Canonical enshittification

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

Next will be: "We block links to other sites because they might be malicious."

Then some kind of "pivot to video."

Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).

Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.

I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."

That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.

All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.

If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.

This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.

I've written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

(via @neil-gaiman )

we owe literally no one more on this planet than the woman behind fantasy name generator

her name is emily and and she runs it all by herself

everyone say thanks emily!!!

THANK YOU EMILY!

[ID: A screenshot from Fantasy Name Generators of orange and white text against a dark blue background that reads:

(Will never not reblog this beauty. What genius.)

Same. :)

This was a conversation on the Internet almost 25 years ago. It's about physical fandom, and ways of talking and communicating in physical fandom, some of which we would now talk about in reference to neurointerestingess rather than to fandom. It came up over on Bluesky talking about people who pronounce words wrongly because they have only encountered them on the page.

The poster who brought it to my attention, Scott Kullberg, said "I remember an old USENET post about a speech therapist's analysis of fannish speech. One of the things she noticed is that it's common and not considered rude to interrupt with this kind of correction."

Fascinating for me because a) it checks out in some ways, b) I wasn't at the event it describes but I could have been and c) reading the thread makes me nostalgic for an Internet that's been eaten by something else. (I also very much enjoyed Patrick Nielsen Hayden's contribution.)

Star Falls by Ebineyland

Well done...👏👏👏

I like how the first one stopped to wait for his friend after he got free.

I like how the first

one stopped to wait for his friend

after he got free.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I keep seeing posts talking about the WGA/Sag-Aftra strike, which yes, good, but in all this "support writers" sentiment I'm seeing no one talk about book writers, which I think is something people should know more about right now.

We are at an all-time high for book bans, namely targeting queer & PoC-authored books. This means that a lot of schools and libraries are no longer stocking diverse YA books, and if you're not in publishing, you may not realize this but school & libraries are by far one of the biggest markets for diverse YA books.

This means that in 2023, YA book sales are down. This is also in part because Barnes & Noble (the largest physical book retailer in the U.S.) is no longer really stocking YA hardcovers. This means that marginalized authors and debut authors are struggling to sell books.

But it's a LOT worse than that. In the past couple of years, marginalized authors are *really* struggling to get new book deals. Most books are acquired by a publisher about 2 years before they release to the public, so this isn't all that noticeable yet, but a LOT of marginalized authors I've spoken to (myself included) have been unable to sell a new YA book since 2020. So while I had a book out last year, even if I sell one right now, you won't see it until 2025-2026. That's three to four years without a new release or the income I get from publishing those books.

On top of that, Big 5 publishers have started closing imprints (namely their diverse imprints) and have started telling their marginalized YA authors to just go. I've had multiple authors tell me their publisher basically said, "eh, we don't care to put in the work for you anymore. You can just go somewhere else". Of the authors who *are* getting offered new contracts, we're being offered pay far below the cost of living and we're being handed contracts that split our payments 4 or 5 ways and require we sign over our work to be used to train AI so they can replace us a few years down the road.

Authors are freelancers who own our IPs, which means we can't unionize the way Hollywood writers can, and despite authors showing up in droves to support HarperCollins employees when they went on strike for fair wages, we're being hung out to dry when it comes to our own rights.

If you enjoy diverse books, especially diverse YA, please understand that many of the authors you loved over the past 3-5 years are being forced out of the industry. We're being exploited, and we have no way to defend ourselves. Our books sales are drying up thanks to anti-queer legislation, our rights are being eaten up by AI, and our publishers are degrading us while profiting of us and refusing to share those profits with us.

Within the publishing industry, we've all been watching this decline happen over the last decade, but outside of it, I know most people have no idea what's going on so please spread the word. And if you care about diverse books especially in YA, please support marginalized authors in any way you can. The industry needs to be reminded that it needs us before we're all eliminated from it.

This. :/

Laundrosaurus, a piece of household surrealism, by Helga Stentzel

Dimitri Sirenko, “Faith and Fate”, 2020 Oil on canvas, 60 x 91cm

Long covid has derailed my life. Make no mistake: It could yours, too.

Because it is not mentioned by name in the article!:

If any of you develop “violent new food allergies” after having covid — even allergies that present as migraines, malaise, nausea, irritability rather than swelling and itching — you need to get checked for mast cell activation syndrome. It is staggeringly common to develop from long covid and is often treatable.

A 4,500-year-old Egyptian dress was painstakingly reassembled from approximately 7,000 beads found in an undisturbed tomb in Giza, Egypt. The dress is thought to have belonged to a female contemporary of King Khufu (2589-2566 BC). While the original strings had disintegrated over the years, the beads were still in their original position, allowing for an accurate reconstruction. Although the color of the beads had faded, they were originally blue and turquoise. Initially believed to have been worn for a dancing ritual, the dress's heavy weight suggests that it may have been used during funerals, according to archaeologists.

More: https://thetravelbible.com/mysterious-archaeological-finds/

Support us: https://www.facebook.com/becomesupporter/museum.of.artifacts/

Reblog if you’re over 20 and still read/write fan fiction.

I’m curious!

Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)

Long ago, @dduane and I had a Whirlpool combi microwave - micro, grill, fan oven - and It Was Great, big enough to use as a proper oven when what needed cooked in a proper oven was small enough that powering up the big proper oven in the cooker was a bit much.

Still with me...?

IIRC it was one of those Christmas presents where Mum, ever-practical, told us; "get yourselves something really useful but not too expensive (I did say practical!) and I'll go halves."

In 2016, after something like 15 years of pretty-well daily use for one thing and another, the old thing expired by stages, micro first, grill second, oven last - it made great bread up until the end - and went to recycling heaven.

*****

We couldn't find a one-for-one replacement (we needed a free-standing counter-top appliance, everyone was selling built-in), so until once was available (optimism) we bought an ordinary microwave.

NB, this and its successors were only used for ordinary microwave things like reheating, defrosting and dealing with freeze-cook stuff. They got nothing like the amount of use of the old combi, mostly because of being incapable of doing a lot of it. As things turned out, this didn't help much.

About eighteen months later, we had to buy another. If a microwave's enamel interior develops a crack (to this day I don't know how), moisture gets in, rust begins and the enamel pulls off the bare metal. That's when you get "sparking".

This demo is deliberate; believe me, when it's unexpected it's even worse.

A private welder show or lightning storm at the end of the kitchen counter when all you want is a hot cuppa is distinctly unsettling. Also, it's only going to get worse, and we could imagine - boy, could we - what "Much Worse" might look like.

To the recycle dump!

(NB, micros with stainless steel interiors don't seem to do this, probably because they're already tuned to deal with the bare metal.)

The replacement, another ordinary micro, Just Up And Died after eighteen months and, guess what, the quote for a check-up and replacements-if-required was as much as the price of a new one.

(Inkjet printers seem to operate on this principal too.)

To the recycle dump again!

We got a third new one (which BTW is still running just fine, because it's been downgraded to Extra, read on), totalled up what we'd spent on ordinary microwaves, said a few well-chosen words about planned obsolescence and the "Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Economic Inequality" and got ourselves a pre-pay credit card whose top-ups were dedicated to Get A Combi Again.

We didn't bother with GACA baseball caps.

That would have been silly.

I don't know if these cards exist in the USA; we treat them as the modern version of a piggy-bank...

...except that to get at the money you need two people acting in accord.

*****

And in 2021 we got one.

Okay, this next bit is going to read like an ad.

It isn't, because the appliance is discontinued. (Whirlpool FINALLY do something similar but not identical.) It's just enthusiastic users discovering there's even more to a gadget than expected.

*****

The New One even bigger than the old one, which had 28 litres capacity; the new one was 33 L (was .99 ft³, is now 1.16 ft³). In non-tech terms, wow, More Room To Cook In.

Reading the figures was no help (to me, anyway) in visualising what a maw the thing had, but opening the door did that and no mistake.

I said something to DD about "bite radius"...

...and she instantly responded with "anyway, we delivered the bomb".

We're a quotesy household. ;->

BTW, The New One does a very good job on seafood, too...

*****

Since we got this, almost exactly two years ago, we've used it from reheating tea to roasting meat to making chilli / goulash / stew / curry (you can run the oven / grill separately or add simultaneous zaps of microwave for much less cooking time) to baking bread.

One of the best things about it is that when the set cooking time is done, the appliance switches off automatically. No risk of busyness, absent-mindedness or out-in-the-garden-ness ending in clouds of smoke, ruined food and possibly even worse.

As for breadmaking, it has a dough-rise setting which is a Time Machine, reducing a two-hour "doubled in size" rise time to about 35-35 minutes...

It also has the most reliable Defrost Butter setting either of us have ever encountered, turning a rock-solid butter brick from the freezer into something spreadable while never - to date - doing the "never mind a butter-knife, give me a spoon or a paintbrush" thing.

*****

However...

There's also a "Chef Setting" where there are some simple recipes. Here's the pastry page.

Basically, you assemble and mix the ingredients, input the correct settings and the machine does all the timing, heating and cooking.

We'd never used this until yesterday, when DD said, "Let's try the sponge cake..."

Yes, this post was entitled "Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)..." and here we are...

We did all the measuring correctly and checked it by pouring the mixture into a baking container while on the scale, wondering betimes why the recipe says 900g, the ingredients total 925 and what actually poured into the container reads 906... Weird. Really weird.

Then we put the container into the oven, entered the correct code, and let things do what they were going to do.

A little later we discovered something else about the recipe besides a weight anomaly.

It didn't mention the required size of the container. Or or how much the mixture was likely to rise.

It rose...

Let's say more than we expected...

The fluted ceramic container used for baking this one makes it look like a Vesuvius cupcake; not quite a pyroclastic flow, but a lot of flow regardless.

Once it cooled we separated the sponge-cake from the escaped sponge in the same way as sculptors work with wood or marble - "Chip away everything that doesn't look like a cake" - and found that despite its misshapen looks, it tasted pretty good.

So today DD made another, this time using a larger container.

...and this time it stayed put until removed using the cunning base-and-lifting-straps of baking parchment.

It's not the loftiest or best-risen sponge cake either of us have ever seen (a smaller-diameter higher-sided container would probably deal with that) BUT if there's something needing sponge cake in a hurry - this went from cupboard ingredients to done and cooling in less than 55 minutes - that treatment seems to fit the bill.

We're now wondering what other secrets lurk in the simple recipe pages; falafel, quiche Lorraine, stuffed peppers, even Flammkuchen* from scratch.

(*Though I have my own views about Flammkuchen, mostly involving a plane flight...)

And we'll be paying a lot more attention to what size of dish we put them in. :->

That's one of our more spectacular failures. :) Or one of the showier ones, anyway.

Is this a prank? What….

Edit: holy heck it’s real…

They might be able to help us…

The stage that they're at is animal testing but it sounds like it's been successful in mouse and primate models.

My understanding: The way autoimmune diseases usually seem to work* is the immune system is "flagging" the wrong thing as harmful/not needed and destroying it. The typical treatments for autoimmune diseases are just tamping the entire immune system down so it can't destroy anything, which leaves a person vulnerable to infection.

The newer method is basically "tricking" the body using a method that... the human body already came up with. Cells flagging the wrong thing apparently happens all the time, so there are multiple defenses against immune disease, and one of them is in the liver. So scientists figured out a way to tell the body "hey, you flagged this wrong" and sent it to the liver and the liver/body recognized this signal.

There is still a lot of work to be done and it sounds like this isn't foolproof (ie: what if the liver is whats broken? unsure, and what if the immune system flags things wrong again?) but this is literally so amazing. i was tearing up reading it, and i hope that everything goes well in clinical trials.

*theres like a lot medical science doesnt know about the immune system

Thank you for this explanation/synthesis of the article! It's important for us to understand that they're still in early development and testing of these methods, but also that they've seen it work in mice and primates (rather than just petri dishes of human cells). I hope this goes well.

Hi! I'm a microbiologist and I've done work in academia, pharma, and clinical trials.

So the most exciting thing about this article is the last paragraph tbh (working on getting the actual paper, it's not up on sci-hub yet).

The company mentioned, Anokion, has four registered clinical trials for both Celiac and MS patients. The trial for Celiac just submitted data from their phase 1 trial (meaning there's good data it is safe) and are recruiting for a Phase 1/2 trial (meaning they are now testing efficacy). After that, the big hurdle is phase 3, which looks at whether or not it is better than a current treatment. The projected completion date is spring 2025. They are also preparing for a Phase 2 trial but are not yet recruiting.

The phase 1 MS trial is currently active, estimated completion in summer 2024.

I checked the company website and it looks like they are in the process of submitting an investigational new drug (IND) application for Type 1 diabetes. This is the first step to starting clinical safety and efficacy trials.

Now clinical trials can get delayed for a variety of reasons, but this is a really good sign! It's way further along than I initially thought when seeing the news. If the treatment does well, we could see new drugs on the market for Celiacs as early at 2030ish and MS as early as 2035.

The real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders

-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers

(via @neil-gaiman)

Happy 80th birthday, Ikea. Here is your cake.

The story of the sun, moon, and stars. 1898. Book cover.

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