Another version of this idea that's been around for a while is CherryTree. I would use it a lot more, but there's not really a way to use your notebook on mobile due to it using a special database format that nobody cares about. I love the idea of this program's data instead being a regular folder of regular plaintext files that you can do anything with. In a perfect world everything would be like this, where your files are just your files, and client programs just help you use those files in more effective ways.
>What won't help is complaining that the largely free products we get don't work the way we want them to.
This makes no sense and seems bad-faith on multiple levels.
My way of detecting it has become less about patterns and cliches and more about the content of the text itself. The article gives many examples of AI generated restaurant descriptions and while they are written very similarly, the bigger problem is that the text has no actual meaning in the first place. It's just pointless descriptions of what a restaurant is, but written in different cliched ways. A human could rewrite the same content to not use cliches and it would still clearly be AI due to how worthless it is.
I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.
Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.
This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics.
There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts.
It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery.
Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better.
Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.
Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
Is probably the Sputnik though commenters mistake it for backhanded-diss of Yandex. Conjures an alternative universe where Russian potatocraft lands live lobsters on Mars before Elon's spacesedan reaches Mars orbit.
I am intrigued by the possibility of minimalist defo of "enshittification" that tweaks "the purpose of a system is what it does".
"The purpose of a search engine system is to keep you searching" etc
I think this way about Marginalia Search. It's just a search engine someone threw up for the sake of making a search engine and by the sake of merely not being crap it's actually pretty decent if the thing you're looking for is in its index set (lots of tech stuff). I think the most impactful thing is that it doesn't index seoslop.
The main reason for them being kittens is to incentivize valuing the astronauts lives without forcing a gameplay related penalty for killing or losing them. The disposability of astronauts is something the devs of this game think was a mistake in KSP. But at the same it's not a game about forcing the player to behave a certain way, so making them kittens is the middle ground.
What disposability? Kerbals were never disposable! If you crash your little green astronauts on some moon or planet, you're supposed to send a rescue mission after them. And should that rescue fail too, stranding more Kerbals, you just keep launching more rescue missions, until you successfully establish a colony :).
It has certainly had that effect on me. When I heard that notepad++ was being flagged for something somewhere by someone, all I thought was "so they forgot to pay a protection fee?" Genuinely I thought it was being brought it up just as an indication that the developer may be absent or asleep at the wheel. There is literally no association in my brain between one of these warnings and the concept of software being compromised or not.
And I've seen other less tech inclined people click right through these without a moment's thought. They think it's just one of those things computers have to complain about.
It's weird how it does seem to do something even though it doesn't do anything. You can see the search indexer running and it's pulling a varying amount of power towards some kind of goal but nobody seems to know what it is. Does it build an index that always corrupts? Is it in a loop of crashing and restarting itself? And it's been like this my whole life practically.
It really shows how anything can be normalized if it goes on long enough.
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