions. /s

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/306702

on the perils of being named after a month

The Cursor Pack is now available! It's a completely free (CC0) package which includes 110+ cursors in both PNG and SVG formats! #gameassets #assetwednesday

https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack

Share with your fellow developers 💜

“When street medics give trainings on the weapons cops use and the damage they inflict, the first question they ask is, ‘What is the police’s most dangerous weapon?’ The answer is: fear. […]

As we all look toward a police-free world and prepare for reactionary pushback against this powerful international movement, we must avoid spreading fear the way cops do. That is their weapon. Ours is solidarity. Ours is calm. Ours is truth. Ours is community.”

As we see young people rising up on campuses across the US, we encourage our comrades in the student movement to skill up on information hygiene and community defense + care tactics.

As such, we’re pulling from our archives a primer on information hygiene written by seasoned organizers to their comrades during the 2020 Uprisings in Minneapolis.

“How we handle information is crucial to our safety and success.”

https://antidotezine.com/2020/07/20/disinformation-hygiene-stop-the-deadly-spread/

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.