Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

@carnage4life It seems to me there’s a not-collusion-but-nudge-nudge-wink-wink “something in the air” trend in the tech industry to lay people off. It started late last year, but companies are still trying to see how long they can continue to lay people off in dribs and drabs, to take advantage of the fact that people currently can’t go to competitors for better pay. This seems like a continuation of that trend to me.

I think their short term goal is to goose profits by reducing payroll, but the medium term goal is to backfill positions in a year at a lower pay rate—because companies still need laborers to do work to remain competitive.

I also think companies are (not so) secretly hoping that AI will prove to be an effective replacement for many of the laid-off employees this year, so they wouldn’t have to rehire.

@brecht @juergen_hubert The most important thing to know about every feature is how to disable it

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.

Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

People working in tech need to be paying attention to what is happening with unions and strikes across America right now.

Take notes y’all.

Let's be clear. Those "low value" degrees are all the degrees were you learn how power works. How knowledge is made. Where hierarchies and ideologies come from. And why all of that is considered "low value" and by whom.

Thanks to efforts by volunteers Nosamu and bai0, the Internet Archive's flash emulation just jumped generations ahead.

Mute/Unmute works. The screen resizes based on the actual animation's information. And for a certain group who will flip their lid:

We can do multi-swf flash now!

A pile of previously "broken" flashes will join the collection this week.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash

📣 BIG NEWS! We're launching a podcast🎙️!

The Causal Islands Podcast 🏝️ will feature thought-provoking interviews with leading experts in distributed systems, AI, computing, and more, exploring the intricate connections between tech + society and how they will shape our future.

EP01 is next Wednesday, the 19th, with special guests @jenn, Chia Amisola, Michael R. Bernstein, and Quinn Wilton.

Register here to join us LIVE! https://lu.ma/causalislandspodcast

Whenever the ruling class starts to sense a threat to their power, that’s when they start picking out ordinary things in society and declaring them to be alien threats, and that anyone who disagrees or downplays the threat must be siding with the enemy.