Vincent M. @Vimar@techlover.eu

Germany is banning the rector of the University of Glasgow from entering the EU. Because he’s a witness to genocide (as a surgeon who among other things repairs blown off faces of children) who was to speak at the French senate.

Germany has completely lost it.

La belle école qu'on nous prépare ! #EducationNationale

C'est la fin avril, voici donc l'illustration du mois qui s'accompagnera d'un magnet Rachida Dati (visible en commentaire avec le lien vers Ko-fi)
Bisous !😘

C'est marrant, quand Rima Hassan appelle au « soulèvement », il faut absolument qu'un journaliste le traduise en arabe par « intifada », mais quand Macron explique que « le travaille émancipe », il n'y a aucun journaliste pour le traduire en allemand.

You would be surprised at how much I would pay for this, if it actually existed.

Surgeon: Relax David, this is a small surgery. No need to panic.

Patient: My name is not David.

Surgeon: No, my name is David.

“We later found out that Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-doubt-netanyahu-preventing-hostage-deal-charges-ex-spokesman-of-families-forum/

Full transcript in image description.

#meme

Bad and freeloader behaviour
AnthropicAI. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ceco4f/claude_ai_name_and_shame/ #linux #linuxmint #opensource Please boost to shame them.

Dites les gens que conseillez vous comme service d’hébergement de boîtes mail ?
Suite aux changements de Gandi, j’avais trouvé une solution mais qui ne me convient plus.

(Le boost rend service.)

La RATP permet de connaître l'état du trafic à un instant T, mais cette information n'est pas historisée.

J'ai essayé de combler ce manque. Voici : https://ratpStatus.fr 🥳

Sous licence libre bien sûr : https://github.com/wincelau/ratpstatus

⬇️

Les patrons de la tech qui ne mettent pas leurs enfants devant des écrans, une légende urbaine
Une rumeur persistante voudrait que les cadres des grandes entreprises technologiques privent leurs enfants d’écrans. En réalité, ils font face aux mêmes questionnements et hésitations que tous les autres parents.

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2024/03/23/les-patrons-de-la-tech-qui-ne-mettent-pas-leurs-enfants-devant-des-ecrans-une-legende-urbaine_6223674_4408996.html

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.