EVERYONE is doing this. Not that I support it, but I’m surprised it still works.
Email clients do it, Reddit does it, tons of apps, even different browsers. I think at one point Microsoft was doing it in Edge (or was that only discount code stuffing?). Affiliate link and cookie rewriting is everywhere.
ETA:
Phia would override the referral codes from other affiliates and instead inject its own, allowing it to take credit for and potentially receive a commission on a purchase it didn’t earn.
Just to be clear, if you post a link on Reddit, Reddit rewrites the it to add their own affiliate links. Microsoft does this. Chat apps do it. It’s not a secret.
I should add “that’s wrong” is tongue in cheek. Obviously it’s wrong. My point is the rubicon has been crossed so many times it’s fucking ridiculous.
LG is starting to become indistinguishable from malware.
Their TV software includes residential proxies (your network becomes the proxy), and gets sold to AI scrapers and others. Imagine if that proxy gets used to download CSAM, used for hacking, or gets your household banned from Google?
Samsung phone software is cancer and auto installs whatever the fuck ads and games they want. They installed forced ads onto their fucking fridges.
Also worth noting Dell and Alienware do this too according to Wikipedia.
When the fuck did this become okay? We need to drive these companies out of business for this. They need to get sued for this. In what world is adding unremovable adware legal, how does that not violate the computer misuse and hacking laws?
“A wizard is never late, nor is she early, she arrives preci…”
Oh shut up Helen, you knew I was going to wear my leopard print and you wore yours today just so I would look like I’m copying you! Our friendship is so over!
Yeah, I fucking hate working with people who are those “learn to code for the paycheque” types.
I mean I get it, it paid well. But I can’t stand working with these people — they have no taste, they have no standards, they make it harder to get good jobs.
But in Copilot Chat in MS Office for example, isn’t the LLM itself Copilot? That’s what I’m talking about as being a weak LLM — I know originally it was some variant of ChatGPT.
GitHub Copilot now is less a model and more a router. Kind of a pity, they had a solid lead there. I at least used it to complete yaml and json configs and it made fewer typos than me.
The other thing is the management and boards of tech companies are incredibly incestuous. Your board is made up the boards of everyone else, they’re all CEOs competing for the same workers.
You’ve got two or three big investment firms that run the boards of all the major companies, which is anti competitive too. They’ll always push for a product they own to their other companies. They know when their other portfolio companies are doing layoffs, what they’re paying their staff, etc. they even share that with other companies so they can “compete” on salaries.
For an industry that cargo culted anti cargo culting, the management and execs all cargo cult the same over hiring and mass layoffs.
Employees get treated like crap now.
10 years ago I’d work overtime near a big release or when there was an outage. But now you get pinged all the time, there are no boundaries, and there’s an expectation. I’ve had CEOs joke about 9-9-6 work schedules and just openly flaunting how much worse they can make your life.
The terminal rot starts when your company brings in some ex Amazon or Meta execs (C suite, VP, director, whatever). They push for an almost pure numbers perspective. Judgement and morality be damned, think of the metric first.
Numbers are what these people know — these people survived the natural selection process at the most hostile and politicking companies you can think of. They’ll do anything to survive and get ahead.
You cut your support team as a cost centre — support doesn’t scale.
Then before you know it you’re 4 years into “we just have to push extra hard this year guys, the pace will slow down next year, we’ll get headcount too”. The whole time your performance reviews are getting more frequent and become more invasive — we’re adding an AI use component, make sure to list your growth areas and the impact (metrics!) of everything you’ve shipped. Remember, you’re competing with everyone we could hire, so how did you get better than them this quarter?
This field used to be good. And no, it wasn’t free lunches that made it good. It was having teams that gave a shit about the customer, it was putting the customer above all else, and it was going home feeling like you worked on something useful and good. You worked hard, you delivered value, and you got paid well.