Notices by javi@goblin.band, page 2

There is this show on Netflix where an USian visits areas of the world where there is a higher-than-average centenarians density and try to dig into their customs to see why in X country "people live 8 years more than in the US on average".

But then they never address the fact that in every single case the people they talk with have lived in countries with socialized health care and strong labour rights. It's kind of hilarious.

There is this moment where they are talking with this Japanese woman about the fact she is part of some kind of social club, trying to suggest this may be a factor in her longevity, and she casually mentions how she has been retired for over 40 years... And I DON'T KNOW MAYBE THE COUNTRY WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC PENSION PROGRAM NOR MANDATORY RETIREMENT AGE HAVING A SHORTER LIFE SPAN MAY NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH HOW OFTEN JAPANESE 80-SOMETHINGS MET WITH THEIR FRIENDS TO SING TRADITIONAL TUNES TOGETHER.

Elon musk: Brazil demanding we ban nazi accounts posting racist shit is against free speech and puts democracy at risk

Random Twitter user: ... Cisgender.

Elon musk: this cannot be tolerated! You are permabanned !!!

Oh look at this

So automattic/Tumblr's CEO is making the company email servers to redirect all mail from teamblind.com to his own personal address instead of the actual person who registered to Blind, so he can know who signed up using their corporate email (the only way to sign up).

Not only that, but by doing this, he could just go through the company email address list, hit the "forgot your password" link, and find out who already has an account, and even steal it.

Update: it looks like blind doesn't allow recovering your password via email, so at least he couldn't do this to existing accounts.

Very sane, not creepy, absolutely not sociopath move, sire. Absolutely normal and not crazy maniac behavior.

‡ If you don't know blind, it's a platform that let employees of a company to anonymously talk between them about their employer

The AI industry is a grift so big that it's really hard to explain it to people not familiar with the tech industry.

Yes, Google is perfectly aware their AI-powered search is way worse than their "classic" mode.

Yes, Apple knows their integration with chatGPT is flaky and ads nothing useful to their products. And

They.

Don't.

Care.

Because the goal is not making their products better, the goal is to ride the hype wave so the investors are happy and their stock price keeps growing.

That's almost entirely what's powering the AI industry.

It's a multibillon dollar grift. One so big and so obvious that most people think they have to be missing something, that they don't understand something that makes everything to make it makes sense as a business.

No. That's everything. It's pure snake oil selling.

The automattic alumni slack server is experiencing a spike of new people joining these days.

The rumour mill says that the CEO, Matt Mullenweg, has set a hard goal of the headcount reduction this year and since he came back from sabbatical last month, things are getting ugly inside the company.

But you know, it's not another round of layoffs, it's just "performance management" (with an associated goal of how many people must be underperforming that must be reached, because MM is the kwisatz haderach of Wordpress and he can see the future and one know how many people will fail performance checks).

Once again, big hug for my friends still inside.

Also, there is a very gloomy vibe on Tumblr right now. In the last few days, a bunch of very popular trans accounts have been purged without being given any reason about it. Mind you, we are talking about accounts with thousands of followers and years of backlog, that never got into trouble with mods before... Suddenly banned without any explanation.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9u9rya58eamp06g8

People cheering for the release of 4 hostages achieved by killing 210 random people in a refugee camp is the perfect gist of the entire Palestinian recent history. Somehow those 4 hostages are fellow humans who serve a happy life (they are), but the 210 palestinians just disposable vermin that don't even get mentioned in the news.

Oh: and two reminders:


Israel keeps broadcasting their war crimes full of pride about them (soldiers entering combat zones disguised as non-combatants is EXPLICITLY forbidden by the Geneva convections)


Israel still kept about 2000 palestinian hostages themselves (people abducted without any formal accusation nor giving their loved ones any news of their demise) and no one ever talks about their release

Honestly, this (Biden pushing for a plan, trying to give credit to the Israel on top of it) is the only thing that would explain the last days. That or a operation by Israel to further discredit Biden.

Oh the news here called it the Biden peace plan, and for what it looks, Hamas was willing to accept it and Israel rejected it entirely.

Somehow I'm sure the US will spin this failure to be Hamas' fault

Fuck, this may very well be the end of Eurovision as a cultural force in Europe.

What's going on:


The Dutch artist have been showing some mild unease at the Israel presence there this year during the past week. The Irish ones have been forced to change their looks because it included the words "ceasefire" and "freedom for Palestine" in ancient gaelic script.


Yesterday, someone from the Israel delegation staff joked about the dutch artist's father death (the Dutch song is dedicated to him) and there was "an incident" (undisclosed, but the rumor-mill says the Dutch guy may have punched the jokester it looks it was only a verbal confrontation)


Eurovision have disqualified the Netherlands from today's final.


The Dutch broadcaster association (those who pick who to send to EV) posted this a few hours ago:


There has been protest within the Finnish public broadcaster asking for Finland withdrawal


The head of the political party who is the junior partner in the government of Spain is also calling for our withdrawal.


The Israeli delegation seem to have spent the week literally harassing anyone they perceive as critical, with several complains about their behavior already being published.


The Israeli song is one of the favorites to win, and if they do, next year Eurovision would be organized by them. If that happen, there is no way several countries wouldn't just refuse to take part.



So yeah, there is a chance this may be it for the festival. Good job, Eurovision. Great fucking job.

Shit is going down HARD in Eurovision onright 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

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.

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.

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

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.

Oh wow, the Substack debacle is even worse than the CEO post defending Nazis pointed out:

https://katz.beehiiv.com/p/off-stack



(The story about everything that happened behind the scenes is in the second half of the post)



Long story short, not only Substack actively defended fascist scum, but also retaliated against writers calling them on it, and collaborated with alt-right writers behind the scenes, giving them private information to ridicule the people talking about the nazi problem.

Some selected quotes from the post

We all thought that this was a case of "Nazi walks into a normal bar, owner refuses to kick him out, a month after that the bar is now a Nazi bar". But it looks that it wasn't the case, it was more like "bar owner is Nazi-friendly, but he doesn't openly announce it in his bar so we all think it's just a regular place".

If you are still on Substack, sorry, but you are actively supporting the far right. All the clues and proof are just in front of you, stop ignoring them.

@[alda@topspicy.social](mailto:alda@topspicy.social): @[baldur@toot.cafe](mailto:baldur@toot.cafe): one of the most knowledgeable person on these subject I've ever met once told me that removing a single image from a site would do much more for performance than any transform you could apply to code, as long as your server were gziping it.

I've found no reason to believe he was wrong.

Those of you who develop any fediverse based project, how do you do to locally test any change you are making that involves federated content?:

(Please give me ideas I don't want to have to program directly in the server 🥲)

Now I have goblin, who looks a bit like tumblr and behaves a bit like tumblr, and I've a post there the is going mildly viral in mastodon (with mildly viral I mean like 50 reblogs and 100 likes in a few hours, nothing crazy), I really realise how great the tumblr model is when you are the OP of a post like that one.

If I had those numbers in tumblr, I would have at least 30-40 reblogs of people adding shit to my own post. People talking in the tags. Building content over my own first stone. Browning the notifications would be interesting and fun.

The notifications of my post in the fedi right now are just about seeing the numbers going up instead of reading interesting takes on my post (kudos to you all who write replies! We all should do that way more often!)

That's why I think we need something that works like that on the fediverse...

Isn't it 100% legally void to say "these are the new terms you agree with, if not, it's on you to say you don't"?