Enshittification

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Matterport_May_2025_subscription_pricing_restructure

So, just a heads up for anyone who hasn't had red vines in a while, I have some bad news. I haven't had red vines in maybe 2-3 years. I bought some last night, and.....enshitification.

They are sooooooo thin now! They used to be girthy tubes. Like the size of straws. Now it's less of a vine, and more of a hollow slightly wobbly stick. Still tastes how I remember. But there's like half of what it used to be.

Would not have bought it if I knew how bad it got. Figured I'd save you guys some money for anyone who cares about this sort of thing. Which, given the community, I would assume would be the vast majority of you.

Blog post, if you'd rather read text than watch video: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/bambu-lab-abusing-open-source-social-contract/

Nice to hear Roman Mars saying a naughty word repeatedly as his anger level rises. Also, great episode number.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46052675

Hugely terrible DRM has now been rolled out to all PS4 and PS5 digital games. Every digital game you buy now requires an online check-in every 30 days. If you buy a digital game and don't connect your console to the internet for 30 days, your license will be removed.

Source [2026-04-25; +image]

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You wouldn't "lose" it, the licence would be restored after connecting to internet... provided Sony's servers are still functioning when you do...

Source [2026-04-25]

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...Trophies on PS4 require the internal system clock (the one you can’t see / alter) to be correct, so people cant change their PS4 date/time to make it look like they got trophies earlier than they really did. If your PS4 clock battery dies, all your games die

Source [2021-03-23]

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Newly purchased PS4 games now have 30 day valid license timer.
Most likely introduced in March 2026 firmware.
Could be a bug similar to an incident from 2022.
PS5 is affected too, but only shows an error when starting a game.

Source [2026-04-25]

[Image] "Don't Starve Together" (PlayStation)

Newer pair of glasses nose pad keeps falling off because the newer screws are shorter than the old ones. Paid about the same price for them to cut corners off a few MM in the screws.

I brought a pair from Zenni Jan 2023, and no issues with the nose pad ever coming off. Because of new eye prescription and I had to get new glasses, so I went with the same pair. Got that pair in July 2025, didn’t have any problems til recently, the nose pad screw have completely unscrewed off. The first time it happened I didn’t think much of it. The second time it happened I realized the screws from the old and new are not the same.

Old screws

A. 2.3241 mm = .0915 in

B. 2.3241 mm = .0915 in

New screws

A. 2.2225 mm = .0875 in

B. 2.2479 mm = .0885 in

Difference

A. .1016 mm = .0004in

B. .0762 mm = .0003in

I wanted to save some money so that why I went with Zenni, but after this experience I don’t want to deal with them anymore. Got any recommend for a brand that doesn’t cut corner? If I have to pay more to avoid enshitification so be it.

March 26 (Reuters) - OpenAI's ChatGPT ads pilot in the United States has crossed the $100 million annualized revenue mark within six weeks of launch, a company ​spokesperson said on Thursday, pointing to robust early demand for the ‌AI startup's nascent advertising business.

Sam Altman-led OpenAI had said in January that it would start showing ads in ChatGPT to some U.S. users, ramping up efforts to generate revenue ​from the AI chatbot to fund the high costs of ​developing the technology. The ads were to be tested with users ⁠on the company's free tier and the lower-priced Go plan.

The ads ​are separate from the answers generated by ChatGPT and do not influence its ​outputs. User conversations are not shared with marketers, the company said at the time.

While roughly 85% of users are currently eligible to see ads, fewer than 20% are ​shown ads daily, with considerable room to grow ad monetization within the ​existing user pool, the spokesperson said.

"We're seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low ‌dismissal ⁠rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback," OpenAI said.

The company plans to expand the test globally in additional countries in the coming weeks, including in Australia, New Zealand, ​and Canada.

OpenAI has ​now expanded to ⁠over 600 advertisers, with nearly 80% of small- and medium-sized businesses signaling interest in ChatGPT ads, the spokesperson said.

The ​ChatGPT maker is set to launch self-serve advertiser capabilities ​in April ⁠to broaden access and drive further growth.

David Dugan, a former Meta (META.O), opens new tab ads executive, was named to lead OpenAI's global advertising solutions team earlier this week.

Analysts ⁠said ​that ads could unlock a significant revenue stream ​from millions of ChatGPT users, but the move could irk some customers and hurt trust ​in the product.

Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/3838226

I was annoyed enough to write all of this up. I used to go regularly, and the rewards program was genuinely a good deal, and made it worth going to Starbucks. Now, even if I set aside all of the horrible things they're doing, I wanted to show just what an absolute shit program this is, and why there is absolutely no use in trying to "gain starbucks status".

Late Night with Seth Meyers

Most grocery stores in my country have established an App (or card) you're supposed to use and it's slowly but surely going down the route of enshitification.

They start by letting you collect points. Then it's extra savings. Eg regular price is 3€, sale price is 1.80€ but app users get it for 1.50€. Cool, a way to save some money, you might think. Nope. Once they reach a critical mass of app users it continues to sales being App-only so everyone is now forced to use the App but there's no bonus left. Two of the biggest chains are at this stage. You now have the regular price (3€) and the app price (1.80€) which is the exact situation as before the app existed but they force you to jump through some extra hoops to get it.

Additionally to that they collect all this data with the sole purpose of manipulating you into spending more money at their store than you did before. They extract their profits from their customers and if we help them get more efficient at that it'll be us that lose out.

Tl;dr: Fuck store apps.

A line from Ethan Mollick’s most recent newsletter (“Claude Code and What Comes Next”) caught my eye. Mollick tries out Claude Code and sees a step-change in AI capabilities:

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website (filled with very sketchy fake marketing claims) that sold the promised 500 prompt set. You can actually see the site it launched here, though I removed the sales link, which did actually work and would have collected money. I strongly suspect that if I ignored my conscience and actually sold these prompt packs, I would make the promised $1,000.

Mollick isn’t the only one who’s impressed. It’s being described as a “general-purpose AI agent.” Casey Newton has declared himself a “Claude Code believer.” Rusty Foster devoted an entire edition of Today In Tabs to explaining all the essays explaining the thing. Andy Hall thinks it will revolutionize political science.

I haven’t tried out Claude Code yet. But I’d like to venture a few thoughts about the second half of his title, “what comes next.” Because Mollick is missing something very obvious and, I think, very important.

Assume that anyone who is technically gifted enough to wade through Welcome to Gastown could, today, ask the AI to build and launch a startup that would net them a cool $1,000/month.

How long would you expect that to last? What actually comes next?

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/34737706

In a third world country that doesn't care much about individuals torrenting. All 4 ISP we have block Torrent sites but that is easily solved be changing DNS. However, the problem is that we have qouta in here. One gigabyte (home dsl) costs 1.5 pounds, 1 gigabyte on mobile data costs 50 pounds = 1$. You can see the different bundles that two famous ISPs provide which is basically the same in links below: https://eshop.vodafone.com.eg/en/internetServices/dsl/dsl-bundles

https://dsl.orange.eg/en/packages/home-internet-packages

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/845753

Comments

Video presentation by Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari of Signal on the dangers and risks of AI Agents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/52490318

As you have probably seen, the new Legion Space update is mostly ads on the home screen. The only way to avoid this is by turning off your WiFi before opening Legion Space and turning off "Automatically Update Resources".

Instead use LLT (Lenovo Legion Toolkit). Open source alternative.

https://github.com/XKaguya/LenovoLegionToolkit

Incase you are not aware what Legion Space is:

Lenovo Legion Space is Lenovo’s unified gaming hub app for Legion devices that lets users launch games, tune performance, tune CPU/GPU and fan profiles, and control RGB lighting from a single interface, effectively replacing or complementing Lenovo Vantage on newer Legion systems by centralizing game-focused controls and organizing titles across services for quick access on Legion laptops and handhelds such as the Legion Go, in a role similar to other OEM gaming hubs like Asus Armoury Crate or Acer PredatorSense.