A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters drop it as a darkly funny illustration of enshittification whenever threads cover degraded products, bad customer support, ad-supported AI, or LLM-generated web slop.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2026 to 2026.
What it is
A 4-minute satirical short from the Norwegian Consumer Council, made with NewsLab, following a day in the working life of an "enshittificator" who makes digital products and services worse. It accompanies the council's report "Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future" on enshittification and how to resist it.
Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Enshittification.
What people said
Recommends peter_d_sherman · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “The Coming War on General Computation (2011)”
>"((1012.5)) So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits". And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea -- just a program that does one specialized task -- after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do w
Cites michaelteter · 2026-03 · Hacker News · on “I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported”
Sometimes the big trashy company buys the better rival, and then trashes it. Edit - just stumbled on this :) [this video]
Cites withinboredom · 2026-03 · Hacker News · on “Nobody gets promoted for simplicity”
I once used the analogy of the PM coming to the shop with a car that had a barely running engine and broken windows, and he's only letting me fix the windows. His response: "I can sell a good looking car and then charge them for a better running engine"... [this video] hits a little too close to home.
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-03 · Hacker News · on “Files are the interface humans and agents interact with”
Unfortunately, LLM slop now makes up >53% of the web, and is growing. It is easy to spot the compacted token distribution unique to each model, but search engines still seem to promote nonsense content. =3 "Bad Bot Problem - Computerphile" [LINK] "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator " [this video]
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-03 · Hacker News · on “Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions”
The premise LLM are "AI" is false, but are good at problems like context search, and isomorphic plagiarism. Given the liabilities of relying on public and chat users markdown data to sell to other users without compensation raises a number of issues: 1. Copyright: LLM generated content can't be assigned copyright (USA), and thus may contaminate licensing agreements. It is likely public-domain, but also may conflict with GPL/LGPL when stolen IP bleeds through weak obfuscation. The risk has zero precedent cases so far (the Disney case slightly differs), but is likely a legal liability waiting to surface eventually. 2. Workmanship: All software is terrible, but some of it is useful. People that
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-03 · Hacker News · on “90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars”
The LLM content piracy to isomorphic plagiarism business loop is unsustainable. Yet for context search it is reasonably useful. =3 [this video]
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-08 · Hacker News · on “an ambiguity in C89 which will never be fixed”
It had to do with the lack of helpful warning/error messages while porting over a C project. Switching out for libstdc++ was helpful in narrowing the scope of where to look for the issue, and a better idea of the failure mode. Given the Sealioning problem on YC, trying to remember an edge case issue from years ago would not go well. If your work habits aren't pushing into the compiler standards gray areas, than one probably won't ever encounter such issues. ymmv =3 [this video]
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “I changed my license”
>Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder. I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical. >It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again? Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage. I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand e
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards”
Every trace on a PCB is a traveling salesman problem with ballooning complexity. [LINK] While physics informed models do exist, they are still going to burn a lot of compute to generate failure modes people didn't know were possible. =3 [this video]
Cites Joel_Mckay · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards”
Every trace on a PCB is a traveling salesman problem with ballooning complexity. [LINK] While physics informed models do exist, they are still going to burn a lot of compute to generate failure modes people didn't know were possible. =3 [this video]