Right.

And what do you know about editorial controls or how journalism has worked in the last 20 years?

Wake up. The decline has already happened. It’s now a game of compromise.

You want to complain and whine like these guys are sitting on a beach, sipping mai thais, while telling their AI agents to write an article.

It’s ignorant and inflammatory. Just makes y’all look petulant.

My point still stands.

You can argue that EVERY fucking thing in the world is in the beginning , mid, or late stages of enshittification.

But calling Ars an internet rot site, at this stage, is just fucking stupid.

Are they as good as they were a few years ago? I honestly can’t say. I do know that there was better news a few years ago.

The people at Ars have a tough job trying to navigate this modern world of oligarchs and autocracy, keeping their identity, while being owned by a corporation whose only job is to make money.

They’ve done a pretty good fucking job, all things considered, of staying their course.

A much better job than internet assholes who want to act elitist and whine when the world falls apart around them while they blame their fellow class instead of the controlling class.

Weren’t you whining about other people making comments like this one to you?

No, the issue we are talking about today and calling Ars an “internet rot site” is a huge leap. Yeah, they post shit articles from Wired and such, (they are owned by Conde Nast), but their core writers are still great and have plenty of good articles.

You want credit for what? Over exaggerating an issue then whining about it?

You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then spitting on the baby. It makes no sense.

So many people at work are having frustrating issues with Windows now.

It takes so fucking long to start up. Sure, you get a desktop and can open a program, but it just keeps locking up repeatedly for a good 20 minutes while whatever bloatware is running in the background during startup.

They cram OneDrive down your throat and it has constant issues.

They put so much shit in your way, in the name of “productivity” it makes your actual productivity worse.

FUCK COPILOT.

The marketers don’t make the decision. They’re underpaid wage slaves just reading script.

Your point seems very valid to me.

I don’t even want to buy their products anymore because they constantly cancel them and remove any support.

The only ones they continue, seem to be the ones they can use for data collection .i.e. Pixels and Nests. (I shamefully own both).

It is so frustrating as a consumer. Especially when you know that you have become the product for them to sell.

I can’t say much because of the NDA’s involved, but my wife’s company is in a project partnership with Google. She works in a very public facing aspect of the project.

When Google first came on board, she was expecting to see quality people who were locked in and knew what they were doing.

Instead she has seen terrible decision making (like “How the fuck do they still exist as company” bad decision making) and an over abundant reliance on using their name to pressure people into giving Google more than they should.

I remember when their motto was “Don’t be evil”. They are the very essence of sociopathic predatory capitalism.

I stopped my Ring subscription but kept the doorbell camera.

It wasn’t until a year later when I was moving and the house was almost completely empty (still had internet/wifi setup) and I looked at the wifi app and saw that the ring doorbell still had significant data usage.

They were clearly still capturing my doorbell video.

So cute, but aren’t baby foxes called kits?

My company actually got their own internal use AI that supposedly is safe for client information and is firewalled and not scraped.

It is not very useful, constantly is out of service, and I don’t trust for a second that it is secure/not scraped.

Was searching the post to see if someone else pointed out that neither Adams was on the list.

Thank you for the laugh this morning.

Everytime I see Sam Adams mentioned, I always think of Sam Jackson beer.

I love the sources everyone is throwing at me. This is great, thank you!

This is going to be a deep dive, I appreciate the info!

I’m not a tankie/communist/socialist. In fact at this point, I’m afraid to ask for clarification.

Between my wife and I, we make pretty solid money. We own our home, we don’t live paycheck to paycheck, have good health insurance, and have solid retirement accounts.

I would not complain at all, if that shit burned to the ground omif it meant an end to this bullshit system in place today.

My wife and I also grew up poor as shit. My single Mom fed us with food stamps and government cheese.

I’ll gladly live that life again if it meant no more dragon hoarding billionaires using their money to dictate politics.

You misunderstand. I went to from the A71 to the 6. I am only recently on the 9.

I am glad you have had a better experience than me. I am pretty happy with Pixel now but I am going to try the Graphene route this weekend.

I appreciate your response.

It was constantly giving out mistaken SOS messages. It would lock up and I’d have to constantly reset.

The final straw was when I was travelling to a work site I had never been to before. It locked up with a static screen and refused to reset. I had to stop at a gas station, at 4am, actually talk to another person and buy a map.

It was slow, buggy, constantly trying to get me to use their Samsung store, .etc…

When I moved to Pixel, it gave me the iPhone experience where shit just worked. And it integrated more things for me, which was convenient at the time. (But now I know it is scraping the fuck out of everything I do/see/hear.)

I just upgraded to the 9 and assume it’s scraping every bit of data it can from me. I will do it this weekend.

Sorry, no way I am going back to Samsung. I had the A71 and it was a TERRIBLE smart phone. I switched to the Pixel 6 and it was night and day.

I just need to get off my ass and install Graphene.