Brewchin

Ever seen Stripes, the '80s action comedy film with Bill Murray and other notables?

There’s a scene in it that I think of every time this kind of story crops up, where you have over-equipped and under-educated people who are trained to think that everyone’s the enemy, and so prioritise their blood thirst and fear over everything else:

“All I know is I finally get to kill somebody!”

Their actions aren’t about right/wrong or just/unjust, but that they were let off the leash to do what they have been conditioned to do.

So you get people calling in hoaxes to police forces who send militarised forces to raid grannies, young children, whomever. It’s about the drama and lulz. Objectively horrifying.

What’s the point? They know customers are full of piss and wind, threatening blue murder while doing absolutely nothing beyond jaw flapping. (Same with gamers).

Amazon’s service model, for example, is to twiddle the knobs to just under the point where the majority ragequit: the sweet spot of maximum profit right now. Everyone else is copying it.

And the sweet spot moves - probably like boiling a frog. A major player does something many hate, but not everyone/enough and those people live with it. Then it becomes the new normal. Twiddle the knob. Rinse and repeat.

As long as they don’t enshittify the mobile apps and browser extensions, I’m neither surprised nor concerned. Vaultwarden exists.

And if they do ruin the client end, I expect third-party alternative clients, or a wholly new alternative, will appear soon enough.

(Yes, yes, “b-but KeePass!” folks… I’ve been there.)

I see! Thanks for taking the time to respond. It’s useful to have usage examples.

Never let anyone tell you that you’re “having fun the wrong way”. 😄

WTF is Mixtape in this context? In my mind, it is (many years ago) tracks recorded from LPs, 45 singles or even CDs onto cassette…

Oh, like BOINC? I loved SETI@home and the protein folding projects for medical research!

Wait, you mean mandatory, secret distributed computing just to offload expense from an insatiable mega-conglomerate to its users products? GTFOooooooooo…

I hate this timeline.

Orly? You don’t say.

The sooner UK PLC gets this into their thick, ideological skulls the better. 👀

I’ve been a (cautious, because not OSS and the inevitable enshittification timer) fan of Obsidian for years, and a data scientist friend switched from Notion to Logseq and raves about it. Is it that good?

This dystopia is sofa king boring.

For those who haven’t read it: it’s Stripe, their payment processor, behind this. Kickstarter isn’t doing a Tumblr; they’re just handling it like amateurs, rather than just yeeting those puritanical morons.

I think my irony meter just broke. The company that takes freely published papers* and paywalls them for extortionate profit is mad that that someone else is making money off free content?

I propose a trial by mortal combat. It’s the only logical solution.

*You’ll be hard pressed to find a published researcher who thinks well of the Elsevier distribution monopoly, and it’s even harder to find one that won’t send you a PDF copy for free if you just ask for it.