this is the best one !

Apparently Microsoft didn’t get the memo :-)

IIRC most successful VCs invest very early and get out often early-ish too. The real enshittification that dangers the actual position of the company often happen much later. At that point the company is traded publicly and there’s a large anonymous body of shareholders - they only care about profits. VCs are actually a little smarter and care about longer time frames as in that early stage often much larger (relative) growth rates are possible.

At a late stage (think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc today) growth is much more difficult. How could Google grow today? They’ve saturated the search market years ago. So the only way of making more money is by sucking more money out of their existing user base. And they absolutely need to do it, as there’s huge pressure on the managerial class to do it, because the shareholders demand it. If the managerial class doesn’t do this (because often some older idealistic people know it would compromise the quality of the product), or they aren’t capable of doing it - they will get replaced by people who are more willing or capable - even if it’s detrimental for the company when viewed longer-term. VCs i would argue care all about profits, “but”. (they are smart enough to see the big picture. They are also small enough or “few enough” that they can communicate among themselves in order to agree on a more wise plan. That’s why they often get out once most of the possible (easy) growth has been achieved. They either know that now growth is much more difficult, or that the company’s value is much more stagnant - ow might decrease even. They can get out and invest their money in other more promising endeavours.

The shareholders of large publicly traded companies are not that coordinated as they cannot really agree on anything other than just “growth”. More sophisticated strategies would have to be negotiated (and communicated) among thousands. The only unifying bond among shareholders is that they want profits. Think about it: many shareholders often don’t even know what companies they own as they are often part of other investment packages. Maybe you’re retirement plan has invested in stocks of 50 different companies, or 10 different fonds that have invested in others still. That is a form of dilution (?). It’s very difficult to communicate any strategy more sophisticated than “profits”. (a side effect is also that many people have invested indirectly or wothout knowing in endeavours that make their life more shitty/expensive when they retire - without knowing it.) There isn’t enough nuance in the wants of the masses as to want any more sophisticated strategy than simply “growth”. That’s why only short term growth can be thought.

Of course sometimes also large companies can grow 2.5x or something like that. But it’s rare and takes more time. The exception makes the rule here. Early stage growth that VCs bank on is much more explosive i think. More like 10x or 100x.

EDIT: sorry i typed this on mobile and it shows.

I’m all for it, but with plants of this size - or rather such an mount of relatively dense photovoltaic surfaces - i am thinking about the heat that these panels are generating. i am guessing it would be similar to such an area out of asphalt. if these panels were cooled the heat could also be used to warm massive heat storage tanks.

“machines mimicking living things” does not mean exclusively AI. Many scientific fields are trying to mimic living things.

AI is a very hazy concept imho as it’s difficult to even define when a system is intelligent - or when a human is.

on the contrary! it’s a very old buzzword!

AI should be called machine learning. much better. If i had my way it would be called “fancy curve fitting” henceforth.

In this case it’s a giant housing shortage though. The city (and large surrounding area) is Freiburg in the south. Rents are so expensive and available flats are so rare that companies don’t find workers who could actually live there. Also: the comparably good loans don’t mean much when it’s only channeled into a greedy landlord’s pockets.

Edit: oh no i was wrong it’s Nuremberg - their public transport organization is also “VAG”. But Freiburg has a huge labor shortage due to unaffordable housing and housing shortage.

I’ve read a comparison of several newer file formats (avif, heic, webp) with jpeg-xl. The conclusion was that jpeg-xl was on par in terms of compression, sometimes better and very fast. also it can re-compress jpgs directly.

here’s an article describing it https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

Have you been to Europe? Have you walked the streets of Paris? The US was built with enough space being everywhere. American roads are wider, cities are mostly built like square-grids of roads built in a time when cats existed whereas European cities emerged in the middle ages. They’re tightly packed with little extra space. Sometimes (very rarely) here there are old Cadillacs that can be rented for weddings. Seeing one of these cars on the street is an unreal experience. They’re just so huge. They don’t fit on the streets here - and those are cars from the 60s or 70s. Everything seems tiny compared to them. From a European perspective it’s really stupid to build such large vehicles as driving and parking it is much more complicated when everything is build for small cars. Now that SUVs are becoming popular here too it’s just a really annoying. Less parking space per vehicle etc. On cities like Paris - one of the tightest city on Europe this is just annoying. And i haven’t even written about fuel consumption. Paris has had huge problems with smog in recent years.

SUVs are not super rare in the EU (unfortunately). They are pretty common in cities and cause a lot of accidents.

if you have a wheelchair you get dedicated parking spaces anyway. what’s your problem? what are you talking about?

I’d like to add that Paris is one of the tightest cities there is in Europe. there’s just so little space already. with thousands of badly parked scooters cluttering up sidewalks people got fed up very quickly. the vote was pretty one sided IIRC.

a Chromecast is one of those inputs. And it has been a nice product. The reason people are mad is that they Google changed the product after they bought it significantly.

and yes. Today the only reasonable good TV is a computer monitor connected to a device I have control over.

It has less to to with people having MBAs and much more to do with companies having shareholders. Once you’re a publicly traded company there are overwhelmingly strong external forces that compell companies to increase revenue. Even if the business model is perfectly solid and it doesn’t make sense to expect rising profits the shareholders only care about growth rates. On the stock market a companies value is only dependent on its growth.

Take Netflix for example. They’ve had so many users some years ago when they were basically the only streaming service that one might have said they reached market saturation. That would’ve been a money making machine that people could be content with. But since the market always needs growth it isn’t enough and netflix is always trying to “innovate” or squeezie more monthly payments from the existing customer base.

cory doctorow has coined the great word “enshittification” to describe this process. And its driven by the need to grow further even though its to the detriment of the service or the customers. In the end it’s the people with the MBAs doing it. But if they’re not doing it the shareholders replace them with those that do.

It peaked there right? So the rest of the day it was lower wasn’t it? Still very expensive!

I worked as a projectionist in 2009 when the cinema got its first digital projector in order to be able to show Avatar in 3D. At the start of the movie no one actually knew if it would work. Due to the movie being encrypted - with every cinema in Germany waiting eagerly for the password - No cinema was able to play the movie. But everywhere cinemas were packed with people. Because of fuckups somewhere in this incredibly stupid system the movie was delayed about half an hour (IIRC) nationwide. With no-one knowing if it would eventually work - especially nice for the people working at the cinema having to deal with angry audience members.

At the same time the 2D 35mm film-version we also had started without any problems (it was massive and pretty dicey to carry it around).

“Wir wollen keine Parallelgesellschaft”

I actually liked it. it’s a really cool / scary atmosphere. I was surprised by how much i liked it as it’s been ages since i even dared to watch a Netflix-produced movie.

I actually liked it and was really surprised about it. It being a Netflix produced film and all that. It was definitely a vibes movie and it excelled at that. No dense plot needed here.

everyday