jtrek

You cannot assume that the people making decisions are rational, smart, people. They may believe falsehoods, and act accordingly. They may be chasing a hidden goal (eg: "I get a bonus if I hit X metric, so I'll kill good parts of the site to do it")

I worked at a place where management was like "we want to increase time on site", and the lead dev was like "I can just add loading spinners everywhere then". Luckily management was a little smarter and move involved than that, and didn't approve that strategy.

Even if the electricity was renewable sources, there's the opportunity cost. You spent that electricity on AI instead of something more useful and immediate.

Unfortunately, most people wouldn't even understand what that means. And many wouldn't care. People don't seem to care about things, even as those things chew them up.

Getting peers on board is probably the way to go.

Elden Ring and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead". That's... interesting. Elden Ring is very self serious, so I don't know what happens when you add in semi self aware satire.

Because they're assholes. They don't care about making a good product. They care about making money. Even though they already have a lot of money, they need more. No matter the cost.

No shit.

One of the problems is all the people who were fucking wrong don't suffer any lasting consequences. They will be listened to again.

Good. The penalty should be enough that it's not something you can just shrug off. Scale it with wealth. Make repeat offenses lead to the license being revoked. Mandatory community service.

Many people are worse than toddlers and their moral framework doesn't go past "I shouldn't do that because I'll be punished"

I'm still in the "Microsoft can fuck off and die" camp, so I don't imagine I'll be using this.

The only thing that we can say for sure is that the companies benefit from shrinkflation in some way otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

Nitpick, even though I agree with you: companies believe they will benefit. We can't rule out how fucking stupid a lot of management types are. Like whatever company fired people for AI and then had to retire them, plus eat the lost potential from fucking around with AI for months.

And even when the individuals aren't stupid, the incentives are fucked. Google kills products because of internal fighting for promotions and recognition, not anything that's good for users or the companies.

I'm pretty happy not using Spotify. I will continue to do so. My library of drm free music (mostly from Bandcamp) is just fine.

Perhaps I should have written "simple" instead of "easy".

But yes, the road to implementing solutions is blocked by rich people and class traitors.

People online often use "introvert" interchangeably with "social anxiety" and "agoraphobia". Someone will be like "if I have to make a phone call I have a panic attack and vomit lol so introverted right?"