I propose there is a final step in Cory Doctorow’s enshittification theory, which is one step past the company collecting rents from captured business and customer bases: the CEO leading the enshittification push collecting exorbitant rewards for facilitating the process.

Final Fantasy IX. I was a religious FF player before IX, and loved VIII so much despite all its flaws, because it really went for it with new ideas and atmosphere and the draw junction system which was hackable and broken but really interesting. In many ways the most Final Fantasy of Final Fantasy, despite the widespread hate.

But the devs got so conservative for IX, might as well have been playing Dragon Quest. And the load times and frequency and lack of variety for random encounters was just insurmountably tedious.

I used to spend a lot of time on tech sites, but tech in general has all become such an evil enterprise. I remember back in the '00s looking forward to the next Android update or even back when a new Windows was going to bring improvements (even if just to fix the bugs). Now every update to every service or hardware is enshittification and SaaS.

Bob Odenkirk has never steered us wrong, thanks. I downloaded three copies of this from YouTube in case I forget.

That’s incredibly helpful and informative, a great read. Thanks so much!

That’s a great point.

The Backblaze option is something I’ve seriously considered.

Any reason this person didn’t go with the $99/year personal backup plan? It says “unlimited” and it is for my household only, but maybe I’m missing something about how difficult it is to setup on Unraid or other NAS software. B2’s $6/TB/mo rate would put me at $150/mo which is not great.

For me, I have a bad memory. I might remember a childhood movie (a nickname I give to special Linux ISOs) that I hadn’t even thought of for 10 years and track down a copy, sometimes excavating obscure sources, and that may be hours of one-time inspiration and work repeated many times over. Having a complete list is a good helper, but a full backup of course is best.

Yeah, this is certainly a viable “brute-force”-ish ooption. While I have 56, I’m only using 26 or so. But I’d actually be hesitant to do anything less than a full capacity mirror because I do expect to eventually use this (and more - adding drives to Unraid).

I’ve balked because of cost and upkeep (maintaining the same capacity, additional chances for drive failure, two separate sites I need physical access to with a high bandwidth connection), so I admit I was hoping I was missing an easier option.

Do you have logs or software that keeps track of what you need to redownload? A big stress for me with that method is remembering or keeping track of what is lost when I and software can’t even see the filesystem anymore.

Fascinating. Definitely still prefer the Go for retro futurism, though.

Yeah, my opinion is rule-breaking should be reported. I’ll correct myself: The phrase I should have used is “bad-faith conduct.” Sealioning, LLM-likely text, propaganda posts, troll comments. Things that may not break rules but still are outside the bounds of respectful or legitimate effort.

If people want to use it to express general disapproval, the result will be a reddit-like leveling of commentary and opinion, because the bell curve of opinion will keep narrowing to just the most statistically acceptable content.

But if you insist on using downvotes for just “disapproval,” I’d at least suggest doing it asymmetrically: upvote if you liked a thing at all; downvote only if you absolutely hate it.

I believe that was the rationale for disabling downvotes. Honestly, it was pretty nice. Really, only rule-breaking content should be downvoted in my opinion. But everyone just uses it as a “don’t like” signal, which further marginalizes small/niche posters and communities that aren’t breaking any rules, by suppressing their posts with negative ratios.

Beautiful! Love those billboards. Also reminds me to check out a PSP Go, I bet the slide-out design is cool in person.

PSP is peak retro tech. The disk drive mechanism is so satisfying to open and close, popping out the UMD cartridge…

But yes, Japan preserves their old tech, books and games by default. Used items are almost always immaculately kept and sent cleaned up. It’s pretty reliable to buy used in Japan.

I’m sorry. Recently laid off myself and management avoided directly saying AI was the reason, but other statements (C-suite talking about whether AI can do other work months before the layoffs, in front of me) convince me that was the reasoning.

The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:

CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.

The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he’s met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer’s price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.

PC costs certainly aren’t helping, but there’s an entire cross-section of income and age demographics whose only computing device is and has always only been their phones.

I was curious so I looked it up. This site suggests 1 in 7 households in the US “either lack a computer at home or rely solely on a smartphone for internet access”, heavily weighted to lower-income states like Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana: https://www.benton.org/blog/computer-ownership-and-digital-divide