#lisp small experiment: putting special #lispm keys on a Stream Deck, as a companion to the Apple keyboard

Brainstorming some blog post titles that are more honest than "A Deep Dive Into X":

• An Elevator Pitch about Go Dependency Management
• A Smattering on 5GHz WiFi
• A Misunderstanding about PGP

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.

(#automattic #google #tumblr #wordpress #enshittification)

Why my favorite fictional character would definitely support every one of my political/social causes: 🧵👇 (1/XX)

Radiolab has stories about interesting topics but the editing style is a huge turn-off. Their "style" is to use tiny snippets (a few seconds) of their interviewees, stitched together with bridge phrases from the hosts (recorded later). So something like this:

Interviewee: "So we started looking into it--"
Host: "A link between eating peanut butter and voting Republican, that is"
I: "--and what we found was that, most of the time--"
H: "those same people who ate smooth?"
I: "--voted for Trump"

Besides being just plain annoying, it can end up feeling like the producers decided on a story they wanted to tell, then went around and gathered audio until they could stitch together enough pieces to tell it the way they wanted.

Like in my stupid fake example above, maybe the researcher had actually said "So we started looking into it, and what we found was that, most of the time, there's no link between if you eat smooth or crunchy and if you voted for Trump", but by god the producers hate those stupid smooth peanut butter eaters...

@carmenbianca @jadedctrl @aylamz Nobody is saying to take politics out of free software, but projects who wish to concentrate on code are perfectly valid and nothing wrong. No please fuck off from my screen.

In experimenting with an LLM, a colleague asked "what does the Zeek conn_state field RSTO mean?". The response was:

In Zeek (formerly known as Bro), the conn_state field is used to indicate the connection state of a particular network session, based on TCP flags and other connection metadata. The value "RSTO" in the conn_state field indicates that one side of the connection sent a RST (Reset) flag during the initial three-way handshake, before the connection was fully established. This typically happens when one endpoint tries to establish a connection to an unreachable or non-existent service on the other endpoint, and the remote host sends a RST packet in response. The "TO" part of the value suggests that this RST flag was sent after some timeout period, which could indicate a problem with network connectivity or reachability between the two endpoints.

A concise, clear, and helpful answer.

Unfortunately it's half wrong, because "RSTO" just means "RST packet sent by Originator" (see https://docs.zeek.org/en/master/scripts/base/protocols/conn/main.zeek.html). Timeouts don't enter into it.

#AI #LLM #smrt

I used ellama to wire up a work-hosted ollama instance to emacs and then had it generate some boilerplate code. Tweaking the boilerplate to be correct took more or less the same time as copy-pasting & tweaking some existing code, but by god this time I got to use a GPU instead of just M-w followed by C-y.

Why is it anything titled a "deep dive" is usually actually the equivalent of a kiddie pool?

Trailer for Dune 3 looks awesome. The Preacher is back.

this is the sad nerd equivalent of those Instagram channels where you post yourself perfectly dressed & made up reading whatever the current bestseller is

#emacs

can you even call yourself a keeb dweeb if you don't lubricate the keyswitches with bear grease?

al dente, adj.: fancy way to say "macaroni got soft enough to eat"

@longobord Now there are hundreds of people who think the civil war was 60 years ago because of my short-lived typo.

Yesterday I started receiving targeted ads based on ebook borrows from my library (San Francisco Public Library). The content of those ads suggested that the targeters were aware of which books I chose to read.

#Privacy #library
1/x

it's 2024 and I'm compiling ITS for the PDP-10.

#富士山
#わに塚の桜
#tokyocameraclub

Symbolics is offering to sell laptops running Portable Genera (the updated Genera that @gmpalter was showing off a while back) but it's not at all clear what the restrictions are, except that it's for non-commercial use only.

Is the Genera license somehow keyed to the particular laptop's serial number?

Or can you pull the disk out and put it in a better machine?

Can you image the disk and run it in a VM?

Can you image the disk and run 50 VMs?

#lispm #lispmachine #lisp

I often hear about state actors. I don't hear as much about state actresses. We can do better.

nation-state, n: a way to say "country" that makes you seem smarter on Twitter.