Economic cargo cults

One thing that never ceases to fascinate me:

Small, thoroughly unremarkable companies try to emulate wildly successful ones by copying some tertiary, sometimes even actively annoying property.

Take Apple and its near-religious obsession with packaging. Their boxes are sturdy, elegant, and engineered with the kind of care normally reserved for spacecraft or Swiss watches.

So naturally, companies selling $9.99 gadgets have concluded that this is the secret sauce. Not the product. Not the ecosystem. Not the brand. No, clearly it’s the box.

What they fail to realize is that I keep an iPhone box because the device inside retains resale value. The packaging is essentially a reusable shipping container with aspirations.

The cheap gadget, on the other hand, has the resale value of an expired, half-eaten sandwich. Its box is therefore not a feature but a long-term storage problem. A nearly indestructible one. I suspect some of these packages will outlive civilization and be excavated by future archaeologists, who will conclude that we worshipped mediocre Bluetooth speakers.

Another favorite is the imitation of Google’s customer interaction model, or rather, the strategic absence of it.

Companies observe that Google doesn’t talk to its customers and infer that this must be part of the winning formula. What they miss is that Google succeeds despite this, not because of it. When you control half the internet, you can afford to be aloof. When you sell niche SaaS to 50 customers in a easily offended corner of Germany, less so.

Yet here we are, with companies proudly offering the full “Google experience”: no support, no accountability, and a contact form that disappears into a small, silent void, presumably to be studied later by theoretical physicists.

It’s a bit like copying the table manners of a king while lacking both the kingdom and the food.

I suppose this is the corporate equivalent of a cargo cult: build the runway, light the torches, and hope that success will land.

Do you see those as well?

GitHub is apparently going to start using your data for model training unless you intentionally opt out of it: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy/

It looks like this is mostly just limited to interactions with Copilot itself, but I'd turn it off anyway just to be safe...

I think that free as in freedom doesn't imply it has no cost

you should pay for software you use, especially if its open source

The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.

Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.

LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.

Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.

Mastodon is 100% the early days of social media all over. Some of you will already be familiar with this story.

My weather station (a very nice Netatmo that has served very well) crapped out after nearly 10 years of excellent service. I asked for recommendations here for a new station that would play nicely with #HomeAssistant, and hopefully, also HomeKit. I received *many* recommendations, with Ecowitt (and the brands it manufactures for) taking the lead.

A connection on here offered me their *unopened* Ecowitt weather station for a very generous price. It arrived yesterday, and I set it up, and it's already doing a great job. Works offline, talks to Home Assistant without any problems. I just need to do a couple of bits of configuration jiggery-pokery and it will pass data to HomeKit.

This is very much how things were when I first joined Twitter in 2007. In spite of attempts at #enshittification of everything, the #fediverse is putting up a good fight.

May your day online be as satisfying as mine was yesterday.

LATER EDIT: I’ve been thinking, and I do realise this good experience isn’t necessarily what happens for everyone. It’s still the case that too many good people don’t find a welcoming place here, especially if they are queer or of color. If this is you, know that I see you, and that I will always try to be welcoming and listening, even if you have things to say that bring me discomfort.

I made this for us(my bf and for myself) for valentine day! It was cropped to be two pfp.
Art and characters by me

#wolf #cute #fursona #love #mastodonartist #mastodonart #wolfart #cuteart #wolflove #valentinedaysart