CommenterPerson

Sorry. This article smells like a sales pitch. I used to use Firefox but changed to Duckduckgo. Firefox had started to feel enshittified. Learned most of Firefox funding comes from .. g**gle.

I upvoted you .. share the same sentiment.

Wondering if this was a self goal to, you know, get people to use this enshittified product on the cloud?

Few observations over the past few decades (my paycheck went up by slightly less than the US inflation rate during this time):

Air travel is much more affordable to me. It has become psychologically nasty which makes the overall deal feel worse, while it is actually better in $ terms.

Housing build quality is worse, things need more frequent repairs, cost is higher probably due to increase in land value.

Much more trashy food in the grocery store aisles, one needs to be aware and shop carefully.

Politics especially in the US has gotten FAR worse.

The internet after the early promise has gotten FAR worse (better in bandwidth and far worse via enshittification).

Cars improved till around 2010 and now worse for the dollar (too much electronics, and repairs are prohibitively expensive).

This escalated with the Mag 7 and surveillance capitalism. Now everyone wants to do it. Good for margins!

As a consumer, my reaction to all this is simply to stop looking and stop buying. Unless it's something urgent, I put it on a list and wait. Many times the need goes away. Better than dealing with all this crap.

FYI Consumer Reports' "Best Buy" ratings used to reliably indicate very good quality and low price. The seem to have changed it to "Recommended" and enshittified it.

Central NJ was a great place to buy, at least until Covid. A great way to build wealth here has been: start at a young-ish age at a low end. Over time, sell / rent that out and keep moving up slowly using a mortgage for your primary residence. Over the decades one can own their own residence and have one or more rental properties. Those bring in steady retirement income, which does not depend on daily stock market gyrations.

These rent vs. buy calculators all end up in paralysis by analysis. Everything depends on assumptions. Yes, in the Bay area the calculations may work one way. But there are so many ways around that. A remote job. Starting with a rental property 100 miles away.

Wow .. adding to the 1426 comments so far. Here is an interview with the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" Professor Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard. Thanks to the OP for the pointer. 3 years old and even more relevant now:

https://time.com/6174614/shoshana-zuboff-twitter-surveillanc...

Re. Whataboutism. At times it is worthwhile looking in the mirror. In 2003 we bombed and occupied Iraq based on fabrications and propaganda by the Bush administration. According to the Lancet, there were 650,000 excess deaths attributed to violence 95% confidence. The middle east was thrown into turmoil and the effects are very much being felt by neighboring countries and Europe.

Sooo .. if we are curious about how other countries run their affairs, maybe we should study high school education in Finland. They did a remarkable job of turning their system around to where their kids outperform American kids on the average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas...

Why not use DuckDuckGo?

Hey another way to dumb down the country. Become second rate at particle physics (LHC), aerospace (Boeing), cut funding from universities, <TLDR list goes here>.

But we're #1 on social media!

You got this immigrant. We have a group of a few families. Each hosts at least one large event per year on occasions like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and our own festivals. Everyone and their kids, and other friends / relatives join. Three families ended up on the same street by chance. We regularly cook or get takeout and get together at short notice. Alcohol and food play a big role.

That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.

Here we go again.

But. "Interesting" is subjective, and there's no good definition for "intelligence", AI has so much associated hype. So we could debate endlessly on HN.

Supposing "interesting" means something like coming up with a new Fast Fourier Transform algorithm. I seriously doubt an LLM could do something there. OTOH AI did do new stuff with protein folding.

So, we can keep debating I guess.

"Smart" and "Intelligent" could have multiple meanings here. Sometimes a washer that uses a dirt sensor is labeled smart. In US I've found anything above the lowest end has wifi capability, unfortunately. My $100 printer had some suspicious notes about sending data to google (!!!). I never connect any of these gadgets to wifi.

Lots of comments that a few plastic knobs, switches, wiring add to the cost. Yes. But buttons and knobs are more intuitive, less distracting, can be operated blind while keeping eyes on the road.

So guess what Mr.Auto Manufacturer, you can keep your hifi $30K-70K touchscreen surveillance machine on your lot. I'll keep driving my 20+ year old Corolla until you learn to do better.

Good article. Verified by years of observing my own and others' failures and successes. Do-Learn is a great positive motto. Compared to the nihilistic break things, or fail fast, etc.

Must say, it was a bit long. At the beginning, and after looking up the author, I confess to thinking "Oh no another pretty face influencer". But it built up very well. My respect level increased a lot when I saw Olin College of Engineering on her bio. Had checked it out for my daughter and came away very impressed by their approach. Most all American engineering colleges are so full of theory and so little doing, when it should be the other way around. Kudos.

This is a tremendous engineering, coordination and public works feat.

Using words like "robots" and "AI" shows how much hype has taken over the latter two fields, with actual achievements being modest in comparison to the hype.

Man this is a tough crowd to impress! (yeah I know it's off but still).

This is Milton Freidman hype and brainwashing. A company profiting in a society has a responsibility towards that society. In Germany, they accomplish this by having one union representative on the board. Profit at any cost leads to a society where workers are paid just enough to prevent starvation so that there are workers.

Just call it Windows Assistant Copilot's Assistant+ ES Edition.

ES = Enshittified.

Sadly, chalk up a victory for enshittification. I was a Firefox fax, now mostly use DuckDuckGo. Doesn't most of Mozilla's funding come from Google?

It does have an impact. It wont give you stackoverflow like code to copy-paste though.

Analogy is thermodynamics says how efficient a heat engine _could_ be. If your engine is way below that you know there how much of an improvement there _could_ be, that it's not an impossible problem. That will get people to build better stuff.

Yay for EU.

Should an airline charge more for a heavier passenger.. because technically the plane does more lifting. Should a restaurant charge for cutlery?

It's good to rein in enshittification everywhere.

Thanks for posting this. Wonderful letter.

Yes it seems to be artificially worse part. When you try to book the no frills basic, some airlines have scare messages like "you will be randomly assigned a seat". I know someone who feels they might be more likely to get bumped if they don't tag a particular seat. I think there are rules to prevent such extreme enshittification?

Are they doing something additional with the 47MB - 200 bytes? Like selling you to the brokers?

Yes yes yes we should. Bloated pages are a symptom of Enshittification. When I try to buy something on Amazon there's so much crap, menus that drop down on hover, that I just close and go away. Or search Amazon via Duck. Also part of the bloat everywhere is the unconstrained tracking and surveillance. .. Design benchmark should be lightweight pages like HN and Craigslist!

I'd like to passively divert annoying or redundant airport announcements down the drain.

More seriously, great concepts for architects to scale up and control noise?

Thank you so much for this article. We.read about all the amazing technology that was created for Apollo but this explains one in detail.

I worry with all the outsourcing over the past few decades that these and even basic engineering manufacturing technologies are being lost.