Tech Tips Canada

Cory Doctrow (who’s on Mastodon by the way!  https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic ) came up with this term called Enshittification. In fact he has a video on this (from Defcon 32) https://youtu.be/4EmstuO0Em8?si=Tf-T9B_c6x2yB2VM

The word is the practice of a business that tempts you with a cheap service, and tempts businesses with cheap advertising and connections, then lowers the quality of the service to force you to see more ads, then make the service poorer for the businesses then goes belly up or implodes and takes whatever profits it can away.

I’d like to offer an extension of this. Shrinkflation, endless updates that break things and add features that nobody wants or remove features that were once usefull. Poor corporate decisions and dumping extra labour on people while jacking the prices.

Self service kiosks:enshittification
Endless food recalls due to contamination:enshittification
AI: mostly enshittification

The world continues to get more and more enshittified and that’s a bit of a tragedy

Duracell batteries used to be so good. They’d last a long time and just be a great product.
Now, they are absolute garbage. They leak, they burst, they’re just gross. I’ve had so many things ruined by these trashy batteries. We’re moving to Energizer now. I’ll never buy these again.

leaking duracell battery

I’m yelling at the chatGPT cloud as Wolfram Mathemmatica is a shell of it now

I did a trial install of Mathematica 14 (The Thirring Institute is a Mathematica shop).  I was pretty excited to try out the new LLM features. The Big Change(tm) advertised for this version was the inclusion of AI. I tried to use the various AI features and found it’s just a shell to ChatGPT, not even Wolfram(the company behind it)’s own stuff. Trying to use it gives errors like “Unable to complete the task, rate limited” (even on the first use). Other features require a paid ChatGPT 4 account. Keep in mind, Mathematica can cost up to several thousand dollars (depending on if you’re in industry, government or even a student)

Now don’t get me wrong, Mathematica is an amazing product, filled with many many features. I’ve been using it since the first version. Incredibly powerful and wonderful stuff. However, if your best feature is an enshitified shell of someone else’s product, than your new product isn’t that great either! If you’re going to buy Mathematica, get it for all the internal features and other cool things. Forget the AI crap

Mathematica 14 logo

The issue could be on the internal side due to the wierd nature of the thirring network setup

Turns out there’s something called the Amazon A to Z guarantee that guarantees if a third party seller doesn’t acknowledge your issue within 3 days you can contact them and they’ll sort it out. We had contacted the seller who had “escalated” the issue but did nothing with it. After the three days, we contacted Amazon. Next thing you know there was a UPS shipping label ready to go. UPS picked the massive bookshelf up. We did eventually get our refund. Still a pain.. I ended up getting the chalkboard from someone else.

I ordered a chalkboard from Amazon to add to my studio. Sounded like a good idea at the time. Took two weeks+ to get here, but did I get the chalkboard? Nope. I got a large and very heavy bookshelf.

.

Absolute incompetence on the part of the seller. The wrong item packaged.. Purolator weighed in as 1 lb. Clearly nobody was paying attention. Gets worse! Contact the seller. All they do is send us a Canada Post shipping label and expect us to cart this massive heavy (50lb)plus bookshelf we didn’t order to there in order to ship it back. They won’t even send the chalkboard I’d originally ordered. Just a refund. (Hardly making up for all the extra effort put in to return it). There’s no direct contact with the seller, just a tiny portal into the vast ocean of crap that is Amazon. I sure wish this seller would do the right thing, have it picked up and provide what I’d already ordered.

What a complete disaster!

When I’d first set this site up, I’d hoped it would be a place to find fixes and such, but I never got that part off the ground for a variety of reasons. This blog will now become a place for me to discuss my thoughts on technological trends, issues, and problems I see with today’s technology. I see alot of things that are stupid, irritating and angering with the way current technology works. Hopefully this will provide some thoughtful insight