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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Cloudburst

Enshittification isn’t inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking interoperability.

First we allowed companies to buy up their competitors. Google is the shining example here: having made one good product (search), they then fielded an essentially unbroken string of in-house flops, but it didn’t matter, because they were able to buy their way to glory: video, mobile, ad-tech, server management, docs, navigation…They’re not Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, making up for their lack of invention by buying out everyone else:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

But this acquisition-fueled growth isn’t unique to tech. Every administration since Reagan (but not Biden! more on this later) has chipped away at antitrust enforcement, so that every sector has undergone an orgy of mergers, from athletic shoes to sea freight, eyeglasses to pro wrestling:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/09/the-importance-of-competition-for-the-american-economy/

But tech is different, because digital is flexible in a way that analog can never be. Tech companies can “twiddle” the back-ends of their clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal you’re getting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

To make things worse, users are banned from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never for them. Reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — these can all be blocked with legal threats and suits and even criminal sanctions, even if they’re being done for legitimate purposes:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enhittification isn’t inevitable but if we let companies buy all their competitors, if we let them twiddle us with every hour that God sends, if we make it illegal to twiddle back in self-defense, we will get twiddled to death. When a company can operate without the discipline of competition, nor of privacy law, nor of labor law, nor of fair trading law, with the US government standing by to punish any rival who alters the logic of their service, then enshittification is the utterly foreseeable outcome.

To understand how our technology gets distorted by these policy choices, consider “The Cloud.” Once, “the cloud” was just a white-board glyph, a way to show that some part of a software’s logic would touch some commodified, fungible, interchangeable appendage of the internet. Today, “The Cloud” is a flashing warning sign, the harbinger of enshittification.

When your image-editing tools live on your computer, your files are yours. But once Adobe moves your software to The Cloud, your critical, labor-intensive, unrecreatable images are purely contingent. At at time, without notice, Adobe can twiddle the back end and literally steal the colors out of your own files:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The finance sector loves The Cloud. Add “The Cloud” to a product and profits (money you get for selling something) can turn into rents (money you get for owning something). Profits can be eroded by competition, but rents are evergreen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

No wonder The Cloud has seeped into every corner of our lives. Remember your first iPod? Adding music to it was trivial: double click any music file to import it into iTunes, then plug in your iPod and presto, synched! Today, even sophisticated technology users struggle to “side load” files onto their mobile devices. Instead, the mobile duopoly — Apple and Google, who bought their way to mobile glory and have converged on the same rent-seeking business practices, down to the percentages they charge — want you to get your files from The Cloud, via their apps. This isn’t for technological reasons, it’s a business imperative: 30% of every transaction that involves an app gets creamed off by either Apple or Google in pure rents:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

And yet, The Cloud is undeniably useful. Having your files synch across multiple devices, including your collaborators’ devices, with built-in tools for resolving conflicting changes, is amazing. Indeed, this feat is the holy grail of networked tools, because it’s how programmers write all the software we use, including software in The Cloud.

If you want to know how good a tool can be, just look at the tools that toolsmiths use. With “source control” — the software programmers use to collaboratively write software — we get a very different vision of how The Cloud could operate. Indeed, modern source control doesn’t use The Cloud at all. Programmers’ workflow doesn’t break if they can’t access the internet, and if the company that provides their source control servers goes away, it’s simplicity itself to move onto another server provider.

This isn’t The Cloud, it’s just “the cloud” — that whiteboard glyph from the days of the old, good internet — freely interchangeable, eminently fungible, disposable and replaceable. For a tool like git, Github is just one possible synchronization point among many, all of which have a workflow whereby programmers’ computers automatically make local copies of all relevant data and periodically lob it back up to one or more servers, resolving conflicting edits through a process that is also largely automated.

There’s a name for this model: it’s called “Local First” computing, which is computing that starts from the presumption that the user and their device is the most important element of the system. Networked servers are dumb pipes and dumb storage, a nice-to-have that fails gracefully when it’s not available.

The data structures of source-code are among the most complicated formats we have; if we can do this for code, we can do it for spreadsheets, word-processing files, slide-decks, even edit-decision-lists for video and audio projects. If local-first computing can work for programmers writing code, it can work for the programs those programmers write.

Local-first computing is experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Wired, Gregory Barber traces the history of the movement, starting with the French computer scientist Marc Shapiro, who helped develop the theory of “Conflict-Free Replicated Data” — a way to synchronize data after multiple people edit it — two decades ago:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/

Shapiro and his co-author Nuno Preguiça envisioned CFRD as the building block of a new generation of P2P collaboration tools that weren’t exactly serverless, but which also didn’t rely on servers as the lynchpin of their operation. They published a technical paper that, while exiting, was largely drowned out by the release of GoogleDocs (based on technology built by a company that Google bought, not something Google made in-house).

Shapiro and Preguiça’s work got fresh interest with the 2019 publication of “Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud,” a viral whitepaper-cum-manifesto from a quartet of computer scientists associated with Cambridge University and Ink and Switch, a self-described “industrial research lab”:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/static/local-first.pdf

The paper describes how its authors — Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan — prototyped and tested a bunch of simple local-first collaboration tools built on CFRD algorithms, with the goal of “network optional…seamless collaboration.” The results are impressive, if nascent. Conflicting edits were simpler to resolve than the authors anticipated, and users found URLs to be a good, intuitive way of sharing documents. The biggest hurdles are relatively minor, like managing large amounts of change-data associated with shared files.

Just as importantly, the paper makes the case for why you’d want to switch to local-first computing. The Cloud is not reliable. Companies like Evernote don’t last forever — they can disappear in an eyeblink, and take your data with them:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23789012/evernote-layoff-us-staff-bending-spoons-note-taking-app

Google isn’t likely to disappear any time soon, but Google is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA program (“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further”) and notorious for shuttering its products, even beloved ones like Google Reader:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

And while the authors don’t mention it, Google is also prone to simply kicking people off all its services, costing them their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, document archives and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

There is enormous enthusiasm among developers for local-first application design, which is only natural. After all, companies that use The Cloud go to great lengths to make it just “the cloud,” using containerization to simplify hopping from one cloud provider to another in a bid to stave off lock-in from their cloud providers and the enshittification that inevitably follows.

The nimbleness of containerization acts as a disciplining force on cloud providers when they deal with their business customers: disciplined by the threat of losing money, cloud companies are incentivized to treat those customers better. The companies we deal with as end-users know exactly how bad it gets when a tech company can impose high switching costs on you and then turn the screws until things are almost-but-not-quite so bad that you bolt for the doors. They devote fantastic effort to making sure that never happens to them — and that they can always do that to you.

Interoperability — the ability to leave one service for another — is technology’s secret weapon, the thing that ensures that users can turn The Cloud into “the cloud,” a humble whiteboard glyph that you can erase and redraw whenever it suits you. It’s the greatest hedge we have against enshittification, so small wonder that Big Tech has spent decades using interop to clobber their competitors, and lobbying to make it illegal to use interop against them:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

Getting interop back is a hard slog, but it’s also our best shot at creating a new, good internet that lives up the promise of the old, good internet. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I set out a program fro disenshittifying the internet:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The book is up for pre-order on Kickstarter now, along with an independent, DRM-free audiobooks (DRM-free media is the content-layer equivalent of containerized services — you can move them into or out of any app you want):

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Meanwhile, Lina Khan, the FTC and the DoJ Antitrust Division are taking steps to halt the economic side of enshittification, publishing new merger guidelines that will ban the kind of anticompetitive merger that let Big Tech buy its way to glory:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/biden-administration-corporate-merger-antitrust-guidelines/674779/

The internet doesn’t have to be enshittified, and it’s not too late to disenshittify it. Indeed — the same forces that enshittified the internet — monopoly mergers, a privacy and labor free-for-all, prohibitions on user-side twiddling — have enshittified everything from cars to powered wheelchairs. Not only should we fight enshittification — we must.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad- free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

—

cdsessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #web3 #darth vader mba #conflict-free replicated data #CRDT #computer science #saas #Mark McGranaghan #Adam Wiggins #evernote #git #local-first computing #the cloud #cloud computing #enshittification #technological self-determination #Martin Kleppmann #Peter van Hardenberg

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sasquapossum · 5 months

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"These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further.""

Another banger from Cory Doctorow, about companies using "software updates" to remove features or content you had already paid for.

#tech #copyright #drm #corporate shenanigans #capitalism #enshittification #but i repeat myself

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ttravaux · 4 years

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Reply 1988: Tebak-tebak dalam Babak

Lima malam terakhir ini saya habiskan nonton Reply 1988 (plus malam keenam untuk menuliskannya), drakor yang mungkin digadang-gadang sebagai magnum opus baik oleh pegiat maupun yang cuma lewat. Durasi dan jumlah episode dalam satu season-nya agak bikin masalah. Preferensi tontonan akhir-akhir ini yang tidak padat isi bikin saya makin sulit nonton yang panjang-panjang tanpa keburu didistraksi chat dan Candy Crush; menonton mba-mba jualan properti di Los Angeles hampir gak perlu buka mata.

Tapi toh di tiap harinya saya berhasil nonton hingga empat episode. Di titik itu belum ada yang spesial namun saya gak boleh bohong kalau daya tarik drakor memang pada momen kesem-kesem dari detil-detil kecil ekspresi cinta-cintaan pada seseorang. Format yang seru bikin saya loncat-loncat mikir scene-scene dan pembicaraan yang kira-kira bisa jadi petunjuk menyelesaikan permainan: siapa suami Deok-sun di antara empat teman cowoknya, geng anak gang Ssangmun yang kalau pindah waktu dan tempat jadi sekarang dan Jaktim akan rajin bikin konten Instagram belajar bahasa Bekasi sama tukang siomay.

Kalau dikait-kaitkan dengan tebak-tebakan masa depan, jangan sampailah Reply 1988 ini disamakan dengan himym. Reply punya cerita yang kaya, batang pohon yang dicipta menancap dan tumbuh kuat, daun dan rerumput di sekelilingnya mengisi (bukan menambal) di sana-sini sehingga pohon itu rimbun dan bisa jadi tempatmu mencari udara. Di beberapa karakter, saya menemukan berlapis-lapis kepribadian, sama halnya dengan penceritaan yang dikuliti pelan-pelan. Interaksi dengan penonton terbangun karena saya dan kamu pasti kebingungan, berusaha melengkapi sendiri cerita dan deskripsi yang bolong-bolong dengan siapa yang saat itu muncul di kepala.

Reply jadi bukan sekedar cerita cinta-cintaan lagi, namun ia adalah cerita cinta-cintaan ditambah cerita persahabatan ditambah cerita-cerita di keluargamu yang bisa kamu sambungkan ke kehidupanmu sendiri. Ia membaca dan menerjemah pola-pola asuh dan interaksi dengan konteks yang tidak utopis sehingga walaupun ikatanmu belum tentu persis sama, bisa tetap kamu identifikasi sendiri siapa Bo-ra, siapa Jung-bong, dan siapa geng ibu-ibu suportif di komplekmu.

Berat rasanya, selama menunggu mood datang untuk akhirnya menonton, menghindarkan diri dari keinginan menelisik alur dan ending. Lima tahunan setelah Reply 1988 rilis, saya harus tepuk tangan untuk diri sendiri karena betulan gak tahu apa yang akan terjadi sepanjang 20 episode ini, saya bahkan masih berusaha membangun cerita sendiri hingga ujung acara. Rasanya seperti berusaha hidup tahunan di dalam gua, di mana kamu sama sekali gak nyangka Darth Vader itu adalah bapaknya Luke; alias susah!

Perjalanan nonton saya pasti gak seberapa spiritualnya kalau dibandingkan teman-teman yang nonton saat drama masih berjalan. Namun saya yakin kita semua sampai pada tujuh menit akhir yang sama. Saya gak bisa lupa perasaan setiap detiknya berjalan, setiap itu pula merinding menjalar pelan-pelan ke seluruh tubuh saya. Melihat rumah-rumah kosong di gang Ssangmun dengan narasi hangat serta shot yang bikin kita bukan lagi mengintip, tapi dihujami bertubi-tubi dengan memori, jadi salah satu experience badaniah yang baru buat saya. Belum sempat sembuh, saya dibuat kaget lagi. Semua menengadah ke arah saya, lalu kamera dengan cepat berputar lagi mengaburkan prediksi saya bahwa lakon yang ditampilkan cuma bakal jadi pengulangan. Saat empat dari lima pergi, satu sengaja ditransfer ke masa lalu, dengan cermat dijadikan transisi untuk memori yang lain lagi.

Untuk tujuh menit akhir ini, saya harus merayakan. Hanya untuk tujuh menit akhir ini, semua harus nonton dan ikutan. Berpetualang bareng melihat potongan kehidupan di 1988 dan siapa tahu mengambil pelajaran---sambil berusaha menutup diri dari spoiler, untuk sensasi tambahan! Tangerang subuh-subuh,

15 Agustus 2020.

#TeamJungpal

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sarahdollrps · 5 years

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PHOEBE STEPFORD/CUCKOO 3 . HELLFIRE CLUB: BLACK BISHOP . 22 . TELEPATH, HIVE MIND WITH SISTERS, DIAMOND FORM . PB: SKYLER SAMUELS . SITE: XMTS

cw: emotional abuse, child abandonment, misuse of telepathic powers, attempted murder

...

all her life phoebe was considered one of three - she and her sisters were born together and spent their formative years together, all but joined at the hip and to this day phoebe still sees herself as merely being part of a greater whole. being identical triplets so alike that telling them apart was impossible was all that phoebe aspired to be, even though as time went on, she became known as the forceful and assertive one; voicing the needs and wants of the group. however when the triplets were teenagers their parents decided to get the family's genes tested (a way to help bolster their anti mutant father's career) which revealed that their so called triplet connection was actually telepathy with a special hive mind link between them. while their father bribed the tech to falsify and destroy the proof of their mutation, he had himself legally divested of the girls by granting them emancipation and setting them up - grudgingly and only at the behest of his wife - with a small trust fund to share. in the meantime the girls were packed off to xavier's school for gifted youngsters, leading to phoebe's impression that if their own parents would turn them away, then no one could be trusted and that the triplets should only have each other and that anyone not part of the trio wasn’t to be trusted.

at school the triplets became known as the "stepford cuckoos" for their talking at once, talking only in each others' minds and doing their best to look and sound like one brain in three bodies. however under the united front - and with a little teacher prodding - differences in opinions began to emerge, leaving phoebe baffled and even more hardened against her peers. during university her tendency to expose the embarrassing secrets of anti-mutant students or those she didn't like caught the attention of a hellfire club pawn named kevin mactaggart and he offered her a place among the hellions figuring that like himself, she could rise through the ranks quickly. phoebe was dismayed that her sisters didn't want to join the club with her, but arguments had to be shelved when their parents contacted them for the first time in ages, asking them to come to the family cottage. however instead of a plea for forgiveness and an offer to help them hide from the newly passed mutant registration act, their fathered offered the girls a joint settlement of $75K on the condition they didn't reveal their links to him. instead phoebe used and abused the power of the hive mind, amplifying her telepathic powers and turning the minds of her parents inside out, stealing their passwords and secrets and generally being ready to leave them to die. her sisters, horrified, cut her off from the hive mind and forced her to help them "call" over a "lost" jogger to get their parents medical help...after phoebe had basically stolen all but enough money to keep their parents in a long term care facility.

these days the three in one have been torn asunder; celeste is studying journalism and living with friends met at the mansion while mindee disappeared in mysterious circumstances two years ago. in between her mba studies, phoebe has risen to the rank of black bishop in the hellfire club, working on climbing the ranks so she can be a queen, while also working with emma frost on strengthening her powers. she also acts as emma’s spy to make sure no one at borgon-frost industries suspects emma of being a mutant or working against the company's interest - all in the guise of a harmless intern. while those occupy her day to day life, phoebe is also trying to wrest celeste away from the company of her factionless friends and to figure out the truth behind mindee's disappearance so that the three in one will be brought back toegther they way they belong...

WANTED CONNECTIONS

fellow borgon-frost interns for mind games and gossip . 20-24 . mix of human and mutant

emma frost as the emperor palpatine to phoebe’s darth vader . 45 . hellfire dame imperial

a spy in celeste’s circle of friends . 21-23 . unregistered neutral mutant

private detective hunting for clues as to mindee’s fate . 27+ . human or mutant

BIO . PLOT . SITE INFO . APPLICATION . CLAIMS

#jcink rp #jcink site #jcink roleplay #xmen rp #rp request #ch: phoebe stepford #site: xmts #meet the characters

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hostingnewsfeed · 5 years

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These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/these-5-great-films-are-like-an-mba-in-mentoring/

These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

Mentoring is one of the most important but oft-neglected elements of the business world. While some companies set up formal programs while others are more ad-hoc, it’s generally understood that mentoring helps younger workers come up to speed more quickly.

Like most skills, mentoring requires role models, which means that people who’ve never been well-mentored are unlikely to become effective mentors themselves. Fortunately, mentoring is a popular theme in film and television, presenting role models galore.

Of all the many films about mentoring, these are the five which, in my view, are both useful and exceedingly timely:

1. Up In the Air (2009)

Human resources consultant Ryan Bingham (whose specialty is laying people off) mentors the young and ambitious Natalie Keener, who is pioneering a program to fire people via teleconferencing. She quits after a laid-off employee commits suicide. Ryan gives her a glowing recommendation that allows her to land her dream job.

This film is notable for its highly-realistic portrayal of corporate behavior and the ethical responsibility of employees functioning in a generally amoral environment. What’s most important here, however, is that there is not the slightest bit of sexual tension between Ryan and Natalie. He treats her like a daughter not a potential girlfriend, which is as it should be.

Insight: Mentoring is parental not a romantic relationship.

[embedded content]

2. My Fair Lady (1964)

Elocution specialist Henry Higgins teaches a lower-class, thickly-accented, Eliza Dolittle, how to speak and act like an upper-class Englishwoman, thereby proving (after much singing and dancing) that the supposed superiority of the ruling class comes from nurture rather than nature.

Because Eliza ends up with Henry at the end of My Fair Lady, it would seem to run contrary to the “no romance” lesson described in Up In the Air. In the original play, however, Eliza marries the hapless toff Freddie and leaves Henry, having clearly outgrown him. To fix the film and return it to the real world, simply remove the cringeworthy final scene (“Fetch my slippers!”). The edited result is immeasurably superior.

Insight: Mentoring prepares the mentee to transcend the mentor’s teaching.

[embedded content]

3. Donnie Brasco (1997)

Elderly gangster “Lefty” Ruggiero mentors young thug Donnie Brasco in the ways of the mafia, unaware that Donnie is actually an undercover FBI agent. When Lefty discovers Donnie’s true identity, Donnie tries to convince Lefty to leave the mafia. Lefty insists Donnie must complete a contract murder or Lefty will be forced to murder Donnie. Lefty is then arrested.

Lefty is a violent psychopath teaching Donnie to be the same. Nevertheless, a deep affection develops between the two men. Even though Donnie is playing a role, he subconsciously absorbs and incorporates Lefty’s twisted mores into his own value system.

Insight: Mentoring is as much about worldview as it is about knowledge.

[embedded content]

4. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Yoda young Luke Skywalker’s mentor becomes, in training to be Jedi Knight. When Luke a presentment of his sister and friend in peril receives, Yoda’s objections Luke unwisely ignores and the swamp planet Dagobah leaves. Luke, ill-prepared, his right arm loses as Darth Vader in huge plot twist as Luke’s father is revealed. (Spoiler was; sorry I am.)

Kidding aside, the Yoda/Luke relationship rings true especially in the way it ends. Luke is too inexperienced to know that it is not yet time for him to “leave the nest” and that by doing so, he will make the situation worse. Yoda knows what’s likely to happen and could have easily disabled Luke’s X-fighter, but instead allows him to leave and make his own mistakes.

Insight: A mentor cannot force a mentee to remain in training.

[embedded content]

5. Finding Forrester (2000)

Author and recluse William Forrester secretly mentors teenager Jamar Wallace. Jamar is accused of plagiarism, a charge that he could easily refute by revealing his relationship with William. Jamar refuses to do so, so William comes out of seclusion to set matters straight. William dies of cancer, making Jamar his heir and literary executor.

While Jamar is ostensibly the person being mentored, the process of mentoring brings William out of his shell and back into the real world. The mentoring (and its direction away from William’s own problems) frees up William’s creativity, allowing him to complete his second and final novel.

Insight: Mentoring benefits the mentor more than the mentee.

[embedded content]

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smartwebhostingblog · 5 years

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These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/these-5-great-films-are-like-an-mba-in-mentoring/

These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

Of all the many films about mentoring, these are the five which, in my view, are both useful and exceedingly timely:

1. Up In the Air (2009)

Insight: Mentoring is parental not a romantic relationship.

[embedded content]

2. My Fair Lady (1964)

Insight: Mentoring prepares the mentee to transcend the mentor’s teaching.

[embedded content]

3. Donnie Brasco (1997)

Insight: Mentoring is as much about worldview as it is about knowledge.

[embedded content]

4. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Insight: A mentor cannot force a mentee to remain in training.

[embedded content]

5. Finding Forrester (2000)

Insight: Mentoring benefits the mentor more than the mentee.

[embedded content]

0 notes

lazilysillyprince · 5 years

Text

These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/these-5-great-films-are-like-an-mba-in-mentoring/

These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

Of all the many films about mentoring, these are the five which, in my view, are both useful and exceedingly timely:

1. Up In the Air (2009)

Insight: Mentoring is parental not a romantic relationship.

[embedded content]

2. My Fair Lady (1964)

Insight: Mentoring prepares the mentee to transcend the mentor’s teaching.

[embedded content]

3. Donnie Brasco (1997)

Insight: Mentoring is as much about worldview as it is about knowledge.

[embedded content]

4. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Insight: A mentor cannot force a mentee to remain in training.

[embedded content]

5. Finding Forrester (2000)

Insight: Mentoring benefits the mentor more than the mentee.

[embedded content]

0 notes

awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat · 5 years

Text

These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/these-5-great-films-are-like-an-mba-in-mentoring/

These 5 Great Films Are Like an MBA in Mentoring

Of all the many films about mentoring, these are the five which, in my view, are both useful and exceedingly timely:

1. Up In the Air (2009)

Insight: Mentoring is parental not a romantic relationship.

[embedded content]

2. My Fair Lady (1964)

Insight: Mentoring prepares the mentee to transcend the mentor’s teaching.

[embedded content]

3. Donnie Brasco (1997)

Insight: Mentoring is as much about worldview as it is about knowledge.

[embedded content]

4. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Insight: A mentor cannot force a mentee to remain in training.

[embedded content]

5. Finding Forrester (2000)

Insight: Mentoring benefits the mentor more than the mentee.

[embedded content]

0 notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

Text

Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like "start my Roomba" or "close the garage door." If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931463/ifttt-amazon-alexa-applets-ending-support-integration-automation

Amazon can do this because the Alexa's operating system sits behind a cryptographic lock, and any tool that bypasses that lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that it's literally a crime to provide a rival OS that lets users retain functionality that Amazon no longer supports.

This is the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, a moral hazard and invitation to mischief that tempts Amazon executives to run a bait-and-switch con where they sell you a gadget with five features and then remotely kill-switch two of them. This is prime directive of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

So many companies got their business-plan at the Darth Vader MBA. The ability to revoke features after the fact means that companies can fuck around, but never find out. Apple sold millions of tracks via iTunes with the promise of letting you stream them to any other device you owned. After a couple years of this, the company caught some heat from the record labels, so they just pushed an update that killed the feature:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/

That gun on the mantelpiece went off all the way back in 2004 and it turns out it was a starter-pistol. Pretty soon, everyone was getting in on the act. If you find an alert on your printer screen demanding that you install a "security update" there's a damned good chance that the "update" is designed to block you from using third-party ink cartridges in a printer that you (sorta) own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Selling your Tesla? Have fun being poor. The upgrades you spent thousands of dollars on go up in a puff of smoke the minute you trade the car into the dealer, annihilating the resale value of your car at the speed of light:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

Telsa has to detect the ownership transfer first. But once a product is sufficiently cloud-based, they can destroy your property from a distance without any warning or intervention on your part. That's what Adobe did last year, when it literally stole the colors from your Photoshop files, in history's SaaSiest heist caper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

And yet, when we hear about remote killswitches in the news, it's most often as part of a PR blitz for their virtues. Russia's invasion of Ukraine kicked off a new genre of these PR pieces, celebrating the fact that a John Deere dealership was able to remotely brick looted tractors that had been removed to Chechnya:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Today, Deere's PR minions are pitching search-and-replace versions of this story about Israeli tractors that Hamas is said to have looted, which were also remotely bricked.

But the main use of this remote killswitch isn't confounding war-looters: it's preventing farmers from fixing their own tractors without paying rent to John Deere. An even bigger omission from this narrative is the fact that John Deere is objectively Very Bad At Security, which means that the world's fleet of critical agricultural equipment is one breach away from being rendered permanently inert:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

There are plenty of good and honorable people working at big companies, from Adobe to Apple to Deere to Tesla to Amazon. But those people have to convince their colleagues that they should do the right thing. Those debates weigh the expected gains from scammy, immoral behavior against the expected costs.

Without DMCA 1201, Amazon would have to worry that their decision to revoke IFTTT functionality would motivate customers to seek out alternative software for their Alexas. This is a big deal: once a customer learns how to de-Amazon their Alexa, Amazon might never recapture that customer. Such a switch wouldn't have to come from a scrappy startup or a hacker's DIY solution, either. Take away DMCA 1201 and Walmart could step up, offering an alternative Alexa software stack that let you switch your purchases away from Amazon.

Money talks, bullshit walks. In any boardroom argument about whether to shift value away from customers to the company, a credible argument about how the company will suffer a net loss as a result has a better chance of prevailing than an argument that's just about the ethics of such a course of action:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Inevitably, these killswitches are pitched as a paternalistic tool for protecting customers. An HP rep once told me that they push deceptive security updates to brick third-party ink cartridges so that printer owners aren't tricked into printing out cherished family photos with ink that fades over time. Apple insists that its ability to push iOS updates that revoke functionality is about keeping mobile users safe – not monopolizing repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

John Deere's killswitches protect you from looters. Adobe's killswitches let them add valuable functionality to their products. Tesla? Well, Tesla at least is refreshingly honest: "We have a killswitch because fuck you, that's why."

These excuses ring hollow because they conspicuously omit the possibility that you could have the benefits without the harms. Like, your tractor could come with a killswitch that you could bypass, meaning you could brick it at a distance, and still fix it yourself. Same with your phone. Software updates that take away functionality you want can be mitigated with the ability to roll back those updates – and by giving users the ability to apply part of a patch, but not the whole patch.

Cloud computing and software as a service are a choice. "Local first" computing is possible, and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

The cheapest rhetorical trick of the tech sector is the "indivisibility gambit" – the idea that these prix-fixe menus could never be served a la carte. Wanna talk to your friends online? Sorry there's just no way to help you do that without spying on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

One important argument over smart-speakers was poisoned by this false dichotomy: the debate about accessibility and IoT gadgets. Every IoT privacy or revocation scandal would provoke blanket statements from technically savvy people like, "No one should ever use one of these." The replies would then swiftly follow: "That's an ableist statement: I rely on my automation because I have a disability and I would otherwise be reliant on a caregiver or have to go without."

But the excluded middle here is: "No one should use one of these because they are killswitched. This is especially bad when a smart speaker is an assistive technology, because those applications are too important to leave up to the whims of giant companies that might brick them or revoke their features due to their own commercial imperatives, callousness, or financial straits."

Like the problem with the "bionic eyes" that Second Sight bricked wasn't that they helped visually impaired people see – it was that they couldn't be operated without the company's ongoing support and consent:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

It's perfectly possible to imagine a bionic eye whose software can be maintained by third parties, whose parts and schematics are widely available. The challenge of making this assistive technology fail gracefully isn't technical – it's commercial.

We're meant to believe that no bionic eye company could survive unless they devise their assistive technology such that it fails catastrophically if the business goes under. But it turns out that a bionic eye company can't survive even if they are allowed to do this.

Even if you believe Milton Friedman's Big Lie that a company is legally obligated to "maximize shareholder value," not even Friedman says that you are legally obligated to maximize companies' shareholder value. The fact that a company can make more money by defrauding you by revoking or bricking the things you buy from them doesn't oblige you to stand up for their right to do this.

Indeed, all of this conduct is arguably illegal, under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits "unfair and deceptive business practices":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

"No one should ever use a smart speaker" lacks nuance. "Anyone who uses a smart speaker should be insulated from unilateral revocations by the manufacturer, both through legal restrictions that bind the manufacturer, and legal rights that empower others to modify our devices to help us," is a much better formulation.

It's only in the land of the Darth Vader MBA that the deal is "take it or leave it." In a good world, we should be able to take the parts that work, and throw away the parts that don't.

(Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com, Sam Howzit; CC BY 2.0; modified)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

#pluralistic #alexa #ifttt #criptech #disability #drm #revocation #nothing about us without us #futureproofing #graceful failure #darth vader MBA #enshittification

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sarahburness · 6 years

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How Yogic Breathing Helped Me Overcome Chronic Panic Attacks

“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” ~Amit Ray

I’ve battled chronic anxiety and PTSD my entire life and am no stranger to that tight pressure grip that dread and panic can have on the body and mind.

On my worst days, I’d feel my chest and throat tighten as I struggled to breathe.

Chronic panic attacks would leave me curled up in the fetal position, unable to move or stop panting.

On my best days, I’d manage to get by, thanks to my numbing out with food and alcohol, self-medication, or mindless TV watching.

I wasn’t just battling anxiety; I was in denial about the low-grade, high-functioning depression that, like a dark little storm cloud, hovered over me from the time my eyes opened in the morning till I finally fell asleep at night.

I tried everything I could to shake it, to blow past the inner turmoil that never seemed to stop churning.

But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t make it stop, and I couldn’t make it go away.

At least not long-term.

Some things I tried provided brief momentary relief or comfort, though eventually, the feelings of dread, fear, defeat, and overwhelm would resurface yet again.

I felt trapped. Powerless. Out of control. Doubtful I’d ever be able to experience anything other than this miserable existence.

I come from a long lineage of various family members with a history of mental disorder and addiction, so I guess you can say it’s in my blood.

As a young child I grew up witnessing my mother struggle with severe depression, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse problems, all of which eventually led her to several meltdowns and even a suicide attempt.

So naturally, I was an anxious and fearful little girl who often felt very unsafe.

My young mind learned early on that in order to survive I had to constantly be on guard.

My nervous system became accustomed to the constant stress-mode of being in “fight-freeze-or-flight.”

As my way to cope and make sense of it all, I sought out things that would help me feel in control of myself and my life, even if I accomplished this by numbing out, distracting, or shrinking and playing small.

How I Found Peace and Courage Through Yogic Breathing

It wasn’t until I embarked on the yogic path that things really changed for me.

I turned to yoga in search of answers and natural anxiety relief during one of the lowest points in my life.

I found comfort in this ancient practice, which taught me that I am not my past and I am not where I come from.

Thanks to my yoga practice I realized that my anxiety didn’t have to define me.

I learned that I could indeed rise above my fears, even in the midst of a full blown panic attack.

I could learn to calm my racing mind and hyper-aroused body by learning to control my breath.

This is one of yoga’s cornerstone teachings and it’s called pranayama or yogic breathing.

“When the breath wanders the mind is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed, the mind too will be still.” ~Hatha Yoga Pradipika

It wasn’t easy to employ these techniques in the middle of an attack, but with practice, time, consistency, and dedication, my panic attacks gradually shifted.

They lessened their hold on me.

I haven’t had a panic attack in almost three years.

So how’d I do it?

Each time I’d feel the onslaught of an attack, it took everything I had in me to channel my inner yogic warrior and brace myself for the internal battle about to take place.

“I am not my fear; I am not this panic,” I’d remind myself over and over again as I struggled to breath.

Sometimes I’d believe myself, other times I wouldn’t, but I kept reminding myself…

“I am not my fear; I am not this panic.”

Using The Warrior Breath for Victory

I used various yogic breathing techniques each time I needed to calm my panicky mind and body.

One proved particularly effective, so it became a go-to.

It’s a science-backed technique called Ujjayi Breathing, also known as Warrior Breath and Victorious Breath.

Uijayi Breathing has a host of mental, physical, and emotional benefits. This breathing technique is known to:

Increase resilience for coping with stress, anxiety, anger, and depression effectively

Regulate emotions

Balance the nervous system

Decrease stress response

Increase rest/ digest/ relaxation/ regeneration response

Regulate blood sugar levels

Lower cholesterol

Improve sleep cycle and quality

Improve digestion

Boost immunity

Improve respiratory function

When you practice Ujjayi you create a sound like the ocean’s waves or an animal’s hiss by gently constricting the back of the throat.

It sort of sounds like Darth Vader in Star Wars.

Various studies have indicated that Ujjayi can be effective in working with PTSD. It’s been used with Vietnam veterans and natural disaster victims.

When paired with deep abdominal breathing, Ujjayi can help you deactivate your body’s panic response while activating the soothing, regenerating response.

The wave-like sounds of this breathing exercise can also provide you with some much needed soothing in the middle of the storm.

Just a few minutes of Ujjayi breathing can offer you a welcomed sense of control as well as a wave of calm groundedness.

5 Simple Steps to Take During Your Next Panic Attack

1. Find solitude.

This is probably instinctive during a panic attack, it was for me at least. It’s important to set yourself up to win during this critical time window, so step away from the crowd and go somewhere quiet and where you feel safe. Remind yourself: “I am not my fear; I am not this panic.”

2. Control your breath.

In the throes of a panic attack, your body and mind can feel completely out of control. Your breath tends to be short, shallow, and frantic, so it’s important and essential to do what’s in your power to regain control by shifting your breathing. Start to slow your breath down intentionally.

Here’s how to practice Ujjayi:

– Place the tip of your tongue on the center of the roof of your mouth, keep it there.

– Breathe only through your nose.

– Take a full exhale with the mouth closed.

– Start breathing like the ocean—constrict the back of your throat as you inhale slowly for six counts and exhale slowly for six counts.

– As you’re inhaling, engage the lower belly by expanding it outwardly.

– As you’re exhaling, contract the lower belly by bringing it inwardly toward your spine.

– Keep repeating this breathing pattern of inhaling for six and exhaling for six until you feel a shift in your body and you’re no longer struggling to keep the pace (preferably a minimum of three minutes).

3. Breathe with awareness.

Once you’ve gotten control of your breathing rate with Ujjayi, start to bring awareness to your breathing. Bring your entire awareness to your breath as the air flows into your nostrils and out of your nostrils.

Follow your breath with total attention. Observe your breathing. Is it long? Let it be long. Is it short? Let it be short. If the mind wanders, bring it back to your breath. Follow the breath and watch it with full presence. This is an excellent mental training that will get easier and easier the more your practice.

4. Name it.

Once you’ve connected to your breath and have brought awareness to it you’re ready to notice what is coming up for you and name it.

A recent study out of UCLA found that the simple act of mindfully naming or labeling our emotions has the power to lessen their intensity. The study looked at brain scans of subjects as they named emotions and found that the part of their brain associated with fear and reactive emotional responses actually became less active. So name what you’re feeling and don’t hesitate… Name “fear,” “panic,” “dread,” “anger,” “scared,” “anxious,” “worried,” “resentful,” and so on.

5. Keep breathing.

With each inhale and exhale keep making the ocean’s sound and find your flow with it. Imagine the waves ebbing and flowing around you as you breathe the waves through you. Feel the waves within you. The more you flow with the waves, the more you’ll dissolve panic and activate inner calm.

About Osmara Aryal

Osmara Aryal, MBA is the founder of CalmWithYoga.com, a site dedicated to using yogic philosophy, mindfulness, and meditation to increase inner calm, mental focus, vital energy, and quality rest. She’s a Certified Functional Nutrition Practitioner and a Certified Yoga Teacher, specializing in Yoga Nidra, Yin Yoga, and Meditation. Find her at instagram.com/calmwithyoga, facebook.com/calmwithyoga, and twitter.com/calmwithyoga.

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The post How Yogic Breathing Helped Me Overcome Chronic Panic Attacks appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

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youranko-blog · 7 years

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Mastery Journal Post - Project & Team Management

Now I’ve already reached the end of my third course at Full Sail. It is incredible how time flies and I am impressed how much I’ve already learned. This course was about Project & Team Management and from day 1 we developed our own project. Every assignment for each week was another step towards our Project Management Plan. Back in Germany I used to work for the project management team in a dubbing studio and wrote my bachelor thesis about the improvement of this department. But even though I had already some experiences with the topic I learned a lot during these four weeks, because it was the first time for me to build my own project management plan. What really got stuck in my head is the time – budget – quality equilibrium from Verzuh (2016) and that according to Osterwalder (2014) a project should be a pain reliever and a gain creator. I will always keep this in mind while working on new projects. As well as having fun while getting it done how my teacher Lester Frederick used to say. Week 4 was the most inspiring one for me, because we did a personality assessment and the results were surprisingly correct. It was interesting to learn more about my personality type ESTJ. Not only that the corresponding Star Wars character is Darth Vader (geeksinheels.com, 2013), but also that I have the same personality type as some tough ladies like Margaret Thatcher, Michelle Obama and Emma Watson (celebritytypes.com, 2017). I strongly recommend everyone to do such a personality test to learn more about yourself as well as about the people around you. I will definitely use it in the future for leading a team. If everyone in the team knows the personality type of each other I strongly believe they work better as a team. I want to end this post with a quote from Emma Watson:

"I feel like young girls are told they have to be this kind of princess and be all this sweet stuff. It's all bullshit. I identify more with being a warrior princess [and] kicking ass" (celebritytypes.com, 2017).

Celebritytypes.com (2017). Famous ESTJ’s. Retrieved January 28, 2017 from http://www.celebritytypes.com/estj.php

Geeksinheels.com (2013). Star Wars MBIT Chart. Retrieved January 28, 2017 from http://www.geekinheels.com/2013/10/23/star-wars-mbti-chart.html

Osterwalder, A. (2014). Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Verzuh, E. (2015). The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

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

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by [email protected], of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing

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