USA.
You used to be so cool
A butterfly complaining about change is low key really funny
Haha good point
Ughhhh, you used to eat all the leaves with me, what’s this “I want nectar” bullshit fad diet?
Google. It was once a good search engine. Now I find myself getting only the most irrelevant results based on my keywords and more often than not an advanced search turns up nothing of value
Corey Doctorow’s podcast Understood: Who broke the internet? does an amazing job of explaining this. It’s only like 5 episodes and worth everyone’s time.
It went downhill when they got rid of search within results, I don’t know why they did that
Me neither! Really frustrates me when companies remove good features for no apparent reason
They had a reason; money. It’s always about money. The worse the results, the more time you have to spend searching for what you want, the more revenue they can generate.
You can usually trace all decisions a company makes, good or bad, back to money.
deleted by creator
Law. I was pretty hyped up when i went to university to study it, but the more i learnt on the foundations of it and discovered the people it created, the more i hated it. Now I’m doing completely different things, and i’m glad my parents didn’t force me to keep doing it.
I took to kindly, although I was not entirely onboard with, the idea of American exceptionalism.
Police
Cops (1989) ruined america, taught us to trust these ass holes and they royally fucked us over.
Not making light of everything before 1989, but even after all that shit, the show painted them in a decent enough light to where people spill their guts and trust them, just because they have a uniform and they took full advantage of us.
Police propaganda goes way back before Cops (1989). Dragnet started in 1951 and inspired dozens of police procedurals that made cops look like street smart scientists who studied at the intersection of crime and humanity. In reality they are just a disappointment. ACAB
I wasn’t alive during that, but I remember the cop propaganda from the 90s well.
The video game industry. (Indie games are on fire lately, though.)
AA is where it’s at now. There’s still insanely good games coming out, there just not by companies like EA and Activision anymore.
In some ways I think the good development studios are the same size they’ve always been, it’s just that a new class of mainstream games has risen to profit on the masses. If you ignore those, it’s not so bad. At least not until one of the AAA publishers gets their hands on them to ruin the IP and layoff the original devs
A lot of AA studios have been cramming in a ton of microtransactions still, whereas indie is mostly devoid of it, but it definitely gets a lot better the more A’s you remove.
I am screaming at this sentence both internally and externally.
Apple, and a number of the other big tech companies as well. Shit used to be easy to use, repair, customize to your liking, etc.
Now they don’t want you to be able to fix a damn thing, plus all too many services and features and stuff have gone to the subscription model.
Fuck all with that, give us our stuff back and let us just use what we paid for.
Right To Repair!
I’m gonna say Tim Cook.
The way he signaled his authority was by sending out an email to the entire company announcing that he was expanding the company’s match program for employees who wanted part of their paycheck to go to NGOs. I thought that was a classy way of saying, “I’m in charge.” I had a lot of respect for that.
But his leadership with the App Store and regulators has been abysmal. He led Apple to make all the wrong moves, ensuring a (now active) fight with regulators instead of just making some small concessions voluntarily. It was completely unnecessary, but he just couldn’t help feeling entitled for Apple to do whatever it wants to make money. I still believe there are people in leadership positions who would choose to do the right thing, but the buck stops with Cook.
Apple might be worthy of my respect again when he’s gone.
Apple have always done what they wanted. In the Jobs era the biggest Apple Store in the world was on Regents Street in London, and Apple paid the local council vast fines each month because Jobs decided that the required illuminated fire exit signs would have ruined the carefully designed interior.
You have to go back like 30 years to get to a pro-repair Apple
More or less yeah. Though back around 2013 or so, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by how they designed their Mac AIO desktops, they actually were somewhat repair tech friendly.
The front glass was magnetically attached, so it only took a suction cup or two to start disassembly, and basic screwdrivers to remove the screen and get access to the motherboard, hard drive, RAM, DVD drive, etc.
And yes you could replace or upgrade parts as necessary, none of this newer soldered on storage shit they do these days.
I’ve lost a lot of respect for companies that solder on important parts that should rightfully be fairly easy to replace or upgrade.
Plus, now the big companies have taken to forcing encryption on the storage devices, effectively locking the drive to the system. Well isn’t that just cute for the backup operator that’s trying to recover your late grandmother’s family photos…
The original iMac G5 was designed to be repairable by the customer. You could even call Apple support and do free part exchanges under warranty.
Yeah it’s pretty bleak, although there have been some moves towards right to repair in recent years.
Respecting companies is always a bit fraught though. Even the ones you like are only doing it to profit off of your niche. It’s thanks to us that they even have a profitable niche to serve
Liberalism
Institutions. Courts. Media. Religion. Law Enforcement. Politicians.
The institutions are captured. The courts, media, and politicians are corrupt. Bought and paid for. Law Enforcement are just class traitors. The enforcement arm of Capital. Protecting the interests of the ruling class and taking a bludgeon to the people. Religion is a tool of control. Used to control the ignorant and guide their ire.
Ironically this take is entirely self-validating, since this is the primary mechanism for that degradation.
Idk I’m starting to think dystopia began when we figured out agriculture
Most life eats other life to live. It’s been a bad time from the very beginning.
When aristocracy discovered mercantilism and mutilated it into capitalism.
The US. Believed in the “American Dream”, but the more I learned about the country, the more I grew to dislike it. It’s all a facade.
And I used to have a lot of respect for old people, but that also changed. They are just as flawed as the rest of us.
They are just as flawed as the rest of us.
Or even more so! They also know a few social tricks to get what they want. Oh, I’ve seen it. Lol
Old people who are assholes were probably always assholes. They were once young assholes and got older. Conversely, old people who are good, were probably good people when they were younger, they just got old.
Most people don’t stray far from their roots. Few are those who make a meaningful change. Some choose goodness as a goal, some get their asses kicked by life and turn bitter.
I guess the lesson is don’t be an asshole. if you are one, work toward being less of one until you aren’t one anymore. Try not to let life get you down. If all else fails, drugs.
I disagree with this as it’s a prejudgement with little to no knowledge about anybody’s roots, circumstances, history, etc. It categorically puts people into boxes and is the flawed reasoning of racists, anti-semites, homophobes, and so on.
For example, Islamic terrorists aren’t born terrorists. Some of them are born into the wrong family and fed hatred all their lives. Some had to live through hardships you and I can’t even begin to imagine surviving. Others are bullied, ostracised, and made feel worthless only to find belonging and recognition in the only group that would listen to them and make them feel seen.
Ask yourself, if you grew up and had to go through the same things as some people, would you still be the you that typed what you typed?
Yes, some people have always been assholes and never changed, they do exist. I’m not denying that.
This is something that bothers me. Every time something like this come up, there is a non-trivial crowd of people saying things like “no shit. In the right circle, everyone known for a long time”. Often they come with specific anecdotes that should raise all the red flags.
Well, I had no idea. Not a clue. And it’s not like I was not interested. I was fallowing his work, social media… live in general. He was a very close friend with a woman who was vocal about being an abuse victim. Nobody told her?
Even in the power of hindsight, when I was looking for articles or comments from the past, there was not a lot. I found like one, “there is nothing he wouldn’t do to lure a goth girl” (paraphrased), that got zero traction.
If there were signs, why did we let that happen? What can I do, not to fall for something like this again?
The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture
I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire”… then got old enough to see through the nonsense
Grown ups.
vaguely gesturing at everything
