javi

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) 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, 1 month ago to random

Look, USians, I don't want to step into your internal politics, but you see, 45 years ago, we spaniards had the occurrence to write in our constitution that the head of state (the king) has immunity from prosecution for anything they do while they are in the job, and now we have an ex-king with a Wikipedia page that includes a "alleged corruption" section 55 paragraphs long.

And it's only "alleged" because he can't be taken to court even with the piles of evidence that exist.

Just saying.

aral, 1 month ago to Israel

World Central Kitchen is devastated to confirm seven members of our team have been killed in an IDF strike in Gaza.
…
Despite coordinating movements with the IDF, the convoy was hit
…
This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war. This is unforgivable
…
The seven killed are from Australia, Poland, UK, US, Canada, and Palestine.

https://wck.org/news/gaza-team-update

#wck #israel

javi, 2 months ago to random

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.

Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.

The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

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

javi, 3 months ago to random

Besides all the damage control Automattic is trying to do about selling user data to openAi and Midjourney, I don't think they realize how much they have jumped the shark for some of us.

See, I worked for the company for a long time. I was really proud of being part of Automattic: For years, there was a clear push to be 'the odd silicon valley company', one that actually respected user privacy, gets its money from the users themselves and not from stealing their privacy, etc.

When Automattic bought tumblr, I remember Matt saying on an interview that his plan was to try to show the world that there was a different way to do social media, one that was not based in selling user personal data: he wanted tumblr to be funded by its own users. I remember actually defending him in tumblr itself: People was skeptical, but my reply to them was always that even if I not always agreed with Matt in everything, believed he was really serious about protecting user privacy (even if it was only to protect his own reputation of being, somehow, a champion of the open internet).

Well.

Now this has been proved as bullshit. Automattic signed a deal with the two more prominent AI companies to sell user data, and didn't announce it until the first data delivery was already done. What's worse, if you read the announcement they posted, it's clear they intended to gaslight the userbase: They talk about a new profile setting to protect your blog from AI scrappers. They are trying to sell it as an extra layer of protection against data scrappers, when they know very well that they only think they can do to prevent that is politely request the scrappers to not take this or that blog data (spoilers: AI companies couldn't care less about those requests). And of course, what is worse: at no moment it's mentioned that Automattic has reached an agreement with the people behind those scrappers to proactively send the data on their own, without even needing to scrape the web to get it. In exchange for (what I assume) is a hefty amount of money.

Not only Automattic has sold your data behind your back, but on top of that, they are trying to gaslight you about it.

The AI data selling is a punch in the gut. It's horrifying, but at least it's not surprising: Matt Mullenweg has been hyper-bullish about AI since last year, so he probably doesn't even see this is a the huge betrayal of user trust that it is. But the way they intended to communicate it to the end-user, the sneaky, shady way to talk about it in the official posts... that feels like an entire battering.

For me, the trust is absolutely broken. I can't trust automattic more than I trust Meta: Yeah, there's this 'don't share my data with AI thieves' checkbox in tumblr and WordPress now, but they haven't even communicated clearly what the 404 media article is telling us: That the data is already in OpenAi hands, and that the only thing the toggle does is kindly requesting them to not use the data they already have from your blog. And that they are not even contractually obliged to comply.

Even if they actually comply and don't use that data, I can't trust Automattic to not change their approach and remove that checkbox in the future (It's not the first time I see the company doing these kind of changes, but I always lied myself thinking that in the end it was minor issues with less impact than the overall stance of the company). I can't trust Automattic to not start doing these kind of things behind our backs (since they have clearly tried to do it this time and got caught only because some brave soul leaked an internal doc to 404 media).

How could I trust Automattic anymore, when they even tried to keep which kind of data they were selling to OpenAI in secret from its own engineering team? I feel terrible for my ex-coworkers still in Automattic, because I know a big share of them are mortified and aghast for everything that has happened in the past week. But it's their job and they are powerless against greedy and evil executives ('evil' as in "couldn't care less about the users or their employees")

When I was laid off last summer, the reason I got from HR was that 'I wasn't aligned with the direction the company needed to take'. And holy shit, wasn't that true.

As I said, I can't trust Automattic more than I trust Facebook, Google, or Twitter. And it breaks my heart and I can't believe I've just wrote that.

javi, 4 months ago to random

(reposting from @ianbetteridge instead of reblogging because mastodon don't feel great about quote reblogs)

Back in late 2021, when I was still working for Automattic, the Chief of Money Things presented the revenue goals for 2022+ his team decided based on a forecast they spent months working on. The goals were incredibly ambitious, because they were based in the growth the company had experienced during 2020 and 21.

Back in the day it didn't make any sense to me, basing the goals of the company on the results of a year where, because of COVID, all the online products were experiencing 2 or 3x more growth than any other year before seemed incredibly stupid. But I told myself "Javi, there may be a hundred different factors you don't see and these people do: it's not your field, this seems dumb , but trust those who know".

But time passed. People stopped being locked at home for 23 hours per day. And surprise surprise: online activity went back to normal levels. Who could have guessed uh? Well, not the C-suite of most tech companies. Not the C-suite of my company.

Flash forward to early 2023: we are told that it's clear we are "underperforming", so the company needs to go into "antifragile" mode (a term from one of those self-help for businessmen books the CEOs like so much): benefits start being cut down, salaries get frozen, the CEO tell us that working 40 hours/week is now considered below the bare minimum expectations, and the execs announce the hiring is frozen and the new goal is to make the company "lighter" by "managing people out". Mind you, the company was making more money than ever (except for 2020/21). The revenue was growing, handsomely. But it wasn't growing as much as the investors were promised, so we were underperforming.

Did the people responsible for setting stupid goals based on inane ideas admitted responsibility and suffered any consequences???

Of course not! They just blamed it on "execution issues". Because hey, admitting that they took some decisions so dumb that any average 13-year-old would find them laughable, would mean that maybe it's not justified for them to earn millions per year.

Every year it becomes more clear that success in the business world and being smart, or even competent in your job, are totally unrelated variables.

So yeah, there are a lot of not-too-bright but incredibly confident people in positions of power in the business world, taking absurd decisions that end fucking thousands of workers, and never suffering for and kind of repercussions themselves.

The system is entirely broken.

fraying, 4 months ago to random

If this is true, I am so disappointed in Wordpress (where I used to work). They were the leader in customer support, keeping it all in-house and requiring all employees to spend time doing support. If they really just hooked a LLM bot up to their email support, they're ruining their own reputation, and I've lost my last example of a company doing support right.
https://social.panic.com/@cabel/111692900717018267

javi, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago) to random

Shit is going down HARD in Eurovision right now.We are hours from the beginning of the fest and in the last couple of hours:

The french artist stopped his song during the dress rehearsal today, gave a speech about peace, and left the stage

The Irish ones sent a press release asking the EBU to disqualify Israel for the comments their broadcaster had done about the Irish song

Both Ireland and Greece didn't show up to the festival flag parade that kickstarts the show.

Norway's artist who were going to be the spokesperson of the jury tonight announced she is declining to participate... An hour ago, about 8 hours before she would have to go live

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9t5qbo5qfs3a8r19

javi, 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago) to random

One: a Nazi promotes her own speech about The Great Replacement (core Nazi doctrine)

Two: Musk promotes the post and says the problem with [Nazi doctrine] is that it doesn't center enough in [Nazi historical doctrine]

Three: my ex-boss and automattic and Tumblr CEO jumps in to recommend Elon a book about [Nazi doctrine]

So yeah, my ex-boss seems to be full in the movement.

Now let me remind you about this thing called reality:

US population grew 0.4% last year

EU population grew 0.1% last year

World Population? +0.8%

None of those figures has gone under 0 in the last 50 years (and probably before, I just don't want to look for more data). The population collapse the are talking about is about WHITE population. If someone talks about population decline, they are a white supremacist.

Good fucking grief.

javi, 5 months ago to random

You know, apart from blocking threads instances, there are other options on how to deal with Meta above instance level. The different fedi platforms could decide... Well, to poison the well.

You could program your server to transform outgoing post going towards Threads' servers in whatever you like. From... Making every post to have the infamous white-Zuckenberg surfing picture attached, to transforming every post they receive from your server in a quote from Das Kapital making your instance a honeypot of Marxist theory, to... Nastier things.

So instead of gatekeeping them, we would be gaslighting them. Hmm.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Btw, if someone who already is in the Fedi, is familiar with Tumblr, and want to take a look at what we are doing with goblin, just let me know and I'll send you an invite for my server

javi, 17 days ago to random

Hey Sundar, here is a free piece of advice:

Announcing your record profits from the past Q will, likely, lead to "fewer layoffs" is not the morale boost you think it is.

javi, 17 days ago to random

If you think about it, justifying the Gaza genocide because of October 7th and the need to get rid of Hamas to prevent another one is fucked up even if you really believe Israel is trying to minimize civilian deaths.

There are two ways you can think of Hamas:

As a terror group. As such, those who have been active part in a terror strike should be detained and brought to trial. Executing every member of the organisation without trial is extremely fucked up.

As a foreign nation army who started a war against Israel. As such, Israel should avide to rules of war, and doing things like targeting enemies while not mobilised, like in their civilian homes, it's a hell of a war crime and extremely fucked up

So even if you bought into the propaganda, what Israel is doing is just beyond fucked up and indefensible.

javi, 1 month ago to random

These people are so fucking dumb. Let me do some quick math.

Any given week day, at peak hour, any train from Madrid's metro can be carrying around 500 people. Let's consider that some of them may be traveling together, so let's say that being optimistic, they could be divided in 250 robotaxies.

Now, that's one train. At any moment there are between 10 and 20 trains going in that line in that same direction. And as much in the opposite. That makes it between 5k and 10k robotaxies. To cover a single metro line

Madrid has 16 metro lines. That makes it between 80k and 160k robotaxies just they could move the same order of magnitude of people our Metro moves in any given workday. If you want to cover really busy moments, like big sport events, you need twice that amount (the nominal max capacity of metro trains is around 1200 people per train, and believe me, I've seen them so full that you couldn't get in pretty often).

That's just for the subway. Local commuter trains and city buses, combined, are actually carrying more people daily than the subway. So let's double the robotaxies fleet again if they want it to "kill public transport". So you need between 350k and 700k robotaxies just to be able to kill the public transit of a single major city.

That's about 1/6th of every Tesla ever made. Just. For. One. City.

The current Madrid taxi fleet? 15k cars.

RE: https://botsin.space/users/fuck_cars_bot/statuses/112232273717775735

javi, 3 months ago to random

And about the AI opt-out setting Tumblr will deploy tomorrow, I'll just let you with the words of the person in charge of the heist:

Andrew Spittle, Automattic's head of AI replied: "We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. [...] I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point."

So Tumblr will notify openAi and Midjourney that you wish your posts to not be used and it's entirely up to them to comply or not. And as we know, we are talking about some of the less ethical companies on the internet (which honestly is kind of a feat), so that cute little setting will most than probably do nothing and less.

javi, 1 month ago to random

@panos @atomicpoet

100%

While working on my own project, I've found myself spending more time on thinking about how to work around the limitations of mastodon so I can keep compatibility while adding new features than on this new features on its own.

As the biggest project in the Fedi, mastodon gravity well is huge, but we need to find the way to scape it. We have the chance to build a new social internet apart from the corporate-lead platforms, it would be a shame if we ended with just a bunch of flavors of Twitter clones.

Btw, this is how this conversation looks in Goblin. Hooray for long posts, and also for chained conversations :

RE: https://catodon.social/notes/9rqbtt0wj5f1ieyy

javi, 4 months ago to random

Filed under "Why only morons end up becoming billionaires?"

javi, 14 days ago to random

I've been a happy user of Nothing audio for years. I've had a pair of Nothing Ear(1), which I replaced with a Nothing Ear(2) when one of the earbuds broke, and then I even got their Nothing Phone (actually my current phone). It's, basically, the brand I've felt more loyalty towards for literal decades.

So when two days ago I stepped over one of the earphones and cracked the plastic shell, I was sure I was going to get a new pair.

Long story short, I've been just checking their site, looking for the name and price of their last model, and saw this:

And... fuck this shit. Fuck it with a flamming iron rod. You were making some awesome, high-quality and more or less cheap, earphones, you were doing so good, but you had to integrate this earth-burning snake oil on your product? fuck it. I won't pay for any fucking hardware integrated with that nightmare.

So long story short:

Any recommendation for some good bluetooth earphones? No apple products, but anything else I'm willing to consider.

javi, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago) to random

You probably have seen already all the caps about google AI recommending to put a bit of glue in your pizza sauce. You may have seen also how someone digged up that it comes from a reddit shitpost from ten years ago.

This case illustrate perfectly something I've been saying for a while: chatbots are basically a cosmetic upgrade over the good old "I'm feeling lucky" Google button.

Or more exactly: a new version of the button that needs 600 million $ in Nvidia gear every month and wastes half a liter of water every time you click it

javi, 4 months ago to random

Oh new Wordpress-drama in the brewing! So, yesterday, the WordPress official twitter account tweeted this:

It was extremely cringe for the WordPress main social media account to not only be this level of sycophantic with his leader for his birthday, but also using its platform to ask for donations for a pretty banal art project, totally unrelated with the WordPress project, he has been involved with in the past. People from the WordPress community were bothered by this and raise complaints in the WordPress slack channels.

And this is where things gets interesting and hilarious:

What... what???? So Matt, Automattic's CEO Matt, WordPress "dictator" Matt, took over the WordPress twitter account to ... congratulate himself on his birthday and ask the community to donate to his favorite rich-kid toy project????????

WHAT??!? Wait, this can't be true, right?

Also, it's against WordPress rules!! Surely its leader hasn't violate his own project rules, right?

Oh, wait, there's more:

So long story short:

WordPress chief guy takes the WordPress project twitter and bides himself happy birthday by asking the community to donate to his favorite frivolity, and when called out about him, he goes all "oh you wouldn't expect my own rules would apply to me, right?"

Yeah, this is very non-toxic behaviour for someone who leads a project that's the backbone of 40% of the Word Wide Web :D

javi, 2 months ago to random

The state of JavaScript web development is so fucking nuts that people can write this and think it's a great movement.

(This is from Dan Abramov twitter)

How the hell did we got to a point that we are caring about micro optimising... JSON fetches.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Our president (center-left in social issues, kind of economical liberal in economics) just announce he's not stepping down, after 5 days of meditating about it.

Now the right wing is furious with him because they feel he's dishonest and he should have actually stepped down for multiple reasons

The left is furious with him because he had ignore the smear campaign the right wing media has been running against every single left wing politician for a decade until now, and with this stunt he has made it all about him.

And look, the guy is a clown, and mostly a centrist which I disagree with in almost every single economic measure he has taken (or refused to take). But the reality is that if he had stepped down, we would have gone for general elections, and the chances of the right wing party teaming up with the actual fascist party to get to the government would have been extremely high.

So yeah, I'm relieved we are keeping our liberal clown president for another year, given how the alternative is having actual fascists as head of several ministries.

javi, 3 months ago to random

I want y'all to notice something else about tumblr's opt-out AI setting. Look at how it was officially announced:

And now I ask you to consider something else: When we introduced "blaze other people posts", Staff also got a lot of flak for making it an opt-out setting. But really it wasn't (at first): When it was launched, every tumblr user got a pop-up the next time they logged in telling them about the change and warning them to go to settings and disable the new checkbox if they weren't ok with it. And you didn't really get opted-in until you had seen that pop-up: It could have been better, but at least there wasn't anyone being opted-in without their knowledge.

But with AI? no pop-up, just a (very hidden) new checkbox in the blog settings, and a @staff announcement. An Staff post that makes an strong use of passive voice to not making it too clear that tumblr ACTUALLY has partnered with AI companies to sell your data: It looks like they are being nice and giving you the chance to add an extra layer of security against data scraping, right? nothing too urgent, don't worry about it!

But then the 404 media post went out a day before they intended to (quietly) launch this and they had to rush it out. With the verbiage that was intended for a purposely low-key announcement. Sure, without that 404 post there would be some low-key pitchforks and torches, but they weren't planning to let us know that AUTOMATTIC ALREADY HAS A DEAL WITH OPENAI TO SEND YOUR DATA BY DEFAULT, just that "hey we are giving you this new setting to discourage any AI company to user your data for training... that would be crazy if it happened, uh? hehe".

javi, 19 days ago to random

A spanish journalist covering Eurovision got harassed by his Israeli colleagues after he shouted "Free Palestine!" during the Israel rehearsal, and that has prompted the Spanish national broadcaster to fill a complaint with the Eurovision organizers prompting them to ensure the safety of the press.

https://www.europapress.es/sociedad/noticia-periodista-espanol-denuncia-prensa-israeli-le-intimidado-eurovision-gritar-palestina-libre-20240510203844.html (spanish link, sorry, the only english media I've seen covering the issue is The Mirror and I won't degrade y'all by linking them)

Somehow I'm still at marvel that, for once, Spain has half a foot in the correct side of history instead of our usual happy prancing around the vilest shit possible.

javi, 3 months ago to random

Tailwind is the opposite of what css is supposed to be about. It's half a step beyond writing css-free html and just use the style attribute of the html tag. It's just the last step of a long path of libraries and frameworks whose leifmotif is basically "programmers who don't understand CSS and refuse to learn how it works need to be reassured they are right and it's not them, it's CSS who is wrong".

Just learn CSS, folks. It's actually not that hard, and it's actually pretty easy to write reusable classes, even in large apps.

RE: https://toot.cafe/users/baldur/statuses/111952168702795371