#platformdecay — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #platformdecay, aggregated by home.social.
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@quidcumque thanks for your thoughts on this one, marked them for later bc spoilers. i put it on a 3 of 5, where 1 = not finished and 2 bad and 3 OK and 4 superb and 5 = everyone should read this!
really would like to get a 9th novel in which wells would expand on the inner reflections and some moral paradoxa, e.g. through interactions inbetween humans and #murderbot including other hacked #SecUnits.
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With all the #AIDeskilling and #enshittification, people (and junior software engineers, sorry, "junior vibe coders") will be asking this in ten years.
And the last true software engineers who can still write code on their own will weep, because nobody remembers them and everyone takes slop for granted.
#AI #deskilling #LLMs #artificialIntelligence #noAI #vibeCoding #genAI #generativeAI #platformDecay #ensh11n
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Murderbot has tried hard to blend in with (augmented) humans, running codes to alter its body language, but also checking in with its emotions and staying focused on security work; at one point it asks itself "If you don’t actually want to do anything, are you still capable of being manipulated into doing things?". Three, on the other hand, is interested in nature and engineering and goes on tangents while not trying to blend in so hard.
(4/n)
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The story feels tight and closed because of this setting, but also because we mostly get Murderbot's thoughts and little interaction, even if the violent kind, with others. Murderbot has installed a module to check on its emotions, and thinks about moral choices like not killing because it upsets the small humans.
Plus there are other SecUnits running around now using the governor module hack, and this continues to be on Murderbot's mind.
(3/n)
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So, "Platform Decay" by Martha Wells, eighth (how can it be eight already?!) volume in the Murderbot series. Where the last one was all about going out, traveling, setting others free, this has a claustrophobic feel. It's set on a giant toroidal spaceport surrounding a dead planet, where our SecUnit is on a mission to extract three kidnapped members of Mensah's family.
(1/n)
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The plot focuses on the logistics of getting *off* the torus, which involves travelling around it by various uncomfortable modes of transportation. These parts reminded me a lot of Charlie Stross's "Neptune's Brood", where characters often remark that "space travel is shit". The torus is an engineering masterpiece, same as "Ringworld", but Murderbot isn't interested in that, it just wants off it.
(2/n)
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How Murderbot will deal with these different choices free SecUnits can make is an interesting question and could lead to much growth.
(I think this can be read as a "masked vs. unmasked autism" metaphor, but I don't want to, because metaphors like that make me uncomfortable.)
All in all: enjoyable, exactly as advertised.
(5/n, n=5)
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What's good for Google's investors must also be good for DuckDuckGo (https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/11/why-googles-new-ai-saturated-search-page-will-be-a-disaster/). Seriously, has anyone else switched to DuckDuckGo as their default search engine?
#Google #AI #AISlop #deGoogle #DuckDuckGo #GoogleSearch #platformDecay #searchEngines -
"(It was actually nice to see it. Do I have to do an emotion check for that? Floating river = not terrible to see.)"
Organic tissue likes water 💙
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"I recognized the tags and heading. It was my own (Murderbot 2.0’s own) hack-your-governor-module annotated code bundle. One or more of the B-E units I had given the code to on Hell Plague Planet must have passed it on. (Except this wasn’t a B-E unit. The code must be spreading, I guess. At least on this stupid torus.)"
Fuck yes.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@Pentapod/116525038714117793
It me 😅
(Okay, I did work at work, but I totally wasn't sad I had to take the slow train home because MORE READING TIME)
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"But what gave the age away were the engraved numbers stretching across the plates next to the various hatch accesses in the dock area. They had been put there for human pilots, before bot-pilots and the feed were common, as a failsafe for automated approach beacons. The numbers were in three different—number systems? Languages—"
I'm not sure why I love ancient tech like this. But I do. 😍
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New book: "Platform Decay" by Martha Wells. Yes. It's Murderbot time!
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@Reinald
Dafür gibt es mittlerweile sogar Begriffe:
#crapification
#enshittification
#PlatformDecay
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification -
(Emotion check: Stop panicking, you piece of shit.)
#PlatformDecay -
RE: https://mas.to/@swelljoe/116450770140914958
This makes me so happy :)
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I see that #LinkedIn is trying to loop me into a locked-down platform. (No surprise, obviously, coming from #Microsoft ).
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April Fools, but this may become reality soon enough. Keep fighting, and keep on introducing your friends to open-source tech 🦾
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Updates need to be great enough to justify changing the #software at all.