Very very skilled idiots.

On that–and as a highly skilled idiot myself–we fully agree!

The adage “social problems don’t have purely technological solutions” is something I’ve known for years yet must continuously remind myself of and reintegrate it for new issues.

It’s a shame the old vision of computer specialists integrated into empowered teams building bespoke solutions never really came to pass. Not enough profit in that model, when mass market slop is so lucrative.

Not that I disagree with the sentiment but in most software systems localization does not just mean translation either. Localization as a practice includes date, time, and number formats, preferred units of measure, language and dialect, and sometimes a few other things. I’m not saying localization or translation are done well, or that the Big Tech companies give any shits about it at all, but its not as though computer professionals are all entirely ignorant of these distinctions.

The Two-headed Calf

By Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

Imagine working in the department the company is now named after and realizing your whole product line is irrelevant and the AI-people get all the money now.

Google announced that something like 25% of their code is AI generated now, and it’d be hilarious how much these companies have enshittified themselves into a cycle of constant self-owns except that we keep suffering for it too.

Like every google app and service is bad now. Search sucks. YouTube apps are bloated, have been crashing, and the algorithm is serving up just random stuff now. G Maps won’t stay open on my phone, and randomly minimizes itself. Gmail is out of space, full of newsletters, and also degrading in search.

Facebook is the same deal. I’ve been on it more recently because I need to track events and it’s all anyone in this city uses. Searching for the name of an event, which you’ve stated you’re going to, by it’s exact name, will find nothing, or an older version of the event from 4 years ago. The feed is 90% ads and sponsored posts, mostly videos. And the videos aren’t ads, they’re just random tiktok-wannabes about paint mixing or machining stuff. It’s utterly bizarre to be inundated with clickbait that desperately wants your attention for no reason.

I consider myself a pretty good engineer and it’s amazing how little these companies can accomplish with literally tens of thousands of developers. Its another of the great paradoxes of our times: individually, software devs must be among the least productive workers of all time, and yet as a group the profession (the computer itself really) has realized such astronomical productivity gains that we’re probably already past the point where anyone really needs to work full-time ever again.

Actually on second glance I think the setting is a train or subway. (there are people sitting in a line around them, and they’re holding a pole like in the middle of public transit vehicles.)

Woman are always charmed by being sexually compared to food by old men on buses.