- cross-posted to:
- enshittification
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- enshittification
- [email protected]
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About the PDF chapter: you (and the publishers) use it wrong. PDF was never intended for processing, only for representation; think of it as a digital print. Scientific stuff should be published in an e-book format instead.
this list is more concepts then actual enshittification. No YouTube, no reference to Google searches less helpful results. No reference to ad overload plaguing more services. No reference to crappy TOS’s with artibution clauses. It’s just using an excuse to say AI bad and rehash concepts learned back in 2015 with the drive to drop cable.
Bad article. Weak, had a chance to put actual offenders on blast with their platform but just softballs it with “general concepts” they feel are shitty. Aside from google stuff like search that is the most softball answer. And more likely google isn’t one of their advertisers
Ars itself has become pretty enshittified. It doesn’t hold a candle when compared to itself 10 years ago. Also, they mentioned Doctorow several times but apparently they couldn’t be arsed to put even a single link to his blog… why?
Even the part about Google Search only highlights the AI crap and skips over the real problem of increasingly worse search results. The whole article is more of a rant from a user’s perspective and there aren’t any real insights.
Another space where they avoid offending advertisers, who are the real thing that ruined google search (along with seo bullshit).
Like if the only change to google search was the ai blurb I don’t think people would care nearly as much. They care because the actual results are heavily weighted to be sponsored results above all else for the entire first page, and the second page is designed to redirect you to images or other things that push you to start a new search (thus seeing new sponsored results). What you wanted to find is meaningless, it’s solely about shoveling products and services down your fucking throat
AT enshittified themselves over the last couple of years. Used to be great source.
Arse Technica is the prime example of enshittification
I don’t get it, why you’re being downvoted for saying something true? Ars was much better years ago
wrecks the thing I care most about: copying and pasting details that I need to write articles. Instead, I often get garbled, shortened pieces of other parts of the document intermingled with the text I want—assuming I can even select it in the first place.
There are two things doing this: PDF optimisation and document obfuscation.
The Optimisation thing is something I’ve seen with many asian PDFs. If they want to use a non-standard font, and want the document to actually use it, they have to embed it into the PDF, potentially blowing it up size-wise. In comes the optimiser: It looks which of the thousands of glyphs of that asial language are actually used in that document, and creates a new font with only those glyphs. This font has a totally different numbering scheme from the original font, so it also replaces the numbers in the document that represent those glyphs. Result: A much smaller PDF. It looks the same, it prints the same. You can still “copy” the characters, but as their only meaning is related to the internal representation of the font, you cannot past them into e.g. Google Translate. It’s just gibberish.
Example: The text is “Jack and Jill”, and the numbers in the document representing those characters would be ASCII/UNICODE: 74 97 99 107 32 97 110 100 32 74 105 108 108 (74 being ‘J’, 97 being ‘a’, etc.). This is standard and works basically everywhere. The optimizer sees the letters " Jacdikln" (sorted) and assigns them numbers starting with e.g. 0 for " " (space), 1 for “J”, etc. The images for all other characters are thrown away, as they are not needed. The internal numbers for the text are now 1 2 3 6 0 2 8 4 0 1 5 7 7, which are not standard ASCII/UNICODE, and copying them to another application would just result in problems.
The Obfuscation is often done by putting additional text in the background color behind the main text. You cannot see it, it does not show up in prints, but when you select a piece of text, it gets copied along, if you like it or not.
So you see “Jack and Jill” in black, but behind it is “went up the hill” in white, and you copy something like “Jacwentk upandth hiell”.
90% of the offenders belong to Google & Co. So maybe its time to ditch big tech and choose better alternatives / go open source.
Checks list… Youtube?
No. So not a serious list then…
