> the change applies to employees in US offices with assigned desks and is part of a broader push to make Instagram "more nimble and creative" as competition intensifies.
I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.
Spec-wise, sure, but I suspect that if you ran a blind test between an Xbox running XBMC and an Amazon Fire Stick, most folks would prefer the XBMC experience (despite the 720p output).
24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
Wealth is becoming more and more concentrated at the top end of the distribution. Folks at the high end have a lower marginal propensity to consume, and thus invest more in assets. This increase in demand causes all assets to rise.
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.
This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.
> 21. On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.
My read on this is that one or more of the DOGE engineers is either using compromised hardware (more likely) or is themselves compromised (less likely).
So, Fly users, how are things now? I gave the platform a shot a long while back and found that the reliability fell far short of what I needed (probably a few months before this post). They still have some desirable features and I wouldn't mind giving it another look if the platform is (vastly) improved.
> A recent study, by a team of economists from the Wharton School, Notre Dame, and rand, reviewed overdose statistics in five states where Purdue opted, because of local regulations, to concentrate fewer resources in promoting its drug. The scholars found that, in those states, overdose rates—even from heroin and fentanyl—are markedly lower than in states where Purdue did the full marketing push. The study concludes that “the introduction and marketing of OxyContin explain a substantial share of overdose deaths over the last two decades.”
100% agree. Microsoft owns the de facto premium gaming platform, but has never been able to execute on a strategy that takes advantage of it. The money snapping up studios would have been much better spent putting in an aggressive offer to buy up Valve.
Sure, everything is ephemeral, but these works have impacts on people's lives and ambitions. How many folks are named after movie or TV characters? How many people got into software after watching The Social Network?
I follow a couple of small communities of amateur VHS archivists. Through this I randomly watched the marketing material of an 80s/90s era MLM, which finally put into context a similar MLM that my mom had fallen for when our family was at a financial low point. This random bit of preservation helped me to better understand a part of my family and upbringing; far better than I could reading a Wikipedia article about the company in question.
It's apples to oranges, but it's interesting contrasting this with community-driven efforts in the gaming preservation space. It's a relatively simple matter to find, say, a full archive of the vast majority if not all commercially released games for the Sega Genesis, along with a smattering of unreleased prototypes that have found their way into community hands. Many, like myself, are hobbyist digital archivists, curating collections of data and hardware for exploring the medium.
Film and TV are harder for a number of reasons. Video is just bigger, and the vast majority of works have their primary versions on film and tape that take far more effort to preserve (physically or digitally). Having said that, I believe Hollywood shot themselves in the foot by so aggressively going after piracy (the same can be said about music) in a way that the video game industry didn't (Nintendo's recent efforts notwithstanding). They spent fortunes on lawyers and lobbyists to protect short-term profits (and, realistically, how many ticket sales did they save?), at the expense of locking away our shared cultural history.
I suggest reading the report by the Minnesota Department of Labor [0].
Some interesting pulls from the summary:
> Census data and the driver survey indicate the majority of Minnesota TNC drivers are male immigrants and predominantly Black or African American non-Hispanic workers with less than a four-year college degree; many live in low-income households (up to 200% of the federal poverty level) and, relative to all Minnesota workers, are disproportionately reliant on public assistance.
> Nearly half (45 percent) of those driving for Uber and Lyft are relatively casual drivers averaging fewer than 10 hours per week and providing only 11 percent of all trips. The focus here is on the committed, non-casual driver since they are more likely to rely on TNC driving as a primary source of income and provide the majority of trips.
> Median earnings for all Twin Cities metro area drivers were $50.04 on a gross passenger time (P3) basis, $29.64 on a gross working hours basis
(P1+P2+P3), and $13.63 on a net, after-expense working hours basis. Twenty-five percent of drivers had net, after-expense hourly earnings of $10.54 or less, and 25 percent of drivers had net after-expense hourly earnings of $17.51 or more.
> The Minnesota per minute rate is designed to compensate drivers at the equivalent of the minimum wage, plus the employer share of federal Social Security and Medicare payroll tax: ($15.57 Minneapolis minimum wage plus $1.28 in payroll tax in the Twin Cities metro area, and $10.85 state minimum wage plus $0.89 in payroll tax for the Greater Minnesota counties). The Minnesota base per mile rate provides for the 63.8 cents per mile cost of acquiring, operating, and maintaining a vehicle based on Minnesota-specific costs from early 2024.
> Applying the 2024 base rate pay standard per minute and per mile rates to the hours worked and miles driven during 2022 indicates that average pay per trip for Twin Cities drivers would rise by about 10 percent under the base pay standard, and by about 17 percent on average for Greater Minnesota drivers.
This reminds me of the speech Bill Murray’s character gives at the start of Rushmore [0]:
> You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you.
How on earth do you coordinate incident response for this? Imagine an agent for customer service or first line therapy going "off the rails." I suppose you can identify all sessions and API calls that might have been impacted and ship the transcripts over to customers to review according to their application and domain, I guess? That, and pray no serious damage was done.
There's probably something to this, and other comments about AI being a source of competition. My experience with generative AI has been that it's neat, the academic papers are always a fun read, but I'm mostly underwhelmed by the output. This will get better with time (Sora is incredible), but it's missing the point. A recent anecdote: I'm in a small startup community and I asked the group what AI tools folks are finding useful. Someone mentioned that copilot makes them 2-3x more productive; personally, my tests with codellama has made me about 0.5-0.75x as productive as normal, mostly because I notice the mistakes and scrutinize the output more - probably a similar experience to folks who have been programming for a while.
But it must feel amazing for that 2-3x guy who is just trying to get his company off the ground, and that's great!
Aside: I recently went down a rabbit hole exploring fast food training videos from the 80s and 90s. It makes you appreciate the engineering (culinary, mechanical, and industrial) that allows a company to make a consistent product at scale, only requiring interchangeable, unskilled labor. Did you know that McDonald's claims that 1 in every 8 Americans have worked at the chain? You can get a fairly pricey jacket celebrating this fact[1]!
Perhaps we're finally at that point with computing. We know the externalities that have resulted from McDonalds and similar chains and, good or bad, we've accepted them. Over the next decade we get to watch the same with commodity knowledge work.
I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.