I could swear Google wasn’t broadly a thing yet. The startup I worked at in 1999 had an elevator pitch for how we “could be the next Yahoo.” Not a great thing to aspire to in retrospect, but Google wasn’t on our radar.

I left Facebook in 2014, having had to rejoin because in that era, you had to have an account to get a job. Which is another topic but worth keeping in mind.

If I don’t know why I’m somewhere, I leave. Rave, website, bar … these are all the same questions, just with less external pressure because you aren’t the product in the other two situations.

Remember what that landscape looked like. The only major players we know today that existed then are Microsoft and Apple, and Apple had just been bailed out by MS to get in front of antitrust issues. Amazon existed as a bookstore, Google was not around yet, Facebook would still be several years out … MySpace wasn’t yet around. AOL was still a behemoth. Adobe sold perpetual licenses.

This is a far more recent development.

There’s always the option to store things locally. You want to get fancy, you can set up a NAS for remote access.

Saying “isn’t X also doing Y” implies the behaviour itself isn’t the problem, when it is. Doesn’t matter who’s using dark patterns for rent-seeking; it matters that we’ve normalized it.

… they said Archly.

This is an underrepresented viewpoint. We are at the point of “find out,” which so many tech companies thought they could stay just to the other side of the line on. Thing is, you can only move the goalposts so often before they’re in someone’s yard, and they didn’t sign up for this shit.

It was OneDrive upgrade nagging that made me switch to Linux. Microsoft could have, you know, not done that and kept a user. They also could have not gone regressive with how the taskbar functions. Or any number of other things that were dismissive of users.

At a certain point, you’re sitting in ever warmer water in the pot, and it occurs that maybe you’re being turned into food. That’s when the Linux pots start looking appealing. This was a completely avoidable problem brought to you by greed.

Greed! Because we don’t think making a good product is what capitalism is about.

That is a uniquely awesome hed. And only strengthens my belief that 404 Media is going to make corporate journalism wish that they’d not shit the bed to the extent that viable alternative options sprang up.

Quick reminder that you are on Beehaw. There’s only one rule here, and this sort of dismissive take does not adhere to it. Please find something substantive to dismiss.

Which is particularly acute in the case of Argentina.

Has there ever been a left-wing austerity programme? This is anti-labour bullshit every fucking time.

Quelle surprise.

I also go to great lengths to say LLMs vs. AI.

But, I also spent most of my career in the “mainstream press,” and reporters can be surprisingly blasé about what technology means if that isn’t their beat. I’ve had to spike a story or two about new police tech that includes zero quotes from anyone outside the PD and their vendor. I’ve held an order of magnitude more so they could be fixed ahead of publication.

And this was 15-20 years ago, when newsrooms employed people with more than three years of experience. I heavily curate my news diet on an ongoing basis, as outlets can go down the shitter in a matter of weeks with buyouts.

What we get today from many supposedly reliable outlets is not helpful to society.

hustles to find pearls to clutch

Pretty much why people stay in abusive relationships.

Lying on an S-1 isn’t an FTC problem; it’s an SEC one.

They don’t speak High German there, so it tracks.

I’m facing this as well across the board, not just where a CS degree is expected. I started off in CS, then a year in discovered I liked working at my school paper enough to drop out after hitting managing ed and having no one left to learn from because the J-school had been gutted in the '80s … in 2000.

So, no degree. Which now means no job. Not even interviews. I never had any pure development titles that AI would pick up on, so the coding I’ve done also doesn’t count. Your basic bottom-of-the-barrel “and then we were able to lay off half the team” automation that then got me pushed out for providing a useful but unrequested solution that made me a threat.

I determine my needs and then choose my tools, so sure, I’ll get back up to speed in Python for a visualization project, but I’m not going to spend a couple of weeks trying to retain things with zero goal.

1 and 2 are viable … in certain situations. Had they left resin codes off anything else, things would look different. But once you get to “other” and believe that’s going anywhere other than a landfill, that’s an education problem.

“They’re resin codes. Why would anyone associate three arrows forming a triangle with recycling? It’s not our fault consumers see any resemblance.”

I didn’t have a choice when I started looking into 5G as primary internet … home was not available at my address but business was for whatever reason. “Very Good” signal tends to get me about 200Mbps, with “Excellent” hitting 400Mbps peaks.