NatalieSome days, I am like an onion. Other days, I am like a prickly pear. Today, I think I am both.
I just saw an article from the NYT talking about how Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, is trying to guilt-trip Google Gemini employees into sacrificing their work-life balance to chase after his infinite growth delusion (he claims it is to “turbocharge” the company’s efforts to “win” the “artificial general intelligence” race… but let’s be real here…)
My cynicism is perma high at this point.
Required reading: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2023/10/18/the-ugly-manifesto-behind-the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
The ugly manifesto behind the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” : Global Nerdy
Want to improve the title of Marc Andreessen’s screechy screed, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto? Easy. Just replace the misused word “optimist” with the more accurate “fascist.” It reads like a supervillain monologue From the opening sentence, “we are being lied to,” the essay takes bigger and bigger leaps into supervillain monologuing, with lines like “we are […]
That awkward moment when you fall into a rabbit hole reading about something cringe AF that happened years ago, and then you begin to question… certain things.
Holy crap. Not surprised, but where do we go from here now?
“What started as US election interference has now spread to other countries. We're currently doing the same thing in Germany and other European nations. The damage we've done is immeasurable, and I don't know if it can ever be fixed. People don't know what's real anymore, and that's exactly what we wanted.”
https://theconcernedbird.substack.com/p/elon-musks-and-xs-role-in-2024-election
Oh, also yet another reason why I will always side-eye the majority of corporate mergers & acquisitions because—& I’ve seen this firsthand unfortunately—good shit that gets acquired by bigger corporate assholes ends up getting neglected (as well as the poor souls being acquired) and mothballed to utter dogshite
But, that one is a story for another day, outside, under some lovely trees, over some 🍃 and/or 🍻
#PlannedObsolescence #BadDistractions #FuckProprietaryBullshit #FuckCorporateAssholes
Also, yet another reminder that open source solutions > proprietary bullshit too.
#PlannedObsolescence #BadDistractions #FuckProprietaryBullshit #FuckYouGoogle
Now I’m just sitting here asking myself… do I really wanna spend XYZ amount of time trying to read thru the replies in that forum post to figure out whatever might have happened to that functionality within the ~2 or so years I hadn’t been logging into the app?
I swear man, that scale & the functionalities on the Fitbit app/website like the Guest weigh-ins & the ability to re-assign them was so good ‘til Google acquired Fitbit 🙄
For context: I’ve a 10+ year old Fitbit scale, and back in the day on the Fitbit app—as recently as ~2 years ago—you could see Guest weigh-ins on the scale. This was super helpful for not only myself and my partner, but also for monitoring our cat’s weight whenever he’d go sit on the scale. “Oh, who is that 15 lb Guest? Oh, that’s just Boone 🐈⬛”.