Welcome to today’s proof that the government “controls the horizontal and the vertical,” as the old TV show, the Outer Limits, used to say. I have all of this crap turned off. They pushed it through to everyone in the country anyway.
Take this as a reminder that every place you go, every text you send, every phone call you make, every email you send or receive, every web site you visit, every social media post, every thing you purchase by credit card… it’s all tracked and recorded. All someone in the bowels of the FBI or CIA has to do is put your name into a web app, and they can see it all, no warrant required. Edward Snowden told us about these systems a decade ago, and nothing has changed, except that he now has to spend the rest of his life in hiding.
That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block.
Internally, every powerful person at Google is committed to ensuring that their rival-peers don’t stake out fresh territory as their own. The one thing every top exec can agree on is that the one guy who’s trying to expand the company into an adjacent line of business must not succeed.
What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get.
Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible.
That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits.
I don’t know if I’ve read a clearer description of the things I’ve seen in 30 years of (mostly) Fortune 250 corporations. Over the course of my career, about a half dozen of my successful software projects — with many happy users — have been sabotaged because they made someone else look bad, or just had the unacceptable side-effect of making me look like I knew what I was doing. Seriously. I could write a book.
Hey, I got paid, and have had a comfy ride along the way. What could I expect as a developer toiling away in the bowels of some faceless blue chip corporation? The only thing the kind of companies I have worked for could offer would be a role with more responsibility but no more pay. Uh… pass.
What really frustrates me in all of this is the tireless effort and work to make sure that software never actually improves workflows or processes for the company, so that eternal middle managers can preserve their tiny little fiefdoms. Sure, we’ll make some software to do something, but by the time the managers “manage,” the people who don’t do the job write the specs, the outsourced programmers who don’t understand anything about the process write the application, the years go by, and the poor schmucks who have to use the thing sign off on the acceptance testing, just to move on, everyone is left with a piece of crap they can’t stand to use, and they wonder why anyone bothered. They’d have been better served just continuing to use horrific, shared Excel spreadsheets.
Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.
I never want to hear another word about what else Elon Musk could have done to supposedly improve the world with the money he spent buying Twitter.
Likewise Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.
Since the 80’s, American corporations have learned to toe the precise line that will allow them to point fingers at their “competitors” in court to wriggle out of the en vogue legal definition of monopoly, but it’s all such a naked joke. The app stores are the same way. It is a certainty that very-high level execs at Apple and Google have concluded to keep their fees the same, so that the market for app development doesn’t actually work, and is anything but “free.”
This constant harping on electronics power consumption is really annoying. These things cost $20-$30 of electricity for an entire year. To put that in perspective, that’s about 2 lunches at a fast food joint, for an entire year. Saving a buck or two here makes no meaningful sense, especially if the unit ever degrades performance to achieve it. Don’t brag to me that the processor does 45 Tflops (or whatever), and then throttle it to say that the new consoles are “green.” Given that Microsoft TURNS BLUETOOTH OFF AFTER A MINUTE on Windows 11 by default, you’ll excuse me if I don’t trust them not to do that.
The bottom is line is that they’re just refreshing the SKU to generate some buzz and try to juice sales, because they’re running third in a three-man race.
On Sunday, I had a bad migraine, so I literally sat in my recliner and played ESO for, like, 12 hours. During this time, I…
Did writs on 7 toons.
Ran all the surveys and maps I had. (About 15.)
Completed all the master writs I had. (About 12.)
Dug up every antiquity I had a lead for. (About 30.)
Moved into the house you get from the Northern Elsewyr missions, and did a little decorating.
Bought all the storage boxes you can get, and all the crafting stations. (Using up almost all my writ vouchers.)
Finished learning all but the 4 most expensive recipes.
Bought enough motifs to complete several more lines. (I still need 13 more for Master Crafter.)
Created 3 more toons. (Was making an even 10, one for each race, then realized that you can actually have 20 on one account now, if you pay for the slots.)
Did HOURS of inventory management. (Can’t quite bring myself to de-con old meta gear I still have.)
Ran my Arcanist through a random dungeon and all 3 pledges.
Yeah, it was a long day, but the weird part was that I could have played more. I had a great time. I finally have a couple of toons that can do vet trial-level damage numbers, and it feels like I’m finally freed to enjoy everything the game has to offer. And, sure, it’s only the new mythics like the Oakensoul Ring and Velothi’s Amulet that have allowed me to do break into this tier, but I don’t really care. It seems pretty obvious that this is the reason those items were added into the game: to allow people like me — on the DPS bubble — to access end-game content. I don’t really want to run vet trials, as it usually takes hours of concentration and coordination, but it’s nice to know I can. One of these days, I’ll sign up and give it a try in my main guild.
I still don’t really want anything to do with PVP, though I have a bunch of siege-related items clogging up my bank. It intrigues me to find a good PVP guild, and just run with a huge pack to 1) use that stuff up, 2) earn some Alliance Points, and 3) finally get all the skill points related to PVP, and finish the Assault and Support skill lines.
Investors have become more prevalent in Canada’s housing market, accounting for 30 per cent of all residential real estate purchases in the first part of this year, according to new data.
First they came for corporations, and I said nothing, because I didn’t own a corporation.
Then they came for retail chains, and I said nothing, because I didn’t own a retail chain.
Then they came for franchises, and I said nothing, because I was not a franchisee.
Then they came for housing, and now I can’t afford to buy a house.
Private equity and investment banks have been buying up literally everything over the past 40 years, driving up prices, keeping all the profits for the so-called “1%”, pushing workers into government assistance, and forcing our civilization back into a modern form of feudalism. Will there ever come a day when we can get our governments to break them up, and recreate the actual “free” markets that capitalism was supposed to based on?
Bad news: your car is a spy. Every major car brand failed a recent privacy and security test from Mozilla. You’re probably driving around in a “privacy nightmare” that may collect information as sensitive as your race, health status, and sexual activity.
This is not just about selling ads this time. This is about actual surveillance and — eventually — control. The governments of the world will make this a requirement, and make circumvention of it as illegal as copyright infringement.
In the US, the government will throw up its hands and say, “Don’t blame us! It’s the “free” market, and this must be what people want!” Meanwhile all the automakers will collude to do it, so that you can’t buy a car without it. Then they will collect the data in their “private,” “secure” servers, and either let the NSA have it, or not resist when they inevitably tap into it.
Some people will think this is a good thing, because then we could, say, throw literally everyone who was at J6 in prison! But then a conservative government gets thrust into power, and now they can go after everyone who was present at a BLM protest that turned violent (but I repeat myself). It is an evergreen human truth: Whatever power “we” let “them” have will eventually be used against “us.”
I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge.
When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. “You know, ‘Uranus?'” Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing on the bus. Nope. Nothing. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us.
This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.
Technical people like me “govern” our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping them from happening again. Even after 30 years of “being on the internet,” I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one show up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.
The people who use Windows because it’s the cheap, default choice are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn’t be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.
It doesn’t matter that we get upset about this. It’s already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The incentives just don’t align between users of Windows and Microsoft’s management. You’d expect that they would care about what “power users” like developers would think, so I guess it’s telling how small that community of users is compared to the rest of the people who use Windows.
The real surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.
A couple years ago, I broke free of playing Elder Scrolls Online, for the second time. I had quit before, in frustration of not being good enough to run the end-game content. It annoyed me that there were parts of a game I was paying for on a monthly basis that I effectively could never take advantage of, so I quit.
Then I picked it back up again for a little while, mentally bargaining with myself that this situation was acceptable because there is so much to do in the game besides the vet-level dungeons and trials. But, as a massively-multiplayer online game, it tends to suck you in, and dominate your leisure time, so I decided to quit again. And, since ESO was the only thing I was using it for, I literally threw my 12-year-old, Athlon-XP-based dinosaur of a PC in the trash, as a sort of “burn the ships” move to prevent going back to playing it. Playing ESO on a Mac is basically a non-starter due to crappy performance, so it wasn’t a realistic option.
Then I developed a medical problem that causes me to live with constant pain in my abdomen. That’s a whole book’s worth of another story, but the relevance to this story is that I now spend basically all my extra time playing games. I mean, I was a pretty heavy gamer before, but this is a whole other level.
Bored with everything else, I tried going back to Fallout 4. I couldn’t stand it on the PS5, because it only runs 30 FPS. Bethesda recently released a refreshed version of Skyrim on PS5 with all the Creator Club content, and running at 60 FPS, and it was like a whole, new game. I replayed it all over again, and love it. But I can’t go back to 30 FPS for Fallout.
I decided to buy an Xbox Series X, for several reasons, and waited for Starfield. Then, after the Redfall launch fiasco, Bethesda admitted that Starfield would also be capped at 30 FPS on console. Like I said, I can’t go back to 30 FPS.
So I sold the X, and bought a new PC.
I know, I know.
This one is a loss-leader from Microcenter. Realistically, it’s a $1,000 build, which you can get for $700.
The amount of friction from trying to run Windows again is astounding, and everyone just glosses over it because it’s so pervasive. I’ll be complaining about these things in later posts.
I went to the new MicroCenter in Indy, and was immediately confronted with this when I walked through the front door. Is this the checkout line? Do I have to grab tickets to inventory, and get them fulfilled at this counter?
No. I asked a girl standing close by what I was looking at, and she said some “YouTubers” were live-streaming doing builds. Sheesh. Seriously? What’s hard about building a computer, especially these days? I’d like to see these guys navigate the dip switches and slots and interrupts we used to have to deal with.
When I checked out, the streamers had people whooping and hollering for some reason. I just wanted to go home, where I spent the next 4 hours configuring what I bought. Story forthcoming…
Every day, it seems, I bang my head on the wall. Today? Tower — a normally-great git frontend on Mac — decided to throw up its hands and refuse to work on my work laptop, running Windows, of course. It’s trying to use AskPass.exe, which doesn’t exist. Did it get cleaned out by my company’s “security” scanning? I mean, there are only about 30 different scripts that run on login, to make sure I don’t do anything they don’t want me to do. Did one of them do something here? Why would that file go missing, all of a sudden?
So I go to Tower’s over-engineered, Apple-product-pages-inspired mess of a web site, and try to download an installer. No, instead, I get the same single run-in-place executable 3-times. Do they not have an installed version any more?
Is this a problem with git? Did git for Windows take a dump?
Is this even a problem with that file being gone, or is this a spurious error message? Lots of Stack Overflow questions seem to indicate that this happens with Visual Studio, but the file reference is clearly not in any Visual Studio installation location. It’s obviously trying to reference something in Tower’s files. And, of course, I can’t find a single reference in Google to this. Once again, I’m the only person in the entire world with a particular technical problem.
So I sent a request for support from Tower, then installed GitHub Desktop, got my new branch pulled, and moved on. But, dang.
Why does this stuff need to be like this? And why does it need to be like this so often?
I was born at the perfect time to pursue a career in full-stack software development. I grew up programming 8-bit computers, then learned Unix in college. I entered the workforce at the emergence of Windows for Workgroups and Linux, and I'll be retiring right about the time the AI's make me redundant. Also, the year Social Security goes broke.
