Aral Balkan
In case you’re wondering how little old Kitten performs in the tests of the Big Boys…
(And that’s from a development build of a page, not a deployment build so no compressed, live reload script in there, etc.)
Turns out it’s pretty easy to ace such tests when you’re not spending cycles and code doing horrible things to people in your web pages (like tracking their every move and attempting to exploit their behaviour for profit). 🤔
:kitten:💕
Aral Balkan
PS.
Kitten: https://codeberg.org/kitten/app
Domain: https://codeberg.org/domain/app
Aral Balkan
Big Web folks: Performance is the most important thing.
Also Big Web folks: let’s make every web page a real-time auction where you’re sold off to the highest bidder.
You wouldn’t have to be so obsessed with performance if you weren’t trying to hide all the shady shit you’re pulling in the background.
#BigWeb #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalism #SiliconValley #adTech #VC
Aral Balkan
@Natanox This is exactly what I was trying to explain to people when Better (https://better.fyi) was still around :)
https://observer.com/2016/10/aral-balkan-dokutech/
Also see: https://better.fyi/sites/forbes.com
Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸
@aral People should explain sth. like Pi-Hole to others not just as adblocker and security measure, but also as speedbooster. All those unecessary requests bouncing even before your router can be a huge accelerator.
Chris Gioran 💔
@aral The amount of human effort and power consumption that goes into generating and mining "clickstreams" is astonishing.
This accumulation of "digital exhaust" is a huge waste of human creativity and material resources that does *nothing* except serve capitalists. It's a huge industry that were it excised from society _everyone_ would benefit.
And i classify as bullshit job every single one in this racket.
Chris Gioran 💔
@Natanox @aral When i worked at Neo4j, a DBMS vendor, "scalability" was always an issue. Almost always poorly defined and very very few cases actually needed large amounts of data (>10TB).
Definitely not all of these, but a fair amount, were click streams or other user tracking cases. And they cost insane amounts of compute and storage to run, and armies of people just wasting their time creating basically nothing.
I hate this.
Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸
@chrisg @aral It is. Context-based advertising isn't worse in any capacity - it even turned out to be better where it was used. No tracking tech required, lower power consumption, same range (turns out people who're shopping in the smartphone category are interested in technology products, wow!), no need for intense data brokerage etc.
However that simply can not be. Tracking-based ads are the only reason Google, Meta etc. exist.
Which is why they must die. 😈
Aral Balkan
@avirr @chrisg You don’t have to design a system so some corporation sees what you do, your own devices can see what you do and adapt accordingly. I’m afraid that’s just the excuse they use to justify their surveillance-based business model.
Avi Rappoport (avirr)
@chrisg @aral The one place they are really valuable is making search results better — seeing what people actually do is the only way to improve.
Chris Gioran 💔
@aral @avirr It is a common reaction to say that progress wouldn't have occurred if these applications weren't funded by <insert capitalist venture>.
I call bullshit on that.
It implies that only capitalism fuels innovation, which is a blatantly uninformed position and useful only as post hoc justification of externalities.
"Sure, we may have caused all this harm, but look at this one problem that got solved by the tech we developed"
Yeah, how about we solved _that_ specific problem instead?
Aral Balkan
@chrisg @avirr But, Chris, if we just solve problems without creating fundamentally exploitative systems, how are we going to have billionaires?
Chris Gioran 💔
@wakame @aral @avirr If something useful is produced by VC funded ventures is coincidental and just useful PR, not the goal. The goal is perpetuating capital.
And i cannot stress the magnitude of the theft that is people not owning what they work on. It is sickening and one of the reasons i quit my job. I can't believe i've done all this work on a pretty big system, over a number of years, and i own _no part_ of it. None, zero.
wakame
We built a system where people don't have enough time and energy to work on new things, because they have to make ends meet.
Venture capital "allows" people to have the freedom to create they should have anyway.
And they only ask for the rights to those new things in exchange. How generous...
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