Imagine working in the department the company is now named after and realizing your whole product line is irrelevant and the AI-people get all the money now.

Google announced that something like 25% of their code is AI generated now, and it’d be hilarious how much these companies have enshittified themselves into a cycle of constant self-owns except that we keep suffering for it too.

Like every google app and service is bad now. Search sucks. YouTube apps are bloated, have been crashing, and the algorithm is serving up just random stuff now. G Maps won’t stay open on my phone, and randomly minimizes itself. Gmail is out of space, full of newsletters, and also degrading in search.

Facebook is the same deal. I’ve been on it more recently because I need to track events and it’s all anyone in this city uses. Searching for the name of an event, which you’ve stated you’re going to, by it’s exact name, will find nothing, or an older version of the event from 4 years ago. The feed is 90% ads and sponsored posts, mostly videos. And the videos aren’t ads, they’re just random tiktok-wannabes about paint mixing or machining stuff. It’s utterly bizarre to be inundated with clickbait that desperately wants your attention for no reason.

I consider myself a pretty good engineer and it’s amazing how little these companies can accomplish with literally tens of thousands of developers. Its another of the great paradoxes of our times: individually, software devs must be among the least productive workers of all time, and yet as a group the profession (the computer itself really) has realized such astronomical productivity gains that we’re probably already past the point where anyone really needs to work full-time ever again.

I looked into doing something similar with Wikipedia and the recommendation is also to use Kiwix, and the offline file size is also very large.

Welcome to the collapse! Hoarding “clean data” for personal use is like hoarding clean water and food: you need a place to keep it, and it starts going stale the minute you shelve it. So either buy a digital bunker to load up with what you need or ask the all knowing AI gods for answers like the other poors.

Also the Stack Exchange software used to be open source, surely there’s still a fork somewhere. You could certainly run your own Developer QA site, but like with Lemmy, the problem then is getting enough traffic to be able to productively tap into the collective wisdom.

(Edit: sorry, this comes across mean spirited but I’m honestly sympathetic and just nihilisticallly frustrated to be in a similar situation. I foresee a big NAS and a lot of downloads in my future, but I hope we also find ways to share our forbidden knowledge until the day it can be free again)

I also stopped posting there years ago for much the same reason. You could feel the strangulation of the community as duplicate questions started getting shouted down, posts got turned into “community wikis” against your will and your own questions started getting edited to better fit someone else’s plans and ideologies. The company was sold shortly after, so maybe animals can sense their pending extinction (some of them anyway)?

I miss those days when writing an answer genuinely felt like helping to grow the global community of friend developers. It’s a shame no technology has been discovered that will let the small amount of collective good in us all work together against the assholes, but alas it seems the opposite is always true.

“Censorship forced me to flee a pro-nazi site to another pro-nazi site,” is a contradiction worth noting. It highlights the general pro-nazi vibe going around big tech.

This is called manufacturing consent. News media tells you what future the elites want so it seems inevitable and desired when they force it through. Alternative futures can never be considered.