So I'm currently toying around with NeoCities, and decided to trial it by building your classic mid '90s Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pastiche website.
Some of the most important elements are already in place.
Tile background? Large font? Heading in bright pink with a shadow? Unusual colour choices? Random cat gifs? Under construction gif? Check! Check! Check!
In the true spirit of the '90s DIY web, some more pages (including the links page) are coming soon.
(I'm thinking of adding a page dedicated to either Britney or a nu-metal band.)
My only question is about whether drop shadows on text was prominent. I’m having trouble remembering how that effect would have been accomplished in the 90s, since I don’t think CSS got it until later. Would it have been something on the <font> tag only supported in Internet Explorer?
@ajsadauskas@neil@asklemmy As for chat, probably the best way to do that today is to use Web Sockets but style it to look like frames or a Java applet on the page.
The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
@ajsadauskas@technology@music@music I don't think you understand the problem.
You see, companies have long struggled due to piracy.
They have to come up with solutions to piracy, and implement them. That is hard work and doesn't do a thing against piracy, and heck it even didn't lower their revenue, because it was proven that those that pirate stuff, also buy stuff.
Therefore, it only makes sense that if you have a lot of money, you don't have to pay...
That’s true. I’m unemployed, I’d probably take a job working for him. Doubt it would last long because I have a dumb mouth that can’t stay shut when it should
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Unless the public puts literally billions of dollars into funding and expanding public libraries to catalog all this video media into numerous publicly owned gigantic server farms that maintain the capacity to upgrade digital storage indefinitely, all video media is doomed to stay with privately owned capitalistic multinational corporations that are influenced by foreign governments to censoring various things at will, and all video media is destined to die forgotten and overwritten by future shitty memes and useless influencer garbage.
@shekinahcancook@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology I have cancelled my family #YouTube premium membership and am migrating away from YouTube video, podcast and music. I want to echo the voices here mentioning #peertube. For #music, I'm trying to pay the creators and download #mp3 instead. I'm listening to #audiobooks in #mp3, paying a higher price and getting a narrower selection. I have #libretube on Android which circumvents the algorithm, the ads, and supports downloads of YouTube videos.
So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.
Remember when Google's corporate motto was "don't be evil?"
Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.
From Google: "Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can't edit or remove the location."
It is NEAT though to have a map with all your photos. I have just removed Google from my photo workflow instead and I autoupload them to my selfhosted Nextcloud and view them using Digikam.
@slothrop as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, this is not exclusive to Google phones.
The restriction is rather a limitation of Google Photos.
For example, this is the error message I get when I try to edit the location data in Google Photos of a photo taken with my Xiaomi Note 10 Pro using OpenCamera. @ajsadauskas
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
@ajsadauskas@degoogle I guess the problem though is how you make sure they are actually maintained by a human acting in good faith. The way community Facebook groups meant to be for this kinda thing get spammed by likely fake businesses doesn’t give me hope
I used them and contributed to links as well - it was quite a rush to see a contribution accepted because it felt like you were adding to the great summary of the Internet. At least until the size of the Internet made it impossible to create a user-submitted, centrally-approved index of the Net. And so that all went away.
What seemed like a better approach was social bookmarking, like del.icio.us, where everyone added, tagged and shared bookmarks. The tagging basically crowd-sourced the categorisation and meant you could browse, search and follow links by tags or by the users. It created a folksonomy (thanks for the reminder Wikipedia) and, crucially, provided context to Web content (I think we’re still talking about the Semantic Web to some degree but perhaps AI is doing this better). Then after a long series of takeovers, it all went away. The spirit lives on in Pinterest and Flipboard to some degree but as this was all about links it was getting at the raw bones of the Internet.
I’ve been usingPostmarks a single user social bookmarking tool but it isn’t really the same as del.icio.us because part of what made it work was the easy discoverablity and sharing of other people’s links. So what we need is, as I named my implementation of Postmarks, Relicious - pretty much del.icio.us but done Fediverse style so you sign up to instances with other people (possibly run on shared interests or region, so you could have a body modification instance or a German one, for example) and get bookmarking. If it works and people find it useful a FOSS Fediverse implementation would be very difficult to make go away.
The thing about #tech#layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers.
Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me.
If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained.
@matdevdug the first time I went through a #tech#layoff I really struggled with “what did I do wrong?” It took me a long time to recover from that.
My first time as a manager having to lay people off was one of the toughest days of my 35 yr career. A year after that there was 100% turnover in that team, including me.
My current place has had a round of layoffs. We learned to manage employee growth in a way that we haven’t had to do it again. We’re now profitable and have an amazing team.
@troublewithwords@matdevdug
I was told that senior management was trashing me behind the scenes because I was finding and reporting too many bugs in our new e-commerce system. So, I stopped reporting them, let the customers find them, and took a package when it was offered. I heard that the new, multi-million dollar system was trashed as unfixable within two years.
There it probably a very hacky way of doing it through a compatibility layer like wine but I doubt it would be either easy or stable. Have you thought about using windows as a VM within Linux and using it that way? Otherwise unfortunately then it wouldn't be a fit for you.
Yeah if Office is that necessary there is only so much you can do to isolate yourself from windows without getting overly technical. The VM is only connected to the internet if you have it on and the network connection enabled in your VM software's settings.
Every corporation that interfaces with the public for profit, including simply manufacturing products, has been employing psychologists for generations. They advise on product design, advertising strategy, customer service, "damage control", and many other facets. The psychologists employed in this fashion are mercenaries to dictators with one selfish goal, and should be treated as such.
@doomscroller It means they get the user data ready for the person to just log in via Instagram into Threads without the user having to actually go through any kind of account creation process
Here's a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.
However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:
First, it's worth noting that many organisations that claim to be "agile" aren't, and many that claim to use agile processes don't.
Just as a refresher, here's the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Your workplace isn't agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don't have autonomous cross-functional teams.
Yet in many "agile" organisations, I've noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.
And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn't believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn't following the principles of.)
Let’s say you have a team of 12 engineers, and each engineer makes $160,000 a year.
That’s $76.92 an hour.
Taking 12 people offline for a 1 hour meeting means that meeting is costing you $923.08. * 5 days a week = 4,615.38. * 52 weeks a year = $240,000.
You’re burning a quarter of a million every year just having meetings. Also likely, these aren’t the only meetings they’re in.
How much money are you spending preventing work from being done?
We used to have a daily stand up first thing in the morning before anyone had even had coffee for gods sake. “So what’s everyone working on?” Fuck if I know, I haven’t even read my email yet.
@technology@ajsadauskas@jordanlund@pixxelkick@7u5k3n if there is nothing to discuss my meetings take 3 minutes. I can't verify spelling of just my status email in that time. We don't leave our desks for the meeting, so it is three minutes. They are called standups for a reason, sitting down should not be worth it (except for the one disabled person )
We're living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Imagine a boardroom where someone says, "I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue." If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.
@pluralistic Being one of Chamberlain's many enshittification victims, I bought a "ratgdo" (Rage Against The Garage Door Opener), a small $30 circuit that hooks to a Chamberlain-brand garage door opener and lets me control it locally with #HomeAssistant. I then disconnected my opener from the official MyQ site and deleted their app.
I've been using Jerboa for Lemmy for my Beehaw account since the Migration. At first it worked fine. Then I started getting an error message about the version of Lemmy being used on the instance. But for the last couple of days it has been crashing immediately on opening:
A major benefit of liftoff to me is that it takes me to linked communities in app, instead of in browser like Jerboa. Makes it easier to subscribe to new communities that people share in comments
Jerboa started crashing for me around the time they did an update that required a newer lemmy version. I've been using Liftoff and that's working pretty well so far. I'm trying to stay open to different apps because they're all pretty new and none that I've tried have been exactly what I'm looking for yet.