Man, I love some Apple products, but the Kool Aid is giving me indigestion.
Now, they've started the "Apple Podcast exclusives" program. So you can ONLY play these podcasts on their player on a Mac or an iPhone.
This S-U-C-K-S.
Podcasts have, since the very beginning been an open ecosystem. Content was produced and hosted anywhere, and the interface was an open RSS feed that can be consumed by anyone with any player.
Spotify tried this obvious enshittification play and by all accounts, it FAILED utterly.
Now Apple is using their home field advantage to try it and they may well succeed.
And it pisses me off.
An open podcast ecosystem benefits everyone, including !$#@ Apple because MANY of us largely listen on Apple hardware.
But I listen using @overcastfm, an outstanding podcast player by a hard working indie developer.
I resent this. I sent them a tweet but would love a way to send my message in a more precisely targeted fashion.
As we all know by now, Stack Overflow has alienated their primary contributors by letting OpenAI train on SO's (CC-protected) content, and forcefully preventing countermeasures. Therefore, SO content will likely become worse and even more outdated as time goes on.
So, time to migrate. What's the preferred open source, community-run alternative to SO for everyone to migrate to? Here's one list of alternative software to run such sites:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
@pluralistic Cory, this might be of interest, taking up your ‘Too big to care’ post. GMX licenses Google results. GMX results are superior to Google’s (without paying for Kagi’s metasearch).
Surprise, surprise... Legislation regulating AI-enabled HR tech is ghost written by HR tech industry firm Workday, and will allow them and their clients to covertly run discriminatory AI models without practical recourse for those facing unfair discrimination.
If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff I had a big list of small things, but i think the biggest thing i miss is the open architecture of the 1990's, protocols were published (rfcs), services were shared and not behind walled gardens, like irc & newsgroups. The new stuff doesn't provide a lot more functionality, but now comes with free #enshittification. (irc -> discord, newsgroups -> reddit, etc...)
What's a good (Debian-based) alternative for Ubuntu, since they seem to be all-in on enshittification? I've used it as my desktop OS for so long, I'm completely out of touch. 😬
WTF #Apple. I’m minding my own business, and get an alert on my watch & phone. “Sign in with your AppleID”. Ok, why? I enter my password anyway. Then: Locked out. WTF? Then worse. I can’t unlock my account for an hour because I’m not at a familiar location. I’m home. Where I rarely leave. If my home isn’t familiar, where the hell is? #kwality#enshittification
If corporations are a form of slow AI, then what @pluralistic calls #enshittification is indicative of an "alignment problem", when the objective function (paperclip maximization) is persued by destructive means. And like all alignment problems, it has to do with a lack of, or the wrong, constraints.
... #Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google #Search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.