ITT: HN goes mask off

Do you honestly think the H-1B visa program is not predominantly used for hiring less expensive workers with fewer choices and negotiating leverage?

The US has had its mask off since 2016-17. The tech industry somewhat more recently.

Pixel Call Screen has been a godsend for me since its debut, akin to using uBlock Origin for browsing.

"Lions for Lambs" is widely panned, but I think spoke to a particular subset of people interested in doing over talking. RIP to a great.

Who do you think gets stopped to meet quotas?

Nah - ICE under the Trump administration has deported dozens of Irish folks who have overstayed in the US, even folks from Germany and UK. There have already been famous cases like Cliona Ward from Dublin. Lot of whites kept in solitary confinement.

You can accuse the agency of authoritarianism but not racism. They are going after everyone illegally in the US.

I think most chat apps do the same, above commenter just needs to learn to count.

Protractor app when?

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

"Enshittification" is too twee.

You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.

it's more cromulent than cockwomble

I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card

Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”

That isn't what it means though. It means specifically that companies will make products and services worse over time for profit.

No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good.

Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.

That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.

> or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects

It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable.

But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.

It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.

“Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.

What you're describing, especially with the amount of water "given a detailed list of symptoms" is carrying, is essentially a compute-intensive flowchart with no concept of diagnostic parsimony.

I have a hunch that the whole "chat" interface is a brilliant but somewhat unintentional product design choice that has created this faux trust in LLM's to give back accurate information that others can get from drugs.com or Medline with a text search. This is a terrifying example, and please get her to test it out by second guessing the LLM and watching it flip flop.