I’m 20 years younger than you and use em dashes all the time. Memorised the alt code for it on Windows 20 years ago.

Oh no, I didn’t take it that way. In fact your first sentence could very well be my reply back to you!

Metal detectors in schools are dystopian

Sounds like they fit right in in the country where children are regularly and routinely murdered while at school and society at large is ok with it.

Only since like last year, so it’s not a huge surprise someone would be unaware.

You can literally see untinted yellow in the rest of the shop

It’s in a shop? It looks like massively blown out bright sunlight looking out through a doorway. I literally cannot comprehend the idea that anyone actually sees it as blue and black. And I’ve always been pretty good at being able to flip my brain to see either interpretation of other optical (and auditory) illusions.

A strike is when you withhold your labour in an effort to extract concessions from the people for whom you provide that labour.

No part of that actually requires an employment relationship. Volunteer strikes are not nearly as common as employee strikes are, but they’re not all that uncommon either. They just require that the volunteers are providing, in the form of their labour, a significant amount of value to the organisation against which they are striking.

You may remember that Reddit moderators did it in response to admins removing API access. On that occasion, it failed in no small part due to a lack of discipline in the strikers themselves.

In Wikipedia’s case, it’s due to the Wikimedia Foundation disbanding the team responsible for dealing with the least of Wikipedia editors’ feature requests, in favour of distributing that work across its regular dev teams. (Editors are volunteers, but developers are paid Wikimedia employees.) The fear is that these employees will inevitably prioritise their own internal work over the feature requests of editors, so features that editors are asking for will not be delivered. The degree of success will largely depend on how many of the highest-volume editors participate, and whether average, low-volume editors (a) join in in solidarity, and if not, (b) are able to pick up the slack.

No local storage or offline capability

PWAs can do both of these. In fact, the definition of a PWA includes that it has some functionality offline. (Though this criteria can be met by serving a simple “sorry, you’re offline right now” page. So long as it isn’t the browser’s default “no connection” error.)

Their business model is shit and I can’t understand why anyone buys it. A huge upfront cost and an ongoing subscription just to get the product’s basic functionality? Fuck that. Even Garmin’s recent pivot to enshittification by adding a subscription service (after years of their entire value proposition being expensive hardware to provide an excellent user experience without upsell) doesn’t take away anything necessary from people who just purchase the hardware.

Umm, what did I just read?

I don’t know why you think linking the same video as was in the comment I just replied to adds any value. Are you that video’s creator? Is this all just a way to drive clicks?

You obviously didn’t watch the interview with the actual company’s CEO that I linked. Let alone read the comments under it. Let me share one.

Despite all the signs that this was a parody, I literally paid them 50 cents for a test “liberation” to see if it was a joke. The tool actually did something, but not only did it violate cleanroom logic by including implementation instructions in the documentation, but the “liberated” code runs almost twice as slow as the original. And to make it even funnier, the “liberated” code was licensed under… the exact same MIT license as the original.

So…it doesn’t do what it says it does.

It’s a company literally called “evil”. The CEO did an interviewer with an AI satirist and he completely refused to take it seriously, saying things like “we receive a lot of love letters…asking as where we live”, “we’re liberating the world of open source software”, and “if people don’t like the work that we do, they might like the work that our customers do even less, because our customers are the ones that are paying us for our services, and we’re just making our bag”.

This is obviously not a serious product.

I was honestly expecting the link to be too this: https://youtu.be/bpqFZBWcStU

Which certainly presents it as though it’s sincere. But anyone with basic media literacy and familiarity with the interviewer in that video (and I do mean and. Anyone lacking either of those can be forgiven.) cannot help but realise that it’s satire. And if you’re unsure, read the comments.

Enshittification doesn’t mean “making a good system bad”. It’s a specific process whereby the user experience of a platform is degraded in order to benefit the business partners. Then even the business partners are ripped off to benefit the platform owners.

It wouldn’t, but translating to the currency of the reader is very commonplace.

The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics

The thing is, that’s not what layoffs are supposed to be. That’s effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn’t matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it “layoffs”.

If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.

But a car or some other form of stable four-wheeled transport that can move them from door to door is necessary for a disabled person’s mobility

Which disabled person? Disabled people are not a monolith, and many are unable to drive but perfectly capable of riding a bike, adaptive or otherwise.

In 6 months no one will have to manually write code anymore

For the last 18 months

No, that’s completely fair. And Dave’s well-publicised admiration for Jimmy Donaldson certainly doesn’t help in that respect. (They also seem like they may have previously had a professional relationship, though the details and extent are unclear.)

But everything he or the other founders have said about Nebula makes it sound like they’re doing the right thing, and they are very deliberately avoiding the number one cause of companies that were once fair ceasing to be fair: venture capital. There’s no outside source that could turn around and demand to get a greater return on their investment against the wishes of those operating the company.

As far as a lifetime subscription to Nebula, I’ve watched way too many sites fail/die to consider a lifetime subscription to anything on the internet. They could shut the site down tomorrow, and now I’m out $500 ($300 if I happen to get a discount from a creator code).

There’s no “happen to”. It’s the default expectation. You can go through literally any creator on the site to get that, it’s not a time-limited thing or anything like that.

As for the rest of it, it’s certainly a possibility. But it will only take 10 years before that lifetime membership becomes strictly better than paying yearly. And the reason they’re doing it is to avoid one of the biggest sources of companies with fundamentally-sound businesses going bankrupt: investors deciding they want to squeeze. They use the lifetime memberships as an alternative to seeking outside investment from venture capital. And from what we’ve seen, it certainly does appear to be a fundamentally sound business. It has seemed to be growing in both the amount and the range of content it offers at a pretty steady rate, and all indications are that their subscriber count is growing along with that.

It certainly is a risk, without a doubt. There’s a reason Nebula themselves say that the objectively best option is the yearly membership. Lifetime membership is directly presented by them as an investment you can make in the company; something to do because you believe in what they’re doing and want to help them, with the potential for some payoff down the line (but honestly not very much).

Oh wow, that’s a pleasantly surprising conclusion.

Out of interest, got any updates?