• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

    “We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

    We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.






  • The problem is that “keeping the government out of the church’s business” is not the goal of the religious right when it comes to gay marriage. They want theocratic rule and the criminalization of what they see as sin. If both sides agreed on the principle of separation of church and state, most battles over LGBTQ rights would’ve been over long ago.

    Separating the legal concept of unions between individuals and the religious institution of marriage would be almost as unpalatable to many evangelicals as fully legal gay marriage, because they’d rather outlaw homosexuality altogether.


  • Is this implying that a publicly-traded corporation whose software is installed on millions of computers around the world has the same level of agency and responsibility as a preschooler?

    I mean, yes, Microsoft bears responsibility for blindly accepting whatever deployment package CrowdStrike gave it and immediately yeeting it out to 100% of customers via Windows Update without any kind of validation or incremental rollout, and should probably be sued for it. That still doesn’t negate the complete and catastrophic failures at every step of the development process on the part of CrowdStrike. It takes a lot of people to fuck up this bad.






  • “Product Degradation” has been the modus operandi for nearly every online service for like 10-15 years now, but it’s the Gamepass price increase is what got the FTC’s attention? Where was the FTC when the movie/TV streaming service market balkanized itself in an arms race to reinvent cable?

    Granted, I doubt the FTC could really do anything meaningful to stop enshittification given that corporations are effectively above the law these days, but it’s been blatantly obvious that this was going to be Gamepass’ strategy from day one. If this actually surprised anyone at the FTC, they really haven’t been paying attention.






  • If it weren’t for the political realities of how voting works under first-past-the-post, the progressive wing of the Democratic party could have easily split off into a separate party whose younger leadership and willingness to push for actually-meaningful change could probably have run circles around the Dems at this point.

    …Man, I really wish I could vote for a presidential candidate that I actually believed in, instead of this “vote for the status-quo neoliberal or democracy dies” bullshit.



  • Reminds me of when they started doing that thing where they pretended to be helpful by having the GPS voice call out the name of a business on the corner where your turn is - “Turn left after ‘business’ on the left” - but in reality those businesses were paying to inject their name into your driving directions.

    When it started, I immediately suspected they were possibly paid sponsorships, which was all but confirmed when it told me to turn “after Bank of America, with drive-thru ATM, on the right.” Stealth advertising mid-navigation… insane.