Mastodawn

Cristiano Breuel Aug 3, 2024

Orwell Was Right Jul 31, 2024

The government did not want to give out voting records, they refused. But 81% were recovered and uploaded to the internet, I have the record of my table. There were 65 in favor of Maduro and 364 for Edmundo! The number matches what was announced in my center!

I can now confirm, with evidence, that there was electoral fraud in Venezuela! If you see this post, help me by giving it a #boost so that it reaches more people and the truth is known!

https://resultadosconvzla.com/mesa/13472/13360

#Venezuela #Democracy

Cristiano Breuel Aug 1, 2024

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rhempel Aug 1, 2024

@grimalkina I struggle mightily to help develop this fundamental skill in teams.

It's hard to get people to take their hands off their keyboards so that they can stop and think hard about what we *know* for sure about the problem.

Evidence based reasoning has a flip side - that's writing down somewhere what evidence you have, and then collaborate to decide on the next experiment that gives you additional data points to narrow the scope of the problem.

We need to mentor this valuable skill.

Cristiano Breuel Jul 31, 2024

Per Axbom Jul 31, 2024

Organisations when they hire consultancy services: “We need a company credit check and report to ensure your finances are stable and that this will be a sustainable relationship.”

Organisations when deciding on using OpenAI: “We understand you spend $700,000 per day and need $5 billion a year to survive as a company, which is way more than any company has ever raised in history. Please take our money. We will integrate your tool into all our tools now. The lottery is our favorite way of investing in our own future.”

Cristiano Breuel Jul 30, 2024

DW Innovation Jul 30, 2024

"The finding is a measure of the extent to which many, many users hate #TikTok and #Instagram, even though they feel compelled to use them. To make clear the bizarre nature of his finding, Bursztyn drew the conference’s attention to another product, a refrigerator. Could you imagine, he asked, 60% of refrigerator owners saying they wished fridges didn’t exist?"

https://theconversation.com/would-you-pay-to-quit-tiktok-and-instagram-youd-be-surprised-how-many-would-235180

#socialmedia

Would you pay to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would

Even though social media is free to use, research found many US university students would pay to quit it – especially TikTok – if they could beat their fear of missing out.

The Conversation

Cristiano Breuel Jul 21, 2024

Dare Obasanjo Jul 21, 2024

There is a weirdly racist trend where people blame hypothetical minorities when systems fail because management cuts corners. We saw it with the Boeing door collapse and now with the Crowdstrike crash.

There is no mythical "DEI engineer" doing sloppy work at these companies.

It's down to leadership cutting corners to make a buck. A software update causing a crash that takes down all of your customers is due to inadequate testing. It's not because some anonymous minority wrote the code.

Cristiano Breuel Jun 21, 2024

Ólafur Waage Jun 20, 2024

I'm collecting a list of all the breakup movies where they only made one movie.
Like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Break-Up"

Yeah, it's a non-relational no-sequel database.

Cristiano Breuel Jun 15, 2024

Dare Obasanjo Jun 14, 2024

Tesla shareholder meeting this week.

Cristiano Breuel Jun 5, 2024

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Cristiano Breuel Jun 5, 2024

@stux This is what I pay my internet bill for

Cristiano Breuel Jun 4, 2024

stux⚡️Jun 4, 2024

Time to clean the world!

Cristiano Breuel Apr 27, 2024

javi Apr 23, 2024

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.

The Man Who Killed Google Search

Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At