Value is now only _extracted_. Place the acquired good into the press and smash it until all but the faintest essence remains among the mash. The squeezings are bottled and saved to pay for future _extractions_.
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
nazgulsenpai 3 hours ago [-]
TIL squozen is the past participle of squeeze, but only because I first thought hah this guy is making words up. Foiled again!
ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago [-]
Gabe Newell has an $11bn net worth so he hasn't exactly been not squeezing.
shaftoe444 3 hours ago [-]
> It's stressful having me head squoze
OroPla 2 hours ago [-]
German here. A "Verschlimmbesserung" is something that makes one part better and another part worse. If it only makes things worse you don't need a German word for it, you can just call it worse.
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Youden 1 hours ago [-]
Not a German but Duden disagrees with you [0]: "etwas in der Absicht, es zu verbessern, schlechter machen".
German here, this is the right definition, trying to improve something but ending up making it worse.
renehsz 2 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that a Verschlimmbesserung stems from a genuine intent to improve something, even though it ultimately has the opposite effect.
OroPla 2 hours ago [-]
I don't remember hearing or using it in this context. It's pretty rare that the goal was to make something worse and if the outcome is only bad, you can just call it bad, right? The word is only needed to communicate that there were good and bad outcomes.
houl 35 minutes ago [-]
A Verschlimmbesserung of the definition of Verschlimmbesserung.
jkrems 1 hours ago [-]
Both my memory (as a German) and Duden disagree with you.
I don't think either of these 2 quite get the point across with the same "wavelengths" getting included.
eqvinox 4 hours ago [-]
As a German, I might not have thought of that but would absolutely use it to translate Verschlimmbesserung. Does it sound "normal" enough to native English speakers?
inanutshellus 4 hours ago [-]
It's definitely a normal-sounding, memorable word for us native English speakers.
Meanwhile I won't be able to remember that German word longer than it takes me to close this tab. Vershumthingsomething.
clbrmbr 4 hours ago [-]
It's totally plausible portmanteau. I get the feeling thought that it sounds more marked in English than in German where these kind of mashups are formed more freely.
ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago [-]
The sibling post's "disimprovement" sounds more natural and has parallel form with pre-existing broadly accepted English words like "disincentive" and "disinfect".
groestl 4 hours ago [-]
Thumbs up, let's settle on that translation
arjan_sch 4 hours ago [-]
I'm Dutch, sounds pretty good to me
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
I prefer “misprovement”, as in “misfeature”.
OroPla 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't the English word more or less "regression"? If you want to coin a new word, how about updowngrade?
2 hours ago [-]
OptionOfT 5 hours ago [-]
I usually relate this to people chasing good reviews at work. Maintaining a system and keeping it bug-free doesn't get people promoted.
Doing something large, inventing a bunch of metrics, and showing that you improve on those metrics does.
eqvinox 5 hours ago [-]
It's actually a verb, "Verschlimmbesserung" is the substantivization.
Base: verschlimmbessern
Present conjugation: I verschlimmbesser[e], you verschlimmbesserst, he/she/it verschlimmbessert, we verschlimmbesser[e]n, (plural-)you verschlimmbessert, they verschlimmbesser[e]n
The [e] at the end is leftover from an older form, in the cases where I omitted it it would sound archaic to a German speaker, but in the other cases it's equivalent or may even sound better. It's also regionally different. The archaic versions kinda sound south German (Swabian, Bavarian).
[ed. made some adjustments]
P.S.: "Verbesserung" means improvement, "Verschlimmerung" means worsening/aggravation. The combined word is understood quite specifically though, not just as a combination of the two. It's *not* a normal case of German "paste words together", that's for nouns (you can do it with the substantivization, e.g. Donaudampfschiffverschlimmbesserungskapitän = "captain of verschlimmbessern the steam ships on the Donau", which makes little sense of course). It's not identical to enshittification either, the latter (to me at least) implies intention; verschlimmbessern you can (and probably often will) do by accident.
schoen 5 hours ago [-]
Cases apply only to nouns; the present and past perfect are called tenses.
eqvinox 4 hours ago [-]
(already edited in)
WesolyKubeczek 2 hours ago [-]
Would there be a semantic difference between Verschlimmbesserung and Verbesserschlimmung?
eqvinox 12 minutes ago [-]
無 (the question cannot be answered because it relies on unmet prerequisites)
"Verbesserschlimmung" isn't a word in active use & depending on how it (theoretically) were to enter use, its meaning might vary. It could enter usage with identical meaning, or it could mean the opposite: a change intended to worsen things that made them better. It's a bit like "inflammable".
(Also: this is why I pointed out it's not formed according to the agglutination rules that apply for concatenated nouns in German. For those, the meaning can be logically derived. This is a portmanteau, those don't quite follow rigid rules.)
jakzurr 2 hours ago [-]
The painting "restoration" at the end of the article is hilarious! (OMG I hope it's just a joke.)
> The story... relates how a solitary gardener encounters a lonely bear and they decide to become companions. One of the bear's duties is to keep the flies off his friend when he takes a nap. Unable to drive off a persistent fly, the bear seizes a paving stone to crush it and kills the gardener as well
> [..]
> The fable has given to the French language the idiom le pavé de l'ours (the bear's paving stone) and to German Bärendienst (a bear's service), both used for doing somebody or something a disservice or bad turn and sometimes for any ill-considered action with an unfortunate result. The Danish and Norwegian word bjørnetjeneste (bear-service) has similar meanings and the idiom also appears in other European languages.
It‘s „bear service“, and context is slightly different. You do bear service to someone, and Verschlimmbesserung is on something. Both signal intent to do something good, but doing bear service is an act of screwing up while doing that, no prior condition required, and Verschlimmbesserung is the outcome of such attempt applied to something that was ok before.
Video quality is bad, there are probably better ones but it has english
subtitles. The idea here is basically the guy tries to improve something,
but in the end kind of causes the whole room to become devastated. That's
kind of Verschlimmbesserung: meaning to do well, but failing to do so and
causing more harm than good. (Also in the comments people connect this to
Friedrich Merz; the guy is really losing popular support by the minute
now. Just recently where he was unhappy how real people ask him critical
questions.)
6c696e7578 2 hours ago [-]
Office 2003 is a terrible example, office is a product that deliberately makes one part worse on each "upgrade" so that the consumer has a reason to upgrade to another release.
WesolyKubeczek 2 hours ago [-]
„Verschlimbesserung” is what your spouse thinks about each of your improvements to the home automation setup, or, indeed, the whole idea of home automation.
boxed 6 hours ago [-]
We already have a word for it? "Misfeature"
The opposite is the more interesting word though: hit bug. A bug/mistake/fuckup that turns out to improve the software.
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
They're not bugs, they're undocumented features
looperhacks 4 hours ago [-]
A misfeature is specifically a feature that's just bad, while verschlimmbessern can happen with everything that nobody would call a feature (insert something about xkcd 1172). But yeah, it's pretty close
grishka 3 hours ago [-]
The modern tech industry is fundamentally broken, the incentive structure is wrong. No one even knows how to ship finished software any more. Everything's a perpetual beta now. It makes me really sad.
Krasnol 6 hours ago [-]
I'd say enshitification is a good enough word.
Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
surreystyles 2 hours ago [-]
The word is needed a lot today, the English version however not always applicable in more formal contexts.
I'd like to use "Schlimmprovement" for elevated communication.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 5 hours ago [-]
I do think it's part of many people's vocabulary. It's a bit informal. And it's not a word you use every day. But it's definitely a word that gets used when the occasion calls for it, just like the related verb "verschlimmbessern."
"Enshittification" isn't the same thing. "Verschlimmbesserung" is when you try to fix a loose connection in a power cord and then no electricity flows at all, or when you try to fix a bad haircut with a trimmer and the haircut ends up looking even worse, etc.
looperhacks 4 hours ago [-]
It's certainly used - not in the top 100, but if the situation calls for it, it's not unexpected.
There's a big difference between enshitification and "Verschlimmbesserung". The latter has the intent of actually improving things, while the first is making things knowingly worse for profit.
juvvel 4 hours ago [-]
Of course it is still widely used.
icantevenhold 4 hours ago [-]
Define widely used;
I probably haven’t used it once in the last 15 years and have heard it maybe twice.
Source: lifelong German speaker
juvvel 6 minutes ago [-]
I am also a native German and have heard it a lot in my lifetime. Of course not daily, but it is definitely still used today.
remuskaos 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe you're working with the wrong people? It's uncommon among younger people, but I frequently hear craftsmen say it (who are over 50).
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3 hours ago [-]
I am even.
Source: Lifelong Prime
levzettelin 5 hours ago [-]
Just from looking at the title, I feel that this talking about AI in general...
Rendered at 22:16:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
[0]: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern
> etwas in der Absicht, es zu verbessern, schlechter machen > > https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern
"Making somewhere worse with the intention to make it better".
Better is the enemy of good.
Old Italian proverb: "il meglio è nemico del bene"
Shakespeare, King Lear: "Striving to better, oft we mar what's well".
Via https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=49... and https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=16...
Meanwhile I won't be able to remember that German word longer than it takes me to close this tab. Vershumthingsomething.
Doing something large, inventing a bunch of metrics, and showing that you improve on those metrics does.
Base: verschlimmbessern
Present conjugation: I verschlimmbesser[e], you verschlimmbesserst, he/she/it verschlimmbessert, we verschlimmbesser[e]n, (plural-)you verschlimmbessert, they verschlimmbesser[e]n
Past/perfect: verschlimmbessert (e.g. "it got verschlimmbessert")
Imperative: verschlimmbesser[e] (e.g. "don't verschlimmbesser that!")
The [e] at the end is leftover from an older form, in the cases where I omitted it it would sound archaic to a German speaker, but in the other cases it's equivalent or may even sound better. It's also regionally different. The archaic versions kinda sound south German (Swabian, Bavarian).
[ed. made some adjustments]
P.S.: "Verbesserung" means improvement, "Verschlimmerung" means worsening/aggravation. The combined word is understood quite specifically though, not just as a combination of the two. It's *not* a normal case of German "paste words together", that's for nouns (you can do it with the substantivization, e.g. Donaudampfschiffverschlimmbesserungskapitän = "captain of verschlimmbessern the steam ships on the Donau", which makes little sense of course). It's not identical to enshittification either, the latter (to me at least) implies intention; verschlimmbessern you can (and probably often will) do by accident.
"Verbesserschlimmung" isn't a word in active use & depending on how it (theoretically) were to enter use, its meaning might vary. It could enter usage with identical meaning, or it could mean the opposite: a change intended to worsen things that made them better. It's a bit like "inflammable".
(Also: this is why I pointed out it's not formed according to the agglutination rules that apply for concatenated nouns in German. For those, the meaning can be logically derived. This is a portmanteau, those don't quite follow rigid rules.)
Unless I'm mistaken, Russian has a wonderful idiom for this: "bear job"
> The story... relates how a solitary gardener encounters a lonely bear and they decide to become companions. One of the bear's duties is to keep the flies off his friend when he takes a nap. Unable to drive off a persistent fly, the bear seizes a paving stone to crush it and kills the gardener as well
> [..]
> The fable has given to the French language the idiom le pavé de l'ours (the bear's paving stone) and to German Bärendienst (a bear's service), both used for doing somebody or something a disservice or bad turn and sometimes for any ill-considered action with an unfortunate result. The Danish and Norwegian word bjørnetjeneste (bear-service) has similar meanings and the idiom also appears in other European languages.
Apparently the source of Russian's, too: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B5...
Hmmm. So, the literal transation would be:
"Verschlimm" - worsen, negative, step back. "Besserung" - improvement, getting better than before.
So, I would translate it as "an effort to improve something but actually making it worse in the process".
There is an old video clip in german about this, actually; I think it was from Loriot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhj1xhv3rZI
Video quality is bad, there are probably better ones but it has english subtitles. The idea here is basically the guy tries to improve something, but in the end kind of causes the whole room to become devastated. That's kind of Verschlimmbesserung: meaning to do well, but failing to do so and causing more harm than good. (Also in the comments people connect this to Friedrich Merz; the guy is really losing popular support by the minute now. Just recently where he was unhappy how real people ask him critical questions.)
The opposite is the more interesting word though: hit bug. A bug/mistake/fuckup that turns out to improve the software.
Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
I'd like to use "Schlimmprovement" for elevated communication.
"Enshittification" isn't the same thing. "Verschlimmbesserung" is when you try to fix a loose connection in a power cord and then no electricity flows at all, or when you try to fix a bad haircut with a trimmer and the haircut ends up looking even worse, etc.
There's a big difference between enshitification and "Verschlimmbesserung". The latter has the intent of actually improving things, while the first is making things knowingly worse for profit.
I probably haven’t used it once in the last 15 years and have heard it maybe twice.
Source: lifelong German speaker
Source: Lifelong Prime