Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

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.

Draadje met plantjes en beestjes die ik zoal tegenkom.

Gewone veldsla (Valerianella locusta)

I'm curious, both academically and out of self interest: throw enby/androgynous names at me. Rules:
- Sam, Alex, and Max (plus variants) are out for overuse
- preferred if it works in Germanic languages but not a requirement
- must at least be kinda recognisable as a "normal" ish name for both binary genders in either German or English
- should at least kinda be a "normal" name (that is to say, "substantially less out there than just going by phoenix as a legal name")

I'm not particularly set on actually replacing my legal name (I don't mind it that much) but I kinda wanna try some names and found options to be woefully lacking beyond a handful obvious and overused ones

We fundamentally believe every program, app, and operating system should always and unconditionally act in favor of it's user.

We don't think that is that bold or controversial of a statement yet none of the mainstream ones do in any way do so

here's the little guide for modding Fallout: New Vegas on Linux that I wrote in about 1/5 the time it took for an 11gb file to download from Nexus Mod Manager

https://proto.garden/notes/computers/configuration/modding_new_vegas

Playing with internally lit cubes, wrapped in colored washi paper. These are USB powered and use 4 two inch long LED strips. I love them because they look totally different (but still cool) when they are not lit up.

@futurebird Here's a cautionary tale.

One Central Park in Sydney was an award-winning green development.

From Vogue in 2014:

"Sydney’s One Central Park complex says a lot about the possible future of our architecture: that buildings needn’t be a strain on the environment, that more high rise doesn’t have to mean less greenery, and that tall buildings may even be able to improve rather than diminish their surrounds. Designed by Atelier Jean Nouvel, One Central Park in Sydney’s Chippendale has been given 12 awards since its completion in December 2013: it took out the title of overall winner as well as taking out Sustainabilty Award at the international LEAF awards, and has just been awarded ‘Best Tall Building Worldwide’ by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago."

https://www.vogue.com.au/vogue-living/design/one-central-park-sydney-named-best-tall-building-in-the-world/image-gallery/84423c7d5cd44773dd0b9e95c13c08b2

More from ArchitectureAU here: https://architectureau.com/articles/one-central-park/

Then, in 2022, the planter boxes literally fell off:

"2022 saw a planter box fall to the footpath below, with local Council calling for repairs to protect the public to take place immediately. Structural engineers have been assessing the safety of other planter boxes that adorn the biophilic building, with some boxes supported by ropes to mitigate risk, while 33 have been removed."

https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/cladding-planter-boxes-concern-one-central-park

Oh, and it also turns out the planter boxes are flammable:

"Category A and B cladding – the two most flammable – were found on the doors, structures (Cat A) and planter boxes (Cat B) respectively, with the dispute currently before the courts after the Planning Department issued an urgent fire safety order in January in the wake of the cladding inspection."

More details here: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-planter-box-fell-off-broadway-s-green-building-that-was-just-the-start-of-its-problems-20231110-p5ej40.html

The building itself is beautiful — I used to work nearby and visited a number of times.

But beyond flammable planter boxes, the bigger problem with the building becomes apparent on street view.

That building on the right, covered in plants, is One Central Park.

It's on a congested six-lane stroad filled with cars and trucks.

Too often, we silo off architecture, urban planning, and transport.

But what we need is green cities.

A green building won't help the environment much if people born fossil fuels in their cars to get there.

#urbanism #architecture #planning #UrbanPlanning #cities #sustainability

Just checked and yes, the screen reader is still broken in Fedora 40. (Cannot be controlled; keyboard shortcuts/modifier key doesn’t work.)

So this is yet another release where the screen reader is broken by default.

It’s amazing to me that this is not a showstopper.

#accessibility #a11y #fedora40 #fedora #linux

sometimes a measure becomes bad bc it was made into a target. but sometimes it was just a bad measure to begin with

🔎: how to start a queer socialist commune and make sure it doesn't turn into a cult

Reminder: mass layoffs usually trigger a cycle of dysfunction. So, to take a hypothetical example, if an already dysfunctional car company lays off 10-20% of their staff—much of which will be sales staff—odds are that their overall numbers a year from now will be much worse, not better