Dear @gruber I have followed you and respected your views on many things technical. But in the case of the E.U. You are on the wrong side of History.

#apple is entering the #Enshittification phase. And Meta and Google have long been there. Stop defending apple against our liberties. I think the E.U. side is correct. They have history on their side. I am tried of hearing that Silicon Valley knows what is best, They KNOW SHIT !

As a 25-year-career software developer, I just wanna give a shout out to the one (1) tool I regularly use that hasn't enshittified: https://lipsum.com! Lipsum—when you want 100 fake words but don't want to burn the world using an AI that can't even count!

For #Discord, the end-times are sooner than we think.

With the pickup of Ex-Activision Exec Humam Sakhnini, you know, the Call of M̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ Duty publisher, as CEO of Discord, we can effectively say "goodbye" to what Discord is, and "hello" to the complete #enshittification of a service marching headfirst into #IPO.

Sorry ya'll, but we're due to move off another #centralized place we love if we care about the services we get. And it sucks, because Discord has a good UX.

https://discord.com/blog/passing-the-torch

Once again, I highly advice you to get off #Discord and use something else, prefferably a messaging platform that is end-to-end encrypted, federated, no phone number idenitfiers, and open source.

You can bet your dollars that once they officially announce their IPO plans, all bets are off in terms of #enshittification X 1000.

https://venturebeat.com/games/why-discord-founder-jason-citron-is-stepping-down-from-ceo-job-exclusive-interview/

UPDATE: (thanks Mauser II and Patrick Schmitz)
The screenshot issue is happening due to HW acceleration being enabled and is NOT a DRM thing!

The AMD video recording problem IS a DRM thing tho, which is why I assumed it was also causing this problem. My bad! (see screenshot in the Mauser thread for that abomination)

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I was gonna share a screenshot of a football match I'm watching, because I think one of the teams has very nice kit colors, but I'm on Windows right now and screenshotting it leads to a black window - no doubt because of some DRM crap somewhere in this shit OS.

God I hate neoliberals and their capitalist bullshit

Not sure if it's in Windows itself or in the AMD drivers or in the browser (firefox) but either way it's some freedom infringing bullshit and I can't wait for this whole system to come crashing down as it no doubt soon will

Some recent Chrome update has started forcing people who sign into Google Apps or Workspaces or whatever to associate a Chrome profile with that account.

This bit me recently and now it’s bitten my wife; her personal Chrome profile has been replaced as default with her nursing school college account and she didn’t know how to change back and thought she’d lost a huge amount of work.

Like…just let people browse the web, good lord. It’s absurd.

Même @lemonde se fend aujourd'hui d'un article sur le concept de @pluralistic : signe supplémentaire qu'il est vraiment devenu difficile d'écarter le concept de #merdification de toute pensée actuelle sur le numérique.

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2025/04/23/la-merdification-ce-processus-inexorable-de-degradation-de-la-qualite-des-services-sur-les-plateformes-numeriques_6599211_3232.html

This is really interesting. Yeah, it’s #reddit, but this is good:

“Big tech had captured, neutered, and leeched from journalism and pulled off one of the greatest strategic coups of all time. They married us to both their ad businesses and to their algorithmic platforms, enshittified our journalism to make their platforms useable (consider the fact that social and search platforms can only exist if people other than the companies running them provide content for those platforms), and then they trained their AI on our work and told us to fuck off. In the span of maybe 10-15 years these companies first changed the objectives of journalism and then just kind of killed it altogether.”

This is what I was ranting about yesterday with that find a grave website refusing to ban my schizophrenic cousin even though he violated their terms and conditions everywhere. He made 64 memorials on the site so he IS findagrave.com.

Information overconsumption and the enshittification of journalism : r/#Anticonsumption https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/1k5oiva/information_overconsumption_and_the/

https://archive.is/zcqnW
#Enshittification

Maybe there isn't A Tipping Point, but several. Like milestones on the long road to freedom. I've just reached one.

#AI
#Enshittification

Not being able to take screenshot of something i am watching on Netflix (that i am paying for!) is sooooooo frustrating (#enshittification).

Trust me: I am not going to screenshot every frame of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, record all voices and sound effects myself and put the resulting movie on Pirate Bay.

But then again, maybe i should.
Don't tempt me.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/22/elegy-for-the-video-screenshot/

Microsoft announces it's an even more terrible place to work now as it ratchets up the pressure for "productivity" and blocklists "low performers". Meta too, but we knew they were terrible.

This BI article says tech workers are not as "coddled", attempting to shame people who have good working conditions and who may feel valued as human beings.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-email-details-new-policies-cull-low-performers-2025-4 #tech #enshittification

This is what happens when companies decide to use bots for Customer service with no way to get a real person.

I realize that this article doesn’t claim at any point that the police were talking to #bots, but the thing is if the Customer service rep was an actual person they would have escalated this immediately, and then that supervisor could have escalated it immediately until they got someone to simply CALL THE DRIVER. That that’s really all it would take.

If they didn’t want to give the driver’s information to the person on the phone claiming to be the police, if it was a human being and not a bot talking to the cops, they would have contacted the driver themselves for the police and the customer and the child still in the car.

An Uber drove away with her kid. Then Uber wouldn't connect her or police with the driver | CBC News https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/uber-drives-off-with-child-1.7513379

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - ServeTheHome

Summary: Synology wants to force users to buy Synology-branded HDs in even their consumer NASes. If they do this, I’ll never buy another NAS from them, ever.

Imagine Toyota requiring you to use Toyota gasoline. No way, no how. https://www.servethehome.com/synology-lost-the-plot-with-hard-drive-locking-move/

When you hear the phrase "seat at the table" what does that mean to you?

Or: Enfranchised and disenfranchised communication.

===

So what am I talking about here and why?

A metaphor I'll use in this post and often overall: let's say that you're at a concert or a bar and you're talking to your friends. When you leave, you may find that your voice is hoarse, from shouting, even though you didn't feel like you were shouting at the time. You were just trying to be heard. Let's call this "shouting at the concert".

Shouting At The Concert has a lot of implications in hierarchical systems. A common one is from the Twitter-that-was, or on Yelp and review platforms: people are so used to phone calls and emails that are routed like 30 times that they don't even pick up the phone any more. Why bother? Instead, they try to create noise and hope that the noise and pressure that it results in will get them what they want or need. (This is, in part, #enshittification but also deeper than only that.)

To put it another way, they've been at the concert so long, that they don't realize they are shouting. It is just their new baseline, their new speaking volume. Other people hear them as shouting, but they're Just Talking.

Increasing scope further: these two modes of conversation could also be referred to as Enfranchised and Disenfranchised. When you're Enfranchised, you use your Seat At The Table (see, there's the prompt ). This may be your voice in a meeting or a vote, but when you are enfranchised you know that 1 ) your voice matters and 2 ) how to use it.

Disenfranchised communication is different. When disenfranchised, # 1 is not true: your voice "doesn't matter" so # 2 doesn't exist. There is no way to use your voice in the system "appropriately" or "in the right way" or even at all. Disenfranchised communication results in a lot of Shouting At The Concert, because that is the volume you need to use to get The Enfranchised, notably not you in this example, to use *their* voice on your behalf.

(Was really hoping this would be a single post, but alas...)

1/2

Fucking lulz

I'm prospecting for new contracts so Crunchbase finally convinced me to sign up for a Pro license a couple weeks ago.

Today I log in to find out a big chunk of the features were apparently in free beta and will soon require an additional Business license if I'd like to keep using them, because of course.

#enshittification strikes again!