is there an enshittification watch site? or something to track acquisition and red flags in products/oss projects?
itsenshittifiedyet.info
if not, what would it take to do that? i think it can be vibed in a weekend.
in the meantime im having lots of fun coding and using AI, reinventing every wheel i can. 0 stress cos i don't do it for money :).
I think a lot of people are having a tantrum because programing is not sexy anymore, its getting easier, the bar is lower now , the quality is awful and nobody cares. its like any other boring soul crushing job.
also if you want to see the real cost (at least part of it) of AI coding or the whole fucked up IT industry, go to any mining town in the global south.
just want to say that, to self host feels like the 2000's, and that's a refreshing good thing, you feel in control, away for all the enshittification we are experiencing right know. I'm having a blast with a group of friends with netbird/tailscale, creating little projects in our forgejo instance with full CI/CD for the infra, and day by day we are adding more and more stuff, our own little internet. we learn things and talk about technical stuff while setting up and implementing them, its my favorite social network now. also f big tech.
I remember one of the students in our school replaced the Windows 95 startup logo with the goatse.cx picture of every computer of a new lab, the rector of the moment called an emergency gathering in the gym BEGGING the students to change it back . promising that there would be no repercussions, he was sweating blood, because authorities picked our school to inaugurate the computer national program that made the lab possible, the next day. nobody talked, they had to change the inauguration to another school, fun times.
oh the memories, the CTCP ping with the string "+++ATH0" string on the message, or the `/skin "/con/con"` command on Quake2 online games, and the ";cat /etc/passwd" on old Unix's finger services, fun simpler times, what a mess.
When I read about Markov Chains and hallucination of LLMs, the first thing that comes to my mind is Reggie watts [0] performances, also remind me i used to do the same thing when i was bored in the classroom, but on my paper notebooks,just nonsense that seems plausible, it was kind of entering in a meditative state, it felt good. when i discovered watts i thought to my self, 'what?! I cloud have done that for a living?'.
I agree with your sentiment and resonate with some of my opinions on languages (been reading about TT and abstract math in general for a while as a hobby)
my opinions so far (subject to change as i read more):
dynamic typing = just one type [0]. yes, good to test ideas quick, to develop quick gigs that i don't care about and tiny snippets/scripts, i use js for that.
gradual typing = guaranteed mess evolving large code bases, I guess the gradual typing thing in practice never happen and when it happens your IDE becomes red and your compiler errors explode, i don't recall where i read about that but it made sense to me, i used groovy to take advantage of the optional typing but i was the only dev in that project.
sound type system + parametric polymorphism = the best thing around, although i prefer to have explicit type annotations.
no formal math object behind a language = the language does not exist, just , absurd rules ,idioms and syntactic mess that you have to remember and tied to specific monkey patched implementations to compensate incoherent foundations, sadly unavoidable, as most, if not all popular languages do not exist,.
Just improvising with the idea and trashing more on big tech:
I would say, nothing, if something like that gets to happen, my guess, it will be silent, away from the noise, would not be a sexy tech headline, kind of what is happening with mastodon, there is no big names, personalities or numbers with tons of 0s behind it, just an interoperable protocol, you know, real tech. it does not need marketing or infinite scale, dependent on FOMO or other social phenomenons, its just pure value for its users, also, as Cory Doctorow said somewhere, as instances of mastodon, ideas like that are going to come and go, and that's fine, that's the process of finding the next valuable thing that will stick with us, it should be organic, the next big thing will not come from the silicon valley casino like esque.
An "IT person" would be just a job. pretty much as any other craft, what happens its that some of the most noisy parts of our industry are sick, feverish, delusional and full of their own bullshit, and we have in our subconsciousness that everything needs to be flashy, glorious, amazing, disruptive, big, competition proof and fast (in terms of success), not sustainable at all.
(im just going to ramble about it, cos im really mad about the state of IT right now and i cant articulate some ideas well)
sometimes i fantasize about the concept of "your IT person", kind of your local barber, general practitioner, tailor or baker. that is on charge of some aspect of your digital life with their own local little infra, tailoring personalized feeds and takes care of privacy/health issues, and provides you with their own simple interfaces or "speak" open protocols that connects with your feed reader, from movies, written articles to memes and funny videos. the thing is to have a human being to talk about this. not an dark algorithm that is adjusted constantly for profit for a soulless company.
Some other ideas revolt time to time on my head : community run local data centers(kind of libraries) or providing simple content services from your home internet connection (that's why i loved this idea: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid). Your personal digital human(but maybe AI assisted) curators,all part of a idealized "virtual solar punk world", sustainable, private and healthier with humans put first, far from the toxic fascination with disruption , profit, perpetual and global growth and all of the startup toxic crap, we have everything we just have to glue it, and i see people thirsty for a digital world like that.
its not the first time i hear about feeling healthier after moving to the feediverse. i have my own set of scripts and mini apps running on top puppeteer with a local llamacpp for summaries and recommendations, its not perfect but im planning to put more effort on this and maybe look for OSS projects that are aiming at that (ie. (*arr suites, nostr, activitypub, veilid).) and offer that to friends and family members to see if they like the idea, also i have a name for all those scripts: "not a browser" the web without HTML CSS and JS served along with the data, just provide the data, how you displayed, its the user concern.
nice to see effort to shake a little the terminal space, and that you can receive 6MM dollars to play with it, but, having tried things like nushell i came back to zsh after i realized that is too much of an investment for something that can disappear in 5 minutes, get poisoned by VC money or be out shined by the next bright thing, and you are competing with 100s of little binaries and ways to do things that have been around for decades here.
also i find those star graph so cringe, who cares?, is someone going to decide to use this based on that?, i mean that trend can be cause of a marketing move, that is.it says nothing about the project it self.
nice to know, kind of suspected that. for me, a good non sleep night = bye cockroach mode and hello overenthusiastic maniac for a week. quite a ride. 100% recommended.
as a it contractor for financial institutions i would say that we earned a lot of money just filling holes made by the previous ones and making our own in the process for the next one. that's what it is, make up problems to solve it later. hell, this whole fucking cursed industry is just that. making holes to fill them up later to keep the wheel of incompetence and delusion spinning. sturgeon law all the way.
this has nothing to do with bad engineering, it's about stupid greedy investors/managers with to much power on decision making, decisions that they should not make. this is sad and an embarrassment to tech people. this industry is a joke.
i always had this question: how realistically is to, having an standard spec and interoperable protocols, for toxic apps of big international tech companies that provides """services""", so instances of implementations can be maintained by municipalities or local tech business and talent with 100x less employees and money?
what policies should be in place to achieve that? what would be the challenges? it would be better/healthier? is someone researching such things like transition to sustainable digital services? (sustainable in terms of local labor, privacy, economy, accountability, etc...)
i mean if you think about this as public services not as a business, profit is secondary, and first is just to make the thing better and better for the users, no need for spying , no advertisement, no need for a rich piece of shit somewhere getting a piece of the money paid in your city for every taxi drive, food delivery or to give up privacy to a soulless/faceless entity just because you want to say something publicly or keep in touch with people. there is no disruption from their part, its just an old thing put on the internet, they are just in the middle of everyone's life, just sucking everything they can. is the actual state of affairs "efficient"?
there must be fed up engineers and tech people everywhere with the sad state of IT industry.
edit: s/of/and