Just seeing this now. Saved for Later on my YouTube. Really need to focus now, but thanks to big tech, I won’t lose it or forget. Thanks for posting.
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“Well, if you can afford to pay $400 for a baby monitor, you can afford a subscription for it.”
(yes, /s)
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I’m fairly sure this is the reasoning.
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Almost certainly. Just didn’t want to seem like I was… endorsing it.
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Don’t give the hospitals any ideas, please!
“If you can afford to have a baby, you can afford a subscription!”
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The Quora wedge is… well, it’s not a wedge. It’s like a splinter. It’s what happens when you search for something on Google and, if Google hasn’t rewritten your query to be something slightly more profitable for them, the top result is some Quora question/answer. You go click/tap/press your nose on the glass to read it and surprise! You can’t read it, because it’s behind a Quora registration wall. All shitty all around for everyone, definitely not a great seamless user experience.
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The enshittification of Insomnia
There once was a tool for making API calls that was beloved by programmers everywhere, called Postman. Programmers developed large catalogs of requests and queries that they developed in Postman and used in their daily jobs for various development and testing tasks. Well-written and documented queries were created, stored in files, and shared with team members. It became a regular Swiss Army knife for many people, and had a dedicated following.
One day several years ago the company that created Postman decreed that users should have to create an account and log in to use the tool, store their queries in a cloud operated by the company, and pay a license fee if they wanted to share their queries with other members of their teams. Unwilling to store sensitive information about their application’s internal calls in some untrustworthy company’s cloud, and not wanting to get caught by the enshittified version of the tool, programmers around the globe abandoned it as fast as the malignant update spread.
Postman had been nice, but was hardly a unique tool in the space. Many opted to replace it with a very similar but less feature-filled open source tool called Insomnia.
Insomnia was another Swiss Army knife type of tool that enabled developers to create and run calls against APIs. It, too, had a nice GUI, an extensive plugin system, and quickly developed a cult following of its own. And like Postman, Insomnia allowed teams to share files containing queries. Due to its usefulness as a replacement for Postman, Insomnia saw a huge spike in growth immediately following the enshittification of Postman.
For the next few years, Insomnia matured and became as polished as Postman ever had been.
Eleven days ago, as the latest round of updates to Insomnia were being downloaded and installed, developers began discovering their carefully cultivated libraries of queries had simply vanished from their screens. They were greeted by a “What’s New” message saying “welcome to the latest update. You must log in to access your saved queries, which will be automatically uploaded and will be waiting for you in our cloud. Click here to create an account and log in.”
Overnight they had decided to enshittify their tool, and appeared to take everyone’s queries as hostages. It’s as if their owner was oblivious that their historic catapult to success on the enshittification of Postman had never even happened. They went from hero to villain in literally the click of a mouse.
Insomnia’s git repo’s issue logs soon coalesced around a new issue titled “Lost all my stuff in the upgrade” in which the user (and dozens of other users) complained about their vanished queries into which they had collectively poured years of work. Many people jumped in with advice on reverting to the previous version, and disabling updates. The author posted a textbook-perfect non-pology, and a few short hours later a new patched release came out with a slightly modified “what’s new” screen that now offered a “click here to export your existing queries into a local ‘scratch pad’ without creating an account.”
It was an offensive, pointless gesture. Doubling down on greed and stupidity never pays off when you don’t already have a monopolist’s hold on your clients, yet it seems like every company tries it as their first step anyway. But hundreds of forks had already been cut from their git repo since the release, and within hours dozens of deshittified versions of Insomnia began appearing in git. Whatever goodwill they had on the previous day disappeared faster than free alcohol at a frat party. It was eerily reminiscent of Elno promising a better Twitter with his $8 checkmarks.
For those of you looking for a replacement, it looks like people are settling on the “Insomnium” fork, which has had all account logic forcibly ripped from the code base, is advertising itself as “privacy focused”, and will be getting long-term support under the Arch Linux banner.
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Somebody got communications from the lawyers of a thin skinned enshittened tech giant:
Let’s get this straight, whatever Google says it does, what it actually does is not give you the search results you asked for, but those it makes most money from. Sometimes these are sites chock full of dodgy malware (fraud), sometimes these are sites masquerading as other sites (fraud), sometimes these are networks of plagiarised sites pretending to be original content (fraud), sometimes these are LLLM (plausible sentence generator) sites posing as primary sources (fraud), and sometimes they are just ads (annoying),
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Luckily we’ve still got the web archive:
… while it lasts.
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Ctrl-Alt-R, Ctrl-S
I started doing that in 2001 after 9/11, just saving stuff so I won’t forget. I do that for research papers as well. I save the PDF and the BibTeX (somehow the one non-commercial, open source bibliography format that still works, even of the stuff I saved for my work in 1992).
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I am sure this will end well, with all the good intentions in the world
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Enshittification has come for our sweaters… time to riot.
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I remember an article about a lady who had dedicated her life to repairing her clothing, and she pointed out that most of the clothes she wore were a decade old, or older, as the quality had dropped off a cliff (her example was a Benetton sweater, but she said it was most anything in stores).
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I noticed that (some) jeans started to decrease in quality around 2010-2011, when IIRC there was a worldwide food crisis due to crop shortages*. Presumably this also affected cotton crops, and a new pair of jeans was suddenly made of lesser material (at the same price or more than before), closer in weight & feel to chino cloth than actual denim. I then found that Lee sold jeans in different colors (where a grey or khaki pair could IMO pass for office attire) and the fabric was closer to the denim of yore. As of now, Lee has dropped all the other colors besides black or multiple shades of blue from their line of straight-legged regular fit jeans.
*it’s also when I noticed that a restaurant dish that might have been $5 or less in the mid-1990s (not a lot of money, even then) had become $9 or $10. Flash-forward to 2023** and the WaPo’s fall dining guide defines “budget” where a main dish is <=$20.
**or… don’t, I wouldn’t blame ya
What I’ve done is refresh black jeans with Rit dye (which for all I know shortens the lifetime of the fabric, which OTOH is infinitely longer than I want to wear otherwise-black jeans with noticeable fades down the front). I’ve since found charcoal dye which brought my grey pairs (one a light grey) back to a darker grey color that Lee had already discontinued at least a few years ago. As for khaki, I imagine having to try a very short wash in brown dye and seeing what happens.
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