Enshittification, as always, is the word here. It’s important to point out because to disenshittify(?) the product would need to turn back the wheel, including profits. Line go down.

With all the other lines going down, they literally cannot course correct here in any way that would matter to the consumer to rebuild trust. So much of their model is built off of force feeding users and directing their behaviors, the thing they absolutely hate.

I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.

I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.

I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.

I have this working theory that the cloud to butt extension was the beginning of the downfall.

It was the point where the techies began to see the absurdity of the “just jam X into it” trend of technology development and got so frustrated at it they developed a childish (affectionate) extension to vent their disgust. Came out around 2013ish or so?

And over the past ~decade and a half, have we not seen that born out to the extreme? It’s around the time I felt myself start to get cynical and stop following tech news.

I agree. The problem is complex and layered, I don’t claim to fully understand it myself, but the problem is that innovation came to mean “innovation on creating capital” and not “innovation on serving the customer”. If you haven’t read Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shosana Zuboff, I highly recommend it. It lays a lot of the groundwork for what Cory Doctorow would go on to call enshittification.

On top of that, or maybe underneath it, is the idea of disruption. It has long been joked as “ignoring regulations” which has very much become true. When you can’t exploit the current systems you create parallel systems where you are in control of the playing field. Disruption to innovation, innovation to disruption. To the consumer it’s just disruption.

What we’ve ended up with as a result over the past decade and a half or so is a market that is not beholden to the consumer at all. We’ve long known that boycotts are fairly ineffective aside from some occasional groundswell on “culture war” issues, but it doesn’t feel like we’re the market anymore. Look at Nvidia’s recent presentation at the CES which wasn’t even about consumers at all, it was about AI and datacenters mostly. They fully dictate the market at us now and we’re just along for the ride.

BUT to my hopefulness above, there are still a few ways to break free of this, I don’t believe things are so bad as that yet. There does seem to be a real choking point for the consumer, Microsoft is another good example. They continue to leverage their market position but people are rapidly exploring options away from them wherever possible. I don’t think we’ll ever truly see a “year of the Linux desktop” the way some people expect, but the slow erosion is real. Another article I think about a lot is the breaching the trust thermocline which theorizes that customer trust is not a linear system. Executives like to believe that once things begin to sour they can simply make a change to correct course when the course was already lost some time ago.

Call me optimistic, but I truly believe there’s going to be such a tech boom once the market outside the US is insightful enough to look backwards and point their finger at the things that worked well and that people actually wanted and iterate off that instead of this failed path, dead end.

I expected nothing and I’m still disappointed,

We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed

Do we?

capability is outpacing our current ability

JFC you are so high on your own supply.

A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute

So you want your shitty tech to be the scaffolding that underlies all human thought?

Fucking tech industry has come to assume that all disruption is innovation and it’s not. It’s just disruption. Go stuff yourselves.

My favorite new dark pattern is the one where the website forces you to either accept the cookies or pay/subscribe.

There seems to be some argument around whether this is technically legal or not, it seems to worm its way around the written guidelines just enough but certainly goes against the spirit of it.

The fact that “Reject All” is an option, has always been an option, gives the game away entirely.

I still have a lot of mistrust for the TPM, but that’s OK, my paranoia has room to accommodate everyone.

It’s even worse than all that. The video is worth a watch if you have the time, he gets his hands on the leaked source code via accidental exposure on the Apple store, but then also covers other extensions that exhibit this same behavior as well as Microsoft Edge that just has it built into the browser. That’s right, even Microsoft is getting in on this by having their baseline browser without any extensions hijack the affiliate codes. It’s all so brazen …

Finally! I was getting concerned with how long this was taking but see it was well worth the wait.

Somehow even worse than I ever imagined, and there’s still more to come.

I know we’re all jaded nerds on this corner of the internet that are well aware of “if you’re not paying, etc. etc.” but there’s real value in investigations like this. Just look at how massively damaging and long-running this scam has been. The future of cyber security and cyberwarfare can’t just be fought on tech knowledge alone, there’s a huge social component to it and a “You should’ve known; I told you so” attitude won’t help.

Spread the information and reach out to those closest to you to offer sincere and genuine help. Help your friends, family, and coworkers uninstall these extensions and all extensions like them. I feel like we’re really coming to a point where all these tech industries have overextended themselves to a point where they are immensely vulnerable. Capitalism demands line always go up and if we can even slightly slow or possibly reverse that trend it could pop the bubble for a lot of these corporations.

I mean, clicking through to his website shows the branding alternate between Wanderfugl(?) and WanderFull so either it’s a sloppy branding mismatch through evolving iterations or … slop.

Honestly that’s a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.

Tagline: “Teach me … how to DIE!”

It kills me because I feel like culturally we’ve really adjusted to this idea of individually patronizing the arts … if only our whole economy weren’t centered around squeezing out every last drop of disposable income from us.

Honestly, the way I learned Linux best after a numerous failed tries over the years was switching to Arch. It gets a lot of crap from the online community, especially regarding its users, but I think it’s an excellent distro especially for people at a moderate to advanced level.

First off, the archinstall script makes the actual installation process - notoriously one of the hardest parts of using the distro - much easier. It comes with a barebones set of components installed to get you up and running.

From there, you just start to think of the things you want to do with your system and begin building it out piece by piece. Consult the Arch wiki for a number of application options and then pick one. Usually there’s some additional configuration involved, not much, just a config file that needs tweaking or something, but this helps you learn things slowly. It also guarantees that if that particular thing breaks in the future, you have a better idea of what might have gone wrong and where to start looking because you previously set it up (somewhat) manually yourself.

Occasionally you’ll stumble across something on your system that’s not working the way you thought it would and it’s because you needed to manually install some additional component or dependency yourself. So again you consult the wiki and just do that. It’s about slowly building the knowledge.

When you’re finished you have a highly customized system with only the components you wanted and a better knowledge of it all.

I still end up using the Youtube app on my phone sometimes and I’m absolutely floored at the audacity of even making the first video an ad. Total, absolute, utter bullshit.

No. The rebellious spirit is what lights the fire. It may take a few tries to follow through, but I respect the rage >=D

We need to come together as a community and encourage every effort. If you really want to see other people stick to it we need to smash any sense of righteousness or gatekeeping to bits.

I’m still not great with Wine myself, but sit down for an afternoon and try out Bottles. https://www.howtogeek.com/running-windows-apps-on-linux-with-bottles/

I’m on Arch and even the wiki just recommends using the Flatpak. It’s pretty obvious once you get the hang of it, each Bottle is just it’s own little, specific Windows configuration. Try running through the example on that site and installing Notepad++ (or something else of your choice) and you’ll probably have an a-ha! moment.

Isn’t it?

The arguments of preference and convenience are falling by the wayside as megacorporations take more and more control over not just your hardware but your behavioral patterns by dictating what you can install and how it functions. They suck up all your personal, private data for AI training without your consent.

I get it, shit sucks. It really does, but we have to remember who is to blame here and it’s not each other. There has to be some urgency here because this is a battle and we, the consumers, the ordinary people, are surely losing. It’s not about being holier than thou, it’s about lifting each other up.

Once you realize this, you also realize that there’s no going back for them either. If by some slim chance there’s enough resistance for them to pause or rollback some features, it’s only temporary. The overall course remains clear and they will continue to move in that direction regardless.

There disdain for you as a consumer could not be made any clearer.

It won’t even be obvious to you it happened or what may have caused it. Some AI algorithm determines you are an un-citizen and checks a box. Rejections keep coming back as you slowly fall down the social ladder, or not so slowly at all, until you become the invisible poor and disappear altogether.