Yardy Sardley

As utilitarian as pyjamas are, not everyone finds them to be in good taste.

I still miss vape nation era H3. Really sad to watch them slowly start to exhibit the type of behaviour old Ethan would have definitely called out.

I think I agree. Still in the period when facebook’s userbase was mostly teenagers, and before smartphones became ubiquitous.

In my opinion it was facebook buying instagram in early 2012 that signalled the beginning of the end. Of course they were only following in the footsteps of google and yahoo before them, but it was the first domino in the enshittification of social media specifically.

Sterling Archer.

I thought Mark Kurlansky sounded familiar so I just looked and yup, he wrote Salt: a World History. I adore that book, but I haven’t really looked into any of his other work yet. What else would you recommend by him?

To add a tiny bit of technical detail here, vanilla Arch enforces support for x86_64 v1, meaning all software available in the Arch repos is built to not use any cpu feature that didn’t exist in v1. Not a bad thing since it allows for support of older (64 bit) hardware, but it does leave like 20 years of microarchitecture advancement on the table.

According to the CachyOS website, they have repos with software built for v3 and v4 which can apparently juice your rig for an extra 20% performance.

Subscribed/New most of the time, but I check All/Active every once in a while to see if there’s any drama going on.

Sometimes I’ll hit All/Scaled when I’m really desperate.

Ads are a bigger business than you might expect. Get enough eyeballs in one place and brands will be tripping over themselves to give you money just to mention their name. Take the superbowl for example. It’s usually the most viewed event every year in the US, so naturally there is a tradition of advertisers pulling out all the stops and making high-budget bombastic commercials for that specific occasion. You can imagine how attractive it is for brands to want to put their ads on big social media sites, where psychological tricks are used to capture as much attention as possible at all times, instead of just once per year.

Then there’s the user data angle. The big sites all have millions of users who constantly give away personal information without even being prompted, and that makes it really easy for the companies who run them to analyze what makes each user tick and serve ads to the people who are most likely to click on them. This elevates the rate brands are willing to pay even further.

Those two things, along with a suite of anti-competitive practices, are enough to get sites to the point of being mostly profitable. Venture capital and hype-based market speculation get them the rest of the way.