javi

@javi@goblin.band

Hi! I'm @_jv_ and https://tumblr.com/jv, but this is my little instance where I'm doing a bit of an experiment to merge both. Basically, I'm trying to build a tumblr-like platform that runs on the fediverse. I called it Goblin, and you can find the source code here:
https://github.com/johnHackworth/goblin

Soft. dev by trade, I used to build things for places like Tumblr and WordPress.com before their fall, now I work for a company I won't mention here after learning from my previous mistakes.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

javi, (edited ) to random

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

javi, to random

The EU election results are bad, but not as horrific as in France, Belgium, or hell, even Germany .. but here a fucking far right YouTuber organized a meme party and he has won THREE FUCKING SEATS.

What a fucking disgrace. Everywhere.

alda, to random
@alda@topspicy.social avatar

Icelandic elections: The newest polls are in the news every day. Candidates and elected officials are approachable. Parties and civil society organisations urge people to vote. 80% turnout.

EU elections: They've been at this since 1979 and the media has not learned how to make this interesting. Parties and civil society knows this is the most important legislative assembly on the continent but don't do much to get people to vote. Turnout hardly crosses the 50% mark.

javi,

We went down to 49% this year here from 64% five years ago. I hate everyone today

javi, (edited ) to random

The automattic alumni slack server is experiencing a spike of new people joining these days.

The rumour mill says that the CEO, Matt Mullenweg, has set a hard goal of the headcount reduction this year and since he came back from sabbatical last month, things are getting ugly inside the company.

But you know, it's not another round of layoffs, it's just "performance management" (with an associated goal of how many people must be underperforming that must be reached, because MM is the kwisatz haderach of Wordpress and he can see the future and one know how many people will fail performance checks).

Once again, big hug for my friends still inside.

javi, to random

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

javi, to random

People cheering for the release of 4 hostages achieved by killing 210 random people in a refugee camp is the perfect gist of the entire Palestinian recent history. Somehow those 4 hostages are fellow humans who serve a happy life (they are), but the 210 palestinians just disposable vermin that don't even get mentioned in the news.

Oh: and two reminders:

Israel keeps broadcasting their war crimes full of pride about them (soldiers entering combat zones disguised as non-combatants is EXPLICITLY forbidden by the Geneva convections)

Israel still kept about 2000 palestinian hostages themselves (people abducted without any formal accusation nor giving their loved ones any news of their demise) and no one ever talks about their release

javi, to random

Something that support MMullenweg going through a hit list now he is back at the throne is that tumblr/@charlottan has been banned for "targeted harassment" (no further explanation to whom). Which would be outrageous and absurd to you if you have ever seen her blog.

Unless "targeted harassment" means " you joked about the CEO being transphobic three months ago".

There is a reason I don't crosspost any of this to tumblr, you know.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9u9rya58eamp06g8

javi, to random

And well, i have no idea of what's going on, but Matt had been known for holding grudges and being childishly petty way before (to the point of registering domains with the name of the project of someone who he had a flamewar with... years after such flamewar).

I wouldn't be surprised if he just have a death note of big accounts that were critical of him back in his February transphobic meltdown and now he is just going through it.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9u9rya58eamp06g8

javi, to random

Also, there is a very gloomy vibe on Tumblr right now. In the last few days, a bunch of very popular trans accounts have been purged without being given any reason about it. Mind you, we are talking about accounts with thousands of followers and years of backlog, that never got into trouble with mods before... Suddenly banned without any explanation.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9u9rya58eamp06g8

javi, to random

POV: you time travel my 1997 version to today and give me 15 minutes access to YouTube:

javi, to random

I can't believe this is in the English Wikipedia :D

gerrymcgovern, to random
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green avatar

"AI-generated code promises to reshape cloud-native application development practices, offering unparalleled efficiency gains and fostering innovation at unprecedented levels. However, amidst the allure of newfound technology lies a profound duality—the stark contrast between the benefits of AI-driven software development and the formidable security risks it introduces."

https://www.cio.com/article/2137674/is-there-a-natural-contradiction-within-ai-driven-code-in-cloud-native-security.html

javi,

As someone who works on the development industry... I've yet to see a single colleague saying AI is going to have such a significant effect in the industry. The usual stance goes from "a nice little helping tool" to "this is useless". The executives are the only ones I keep seeing repeating how industry-shaking AI is going to be

javi, (edited ) to random

Also, quite a lot of "but public transport don't work in rural areas!"

Look, I grew up in a rural area. I could literally watch sheep grazing on a hill less than 50m from my parent's house kitchen window. My town was around 4k people.

Still, we had a bus going to the nearby (and similarly-sized) towns every 15 minutes. Two buses per hour to the provincial capital, and one to the other "big" (around 200k people) city of my province. A train to the capital and another to the 'big city' every hour. My town was in the bottom of a valley, and around it had maybe 20-30 hamlets (10-100 people each) between 2 and 10 km away from town, mostly in the surrounding mountains, and every day several buses go through them to pick the kids who live there and take them to school/high school in my town and back.

Hell, these are some of the stops in the train line that took me to the province capital, the one I used to take every day to go to college:

I don't think I've ever seen more than 1 or 2 people take or leave the train in any of those three stops. In the last one, you couldn't even see any houses around from the train. Most of the times, the train just stopped and left without taking or leaving anyone. Still, they were important for some people, who deserved to have a trustable public transport network.

Public transport in rural areas is perfectly possible. You just need to remember that it is a SERVICE and not a BUSINESS.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9tyu0e45u123b8ao

javi,

I just shared pictures of train stops with literally no houses around. The population density of most of the central areas of Spain (excluding the provinces of Madrid & Zaragoza) is about the same as Iowa's.

And still, there is public transport network. Worse than the one in densely populated areas, of course, but it's there.

Economies of scale only matter if you want to make a business out of your public transport network. If mail gets daily to a place, a bus can get to that place several times a day too. It only needs to be considered a service people have rights to.

javi,

It works great in America! a lot of american countries have excellent public transit networks. Now, the US is a big exception, but not because it can't work there, but because they don't want to pay for it.

javi,

oh you are just stupid, fine enough. Shoo.

javi,

oh of course, there are places that it's just not feasible to get public transport to. In the US and everywhere else. But those are rare and covers only a small percentage of the population. Let's say that 90% of the population of a country could, or should, be covered by a decent public transit network. There's always going to be a small percentage of population that lives too far away from population centers to be covered. But again, that's a small minority and that doesn't mean that the other 90% of the country shouldn't have it.
I disagree that the cost/benefit ratio is any different. Here, we pay for it. It's a cost. It's not supposed to make money. Those nice high speed trains we have here? A money sink, massively subsidiced by the state, won't exist without those subsidies.

And they are a great money sink to have, if you ask me.

javi, (edited ) to random

Reading a reddit thread about how many trains/buses/cars take to move 50k people and

Once again, I'm appalled at how much some USians think the rest of the world doesn't exist, is lying, or we are too stupid to understand we are making obvious (for them) bad choices

javi, to random

My employer gave us keys to GitHub copilot three months ago

I got my new work laptop a month ago

I've just realized that I haven't set copilot at all in the dev environment of this laptop

It really doesn't look I was finding it useful at all, if I didn't even remember about it once it stopped giving me pointless suggestions.

javi,

An example of what, you mean?

javi, (edited )

Oh 99% of the cases are just not relevant (you start writing a function and it offers to auto complete it for you with code that doesn't do anything close to what you need) or trivial (the kind of auto complete any well-configured IDE already gives you).

javi, to random

So... So... This is what people feel when their national team wins the world cup???

javi, to random

hey look who went to Israel to meet Netanyahu! Santiago Abascal, the head of the literal spanish fascist party.

javi, to random

oook, I guess Biden's red line is about 35 km wide and finish just in the shores of the mediterranean

javi, to random

Question about USian politics:

Does Biden have to win in the primaries to be the candidate this year, or is it like the World cup and the last winner gets in the next competition without having to go through the qualifying phase (so he will be the candidate 100% sure)?

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