crowsby

Similarly, platforms that default to a massive CREATE AN ACCOUNT box centered on the screen and make you play Where’s Fucking Waldo trying to find the size 8 “Log In” hyperlink.

Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.

“I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.

So I do analysis on this type of data as part of my role at an online job board. Based on our data, a couple things stand out:

• Overall job volume is down about 40% year-over-year. So the market in general is a lot tighter.
• The proportion of remote roles is dropping, but slowly. A year ago about 70% of our roles were fully remote; now it’s about 60%.
• The proportion of fully in-office roles has actually remained relatively stagnant, generally floating around 15%-20% at any given time. They’re also very difficult roles to fill because A) they’re limited to actual geographies and B) they are nobody’s first choice
• Between February 2023 and now, the median # of applications we get per role has spiked sharply; particularly with remote roles. These roles unsurprisingly remain jobseekers’ first choice, and since they’re not limited by geography, tend to pull in a_much_ wider talent pool, especially since the overall number and proportion of remote roles continues to shrink.

So what I’m seeing is many of these remote roles becoming supplanted by hybrid roles, which has pros and cons. They’re still limited by the same geographic constraints as in-office roles, since you’re not going to be applying to a hybrid role across the country, after all. So you’ll see less variety of employers. The advantage is that if there is a hybrid role that looks appealing to you, that you’ll be facing a lot less competition than you would for a fully remote role.

That’s what I’ve been thinking. I can’t even recall the last time I heard of anyone I know taking a PCR covid test.

And that makes it challenging trying to manage behavior. I’ve definitely noticed a marked uptick in people I know that have gotten covid in the past couple weeks, but when I try to look at the data to validate my anecdotal experience, it’s difficult to find compared to two years ago. Oregon, for example, has wastewater monitoring, but the page used to convey the data doesn’t work on mobile and is confusing to use at best.

I would caution some patience and suspicion on this story.

• Zillow says that the sale information was a mistake and has since been removed.

• Meanwhile, this headline is sourced from a straight-up clickbait site reposting a story from a news website with a history of mixed factual reporting.

We all get the fun brain chemicals coming out when a big juicy story like this appears and validates our worldviews and we can’t wait to share and amplify it, but spreading misinformation is bad, m’kay?

free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and “improve” workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: “Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others”.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

Funny that he was “extremely concerned” when a report came out last month on how Instagram algorithms were promoting child exploitation, yet he completely gutted the Child Safety team at Twitter and then went out of his way to let everyone know that he was personally behind the decision to reinstate some conspiracy theory nutjob who’s posting this garbage on his site.

Spam bots pursuing an audience shouldn’t be a surprising thing. Even glorious fediverse valhalla is battling with them.

The difference between the Threads & Twitter situations is that I’m inclined to extend a lot more leeway to an engineering team that’s less than two weeks into a new platform, versus one that’s been around nearly two decades and is suddenly dealing with issues because the owner decided to haphazardly fire the teams responsible for maintaining those areas.

what is it with the US always having the dumbest of the dumb?

I would gently suggest that Reddit-style hot takes might be better suited remaining on Reddit.

As far as the actual data goes, the Pew Research organization did a survey on attitudes toward climate change by country back in 2019. The main takeaways:

• Yep, the US lags behind most of Europe in regards to attitudes around climate change. However the disparity is more of shades of gray rather than the dramatic binary situation you described. There are deniers in every single country listed, and even Germany reported a full 27% of their population not considering climate change a serious threat. Sweden had 30%

• On a longitudinal level, concerns about climate change have increased everywhere, including the US. Between 2013 & 2018, the proportion of US respondents who considered climate change a major threat increased 20%.

• Unsurprisingly, there’s a major partisan gap in the US. 83% of left-leaning respondents considered it a major threat, whereas only 27% of right-leaning ones did.

• Time to first response
• Resolution time
• Customer support costs

It’s key to note that customer satisfaction with response is not among the metrics the CEO is highlighting. It seems that the role of customer support is increasingly to frustrate customers away from pursuing issues, rather than reaching a mutually-satisfying resolution. I consider most customer support chatbots as a tactic towards that: they’re not going to offer any significant assistance and exist simply to waste my time, so of course the imaginary “time to resolution” is going to be minimal. If they’re going to make it a hassle then I’ll just open up a credit card dispute.

The main thing for me would be the plethora of high-quality apps already available for Lemmy, not even a month out from the start of the Reddit APIcalypse.

That being said, I think kbin looks infinitely better in either mobile or desktop browsers, making the need for an app less urgent. I don’t even think there’s an app available for kbin right now, at least for Android.

Tildes, for what it’s worth, is not intended to be a replacement for Reddit. Its creator/admin is trying to purposefully cultivate a very different culture than what you might find on Reddit or Reddit replacements like lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/etc. From their Philosophy page:

High-quality content and discussions
Tildes prioritizes quality content and discussion through its mechanics, design, and organization. Fixation on growth and related metrics results in other sites having a bias towards high-appeal, low-depth content like funny images, gifs, and memes. The priority on Tildes is to cultivate high-quality communities, which are far easier to build when they don’t have to fight an uphill battle against the platform itself.

Limited tolerance, especially for assholes
Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to “if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault”.

This is a difficult topic, so I want to try to be clear about where on the spectrum Tildes is trying to land. I’m never going to refer to the site as a “safe space” or ban anyone just for occasionally acting like a jerk in an argument—I’d probably have to ban myself fairly quickly. However, it will also never be described as anything like “an absolute free speech site”.

Personally as an old, I love it. The whole vibe promotes longer, better thought out replies, as opposed to the modern internet where people are more often looking to do quick hit n’ run posts with popular sentiments for easy internet points. I also love the proactive removal of problem posters. Some people are just looking to stir up trouble wherever they go, but don’t fall under a specific rule that might get their account axed. Tildes isn’t afraid to uninvite problematic assholes.

If its culture is something that resonates with you, feel free to hit me up for an invite while I have some.

Bouncing back and forth between Jerboa / Connect / kBin on mobile web right now. Who knows what it’ll be next week.

This is a fun period of extremely rapid innovation, with new Fediverse apps getting announced nearly every few days by extremely talented developers. Many of these alpha/beta apps already have a better user experience than the 1st-party Reddit app, and it should get even better from here on out.

I’m surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I’ve curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.

I suspect they’ve fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.

I see a lot of posts about how lemmy.ml admins are deleting any posts critical of Russia & China. Are there any receipts for those claims? I haven’t seen any actual proof, just a whole lot of people saying tankie.

I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.