The taste just isn’t the same.

Off topic, but in Portugal was the first time me, a Central European, ever ate a ripe Papaya. Yum! Thanks to the Azores. The shit you get in the supermarkets round here is useless. Same for mangoes, usually.

AI summary? 😲

I remember 2007, when I got a gmail account and thought it was a much better alternative to whatever I had before.

Google used to nurture an image of being the “good one” among megacorps; they championed open standards (except when they didn’t), supported open source projects (until they backstabbed them), and used language that corporate wasn’t supposed to use, like “don’t be evil” (until they, infamously and in a true dark comedy move, retracted that motto).

my main job was to fix boring bugs on the Ruby on Rails internal user accounting system that someone else had developed. When I complained that this was a far cry from the academia-like, exciting research environment I had been promised, and asked to be assigned to a more challenging project, I was told the following rationale against it: “no”. Moreover the deadlines and expectations were such that even if I worked (unpaid) overtime every day, I was still was at risk of a performance review. Making actual use of the “20% time” felt like a pipe dream.

And all that with wages well below even the local market in our crumbling Third World economy.

Like most employees I blamed myself for not working hard enough to get good compensation—or to have time to exercise my right of 20% free time… Until I saw in the “Googlegeist” statistics that some 95% of employees never use their “20% time” at all, being trapped under the same pressures as I was.

When she dared bring it up, this was the reaction - and I know this scenario all too well though I never worked at Google:

The result of this was my boss having a fit over me “backstabbing” him. See, me complaining about the unfulfilled recruiter promises marked me as an Unhappy Googler. And Google, if you remember, was the Best Place To Work.

I said, “But the issue is real and not my fault, don’t you agree? I just used the data to bring it to attention. Didn’t you say we operate under ‘radical transparency’?” (I was young and believed in this kind of slogan. Yes, I was a sitting duck and didn’t stand a chance.)

Boss replied, “Radical transparency doesn’t mean you get to say negative things.”

edit: the article is barely getting started at this point and I’m still reading with great interest. Please give this blog a click even if they say they don’t care about it.

it’s all taxpayer money anyway

Good point.

Assuming slrpnk stands for solar punk - that produces funny little theories in my mind about the server location.

🤷(https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases)

Imagine paying for “Premium Lite”

Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause

And they now have a huge problem with bots & admins who ban “without just cause”. Except to them it’s no problem at all, it’s the desired shift towards more “marketability” I guess.

Yeah that paragraph really got me. Very far from what is actually going down on reddit these days.

Most people don’t care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That’s why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That’s why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it’s a “right leaning” platform and looking for other places.

You had me at first, but you lost me here. “reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence” is not a correct description of what’s going on over there and consequently the rest of that sentence is nonsense, just like the one-dimensional politicizing.

Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation.

Sure, “some” certainly want that, but that’s not the point of the fedi/lemmiverse and you know it. You took a very loooong breath to get to this in the end, even making it political along the way. Some people will upvote you only because they didn’t take the time to finish reading.

Also - the law is different in different countries, and the fediverse is global. “Unless you break the law with your speech” really isn’t the point you think it is.

I personally don’t like their kitchen sink approach.

Thanks for the tip. Already set it up. I like it - does just what I need and not much more. And the web UI can be disabled.

I’m not sure how you’re having compatibility issues as I would think CalDAV is a standard protocol?

There used to be a mismatch between the spec and Google’s implementation of it.

There used to be a mismatch between the spec and Google’s implementation of it.

Dark Patterns is a broad term, but it’s also the worst aspect of commercialising “free” software/web services etc.

I hope the term is already part of whatever regulations the EU has there, and I hope this and similar complaints succeed.

The scandal serves as a stark reminder that whilst artificial intelligence continues advancing rapidly, human expertise remains irreplaceable in many complex technical domains—a lesson that Builder.ai learned through public humiliation rather than honest business practices.

The full report

These are all important points and it sounds like a summary of everything that is wrong in IT wonderland.

I guess the report goes into more detail, I guess they needed some nice headline to wrap it in, but - I wonder where they draw the line between “Big” and “Little” tech or why it’s supposed to be a big gotcha that not only the biggest corporations employ outright evil tactics, exploit workers globally.

—often backed by Silicon Valley venture capital—

Not all “startups” are created equal I guess

Is This Anal?

LiMux