• 41 Posts
  • 1.77K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•VLC player
    20·
    3 days ago

    If you are going to cooy and paste, copy and paste the entire thing.

    Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

    Examples:

    Academic publishing

    Between 2016 and 2022 the turn over and profit margins of academic publishers increased partly due to article processing charges from open access. This has been accompanied by predatory publishers who prioritize profit over scholarly integrity. This Academic enshittification results in a scholarly system that is “overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge.”

    Amazon

    In Doctorow’s original post, he discussed the practices of Amazon. The online retailer began by attracting users with goods sold below cost and (with an Amazon Prime subscription) free shipping. Once its user base was solidified, more sellers began to sell their products through Amazon. Finally, Amazon began to add fees to increase profits. In 2023, over 45% of the sale price of items went to Amazon in the form of various fees. Doctorow described advertisement within Amazon as a payola scheme in which sellers bid against one another for search-ranking preference, and said that the first five pages of a search for “cat beds” were half advertisements.

    Dating apps

    The market for dating apps has been cited as an example of enshittification due to the conflict between the dating apps’ ostensible goal of matchmaking, and their operators’ desire to convert users to the paid version of the app and retain them as paying users indefinitely by keeping them single, creating a perverse incentive that leads performance to decline over time as efforts at monetization begin to dominate.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mltoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•His gut produces alcohol spontaneously. For years, he was dismissed as an alcoholicEnglish
    37·
    6 days ago

    I listened to his interview on NPR and it sounds terrifying. If he excerts himself too much, he gets drunk. If he eats carbs…drunk. Because his body made alcohol for so long, he had become an alcoholic even though he’d never had a drink. His alcohol dependence was so deep that he went through physical withdrawl, including the shakes, once he started treatment.

    EDIT: Nobody believed him when he said he was not a drunk. Even his parents told his girlfriend (now wife) not to marry him. His wife believed him and is now a champion for the cause.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•Weird how that works
    71·
    7 days ago

    It is a real and very common problem that gets no press because a lot of people work very hard to ensure that the line temps do not reach critical. That said, it only becomes a real problem during times of high demand like heat waves and cold snaps. Our infrastructure is absolute dog shit at the moment, and I think the fear is that if every home had one or two EVs charging overnight, then every night would be a high demand event.

    We need to bring our infrastructure up to adequate.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•Weird how that works
    7216·
    8 days ago

    I think there is a big misunderstanding here. The power grid suffers from a distribution problem not a production problem. The concern with households with EVs is getting the power from the power plants to the houses. During high demand, the powerlines overheat. It’s a delicate power regulation dance to keep the flow at maximum capacity without having fully shutdown any power routes in order to cool. If you do not, you will lose the lines which means a significant downtime for that path.

    Datacenters are getting direct lines from the production sites. I believe that for some datacenters, retired nuclear power plants are being spun up in order to serve them exclusively.

    SOURCE: Grid management is one of the things my firm specializes in.

    EDIT: Believe it or not, households with solar panels that feed back into the grid can be a problem sometimes because the unexpected capacity in the lines can also overheat the lines and hampers the ability of the utility company to regulate lune temps. If you are doing solar, consider adding battery banks to catch the excess.