The enshittification of computer repair is happening.
AI has amazingly managed to make repairable computers practically worthless.
The increase in memory and storage pricing is destroying the second-hand market for computing hardware and this makes me sad. I watched a video from someone that runs a repair shop, and this is what's happening:
The memory/storage alone is worth more than the rest of the computer, so people are stripping them out to sell separately.
The second hand market is now flooded with computers that have no memory or storage. Buying new memory or storage to put in these used computers is now more expensive than buying a new computer.
So we now suddenly have a giant e-waste problem PLUS a giant problem for repair shops that want to stay in business.
In the video, he was basically saying that they have to pivot to the only computers that folks aren't stripping RAM and storage out of - computers that have those things soldered on. The irony here is that repair shops now have to ignore the most repairable computers and focus on the least repairable computers instead.
I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.
no search to find like minded people! (even now i don’t see people use hashtags so despite the fact every How To Use Mastodon account says hashtags work for discovery…)
i dunno. i love a lot of the stuff on mastodon but its been so sad to use. like it doesn’t bring joy.
because it wasn’t built for it. it is explicitly designed against it.
i think the main thing that’s upset me about mastodon is Community Takes Work.
and Mastodon’s direction up until now has constantly been: implement technical measures to prevent abuse, but don’t require active work by people or moderators. like create a system that has no discovery, no quoting (despite the fact most quote posts are positive and peppy and excited!!!!) because the Work of Community Building and Protection was not respected. instead we get this… hollow husk
Mastodon is finally gonna provide search (Fediverse Discovery Providers)
ironically (and annoyingly) I can’t find anyone talking about it on mastodon. sigh.
abadidea
Adrian Sanabria
Rob Shearer