Mastodawn

Jake Tyers Apr 27, 2024

myrmepropagandist Apr 25, 2024

I’m very fond of stories in a universe where some advanced, but long vanished, race of enigmatic aliens has left behind strange artifacts: like puzzle boxes or dungeons for our heroes to explore and nearly get killed in. If not aliens let it be a lost human civilization.

I also like to think about those ancient people who built the ‘Temple of Doom’— for all of those traps to work so well after thousands of years they must have been very clever. What was it like to set them up?

Jake Tyers Apr 27, 2024

Swede’s Photographs Apr 26, 2024

Blue Majesty

This blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) appears to be thoroughly in charge of the realm. Oh what is the word I'm looking for to describe this look ... noble, that is it. My dog, Charlie who is a border collie, gets that look whenever he lays quietly with his head raised. Charlie would spoil the moment though by acting silly.

"This common, large songbird is familiar to many people, with its perky crest; blue, white, and black plumage; and noisy calls. Blue Jays are known for their intelligence and complex social systems with tight family bonds. Their fondness for acorns is credited with helping spread oak trees after the last glacial period." - allaboutbirds.org

#photo #photography #photographer #photographylovers #wildlife #nature #bird #birds #birding #birdsofmastodon #birdwatching #birdphotography #BlueJay #corvid #jay

Jake Tyers Apr 26, 2024

Prof. Sam Lawler Apr 26, 2024

It's nice and warm out, and the 2 new baby goats are really healthy, so they got to go out and meet their herdmates. (Their herdmates were EXTREMELY interested in meeting them, hilariously, especially the llama)

Jake Tyers Apr 26, 2024

Gail Parenti Apr 26, 2024

#FensterFreitag The view from my ironing board in #Umbria. I never thought I would miss ironing so much. 😔

Jake Tyers Apr 26, 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

Jake Tyers Apr 26, 2024

Liam Hogan Apr 26, 2024

This moth is camouflaging itself against chrome

Jake Tyers Apr 26, 2024

Lauren Apr 26, 2024

Meet Jimmy and Jimmy. They are two of my many Jimmies. #crickets #insects

Jake Tyers Apr 26, 2024

Plazi Species Apr 26, 2024

#NewSpecies!
New freshwater crab from #india just pinched us:

Ghatiana dvirupa

Treatment: http://treatment.plazi.org/id/6E688161-FFDD-FFC0-51B8-DEF510B0FCEE
Publication: http://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5443.1.6
#Zootaxa #GhatianaDvirupa

#FAIRdata
#science #OA #openaccess #biology #taxonomy #ecology #biodiversity #nature #wildlife #conservation #animals #invertebrates #arthropods #crustacea #crab #freshwater

Ghatiana dvirupa Pati & Bajantri & Hegde 2024, sp. nov. - Plazi TreatmentBank

Jake Tyers Apr 25, 2024

myrmepropagandist Apr 25, 2024

If you like to do paleoart of Theropoda and you have *not* seen videos of baby emus and rheas playing... I think it's an important thing for you to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjMuRtOItUs

Emu baby zoomies!

YouTube

Jake Tyers Apr 25, 2024

federico

Apr 25, 2024

When you reimplement /usr/bin/cat using Python