Attention and awareness of the ways in which modern technology is harming ourselves.
We’re providing people with the electronic equivalent of heroin, from a young age, completely rewiring our brains and detaching us from nature and each other.
The statistic that ~90% of American teens own an iPhone was shocking to me. It makes me think that from a young age, children are taught not to question but just accept their cage. If closed source is all they grow up with, opensource will be foreign to them. And that in a way that’s worse than when you grow up with windows which doesn’t completely lock you in.
I’m not surprised that 90% have a phone, but am surprised that’s specific to iPhone Where are you you Android people at?
Android users aren’t having kids. /s
This! I feel it myself, my ADHD was much better when I stayed in a relatively natural setting with only little technology. for a few weeks (I did some programming there though, and boy was I focused in complex problems without medication etc. had one of my best coding sessions there I think). I’m pretty sure that a lot of ADHD but also other psychiatric issues like autism or social anxiety etc. that is diagnosed these days is because of all this unhealthy environment we have created. Or in other words, our modern technology promotes psychiatric issues such as ADHD, autism, social anxiety etc.
Fun fact: car emissions cause allergies
More focus on the ability to maintain, repair, and perhaps even upgrade existing tech. So often people are pushed to upgrade constantly, and devices aren’t really built to last anymore. For example, those yearly trade in upgrade plans that cell phone providers do. It sucks knowing that, once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage and has to be replaced. I miss my older smartphones that still had replaceable batteries, because at least then it’s just the battery that’s garbage.
We’re throwing so much of our very limited amount of resources right into landfills because of planned obsolescence.I think the solution to this will come by itself: the supply chain will break down and people will have to learn to make do with what they have. It was like that in the Soviet Union, is like that in some parts of the world right now, and can easily return if we don’t get climate change in check.
once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage
I don’t get this. I understand they aren’t user replaceable but surely you can get it replaced? Given how good batteries are, they easily last 2-3 years. iPhones are supported for 5-6 years so you only ever need one replacement
Getting my iPhone battery replaced has typically cost about $75, not all that different from a decade ago spending $35 for a user replaceable battery for a flip phone
One major difference now is that at least iOS gives me a good measurement of battery health so I can make data driven decision
More privacy and less profit 🫣
I realize most people could rather not pay for a service they currently have for free (which is partly due to the lack of transparency regarding our data usage).
It’s possible that a donation based-society might work. However, I’m not sure how that can be achieved in parallel to a profit-based society (the on we majorly have to take part in).
IMO one way is to force the issue by making certain methods of profit impossible or not worth it in the long run. Something like “don’t use it? you lose it” in terms of patents or proprietary solutions. For example if a company stops producing and supporting something, then it has to release the designs, code, and intellectual property to the public.
Three things off the top of my head:
- Unionisation
- Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
- Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.
Severe sanctions on US tech giants
For the hell of it? Because they’re inherently evil? Protectionism am to develop local industry?
I’ve worked for a few, but not the consumer giants most people think of. I haven’t found them evil, and they support employees across the world.
I’ll go even further with developing countries in particular. From my perspective, entire software industries were built on multi-national funding, and we still pay better than local companies. The biggest change over the last decade or two has been switching models from cheapest outsourcing to employing local talent everywhere
This is just like, my opinion, but here you go:
If you live in the western sphere, the US tech giants control half of your critical infrastructure and invade every aspect of your personal and professional life. If you live outside the US, they do not answer to you or to anyone you can vote for. They lean on your government for permission to turn your whole existence into a series of transactions, and then extract as much value as possible from each one. The money doesn’t swirl around your community making everyone richer. Instead, 5% goes to pay a few nice salaries in your biggest city, and the rest of it gets funneled straight out of the country and into california.
Even Europe - their imperial mentor and favourite uncle - is treated like shit. Europe built half of their technology but controls none of it. There is not a single european tech giant. Every last one is american, with extensive ties to the US government and security apparatus.
Never thought of it that way. Depending on your definitions, here’s a top 20 list that has SAP as the only European company. Asian ones are getting pretty common though
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-tech-giants-ranked/
The death of the device and the return of the system.
A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.
A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.
A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.
Have developers be more mindful of the e-waste they’re contributing to by indirectly deprecating CPUs when they skip over portions of their code and say “nah it isn’t worth it to optimize that thing + everyone today should have a X cores CPU/Y GB of RAM anyway”. Complacency like that is what leads software that is as simple in functionality as equivalent software was one or two decades ago to be 10 times more demanding today.
Yes!! I enjoy playing with retro tech and was actually surprised on how much you can do with an ancient Pentium 2 machine, and how responsive the software at the time was.
I really dislike how inefficient modern software is. Like stupid chat apps that use more RAM while sitting in the background than computers had 15-20 years ago…
It leads to software obesity and is a real thing. I think it has to do with developer machines being beefy, so if you write something that runs on it and don’t have a shit machine to test it on, you don’t know just how badly it actually performs.
But it also has to do with programming languages. It’s much much easier to prototype in Python or Javascript and often the prototype becomes the real thing. Who really has time (and/or money) to rewrite their now functional program in a language that is performant?
IMO there doesn’t seem to be a clear solution.I don’t think that even the languages are the problem, it’s the toolchain. While certainly if you went back to C or whatever, you can design more performant systems, I think the problem overall stems from modern toolchains being kinda ridiculous. It is entirely common in any language to load in massive libraries that suck up 100’s of mb of RAM (if not gigs) to get a slightly nicer function to lowercase text or something.
The other confounding factor is “write once, run anywhere” which in practice means that there is a lot of shared code and such that does nothing on your machine. The most obvious example being Electron. Pretty much all of the Electron apps I use on the reg (which are mostly just Discord and slack) are conceptually simple apps that have analogues that used to run on a few hundred mbs of storage and 10’s of mb of RAM.
Oh, one other sidetone - how many CPUs are wasting cycles on things that no one wants, like extremely complex ad-tracking/data mining/etc.
I know why this is the case, and ease of development does enable us to have software that we probably otherwise wouldn’t, but this is a thing that I think is a real blight on modern computing, and I think it’s solvable. I mean, probably the dumbest idea, but improving translation layers to run platform-native code can be vastly improved. Especially in a world where we have generative AI, there has to be a way to say “hey, I’ve got this javascript function, I need this to work in kotlin, swift, c++, etc.”
LLVM will save us.
Maybe…
LLVM is ironically a very slow compiler back-end, whose popularity has contributed to a general slow-down in compilation speed across the whole industry (it’s even slow at doing debug builds for fast iteration).
WASM has some promise though
Doesn’t really matter if the compiler is slow if the result is optimized and fast 🤷 Rust compiles slower than C, but that’s because C has no safeguards (excluding static typing). Very often the wasted CPU cycles are on the end of the user, not the developer.
Thank you for saying this. Sometimes I feel like I sm the only one thinking like this 🙇♥️
Probably less elitism. “Oh you build it in x language? Well that’s a shit language. You should use y language instead. We should be converting everything to y language because y language is the most superior language!”
(If this feels like a personal attack, Rust programmers, yes. But other languages as well)
To people that really spend time in code, this banter is meaningless.
Well sure, it depends on the context. If it’s a shitpost on /c/programmer_humor, whatever, meaningless banter.
If it’s a serious question, (maybe for a beginner) asking how to do something in their language, and the response is “It would be a lot easier in y language” - I don’t think it’s particularly helpful
You can write it in whatever language you want, as long as it’s rust.
/s
The cargo culting is always going to happen and turn into elitism. But it stems from real advantages of specific technologies, and sometimes you should actually consider that the tech you’re using is irresponsible when better alternatives exist.
Phones with fully open source drivers including the bootloader and decent specs. Give me a UEFI over fastboot any day.
I’d also love it if electron and sexism would kindly go away.
I would like to see:
- Corporations treating their customers like people, not just bags of money.
- Corporations and employers to stop spying on people. Like, it makes me feel so unsafe and that I can’t really trust them.
- People becoming more tech literate.
- Open source software, such as Linux being used by more people, especially those who are not so tech literate.
That we stop fawning over tech CEOs
A pivot way from cargo cult programming and excessive containerization towards simplicity and the fewest dependencies possible for a given task.
Too many projects look like a jinga tower gone horribly wrong. This has significant maintainability and security implications.
Containerization (even for small things) makes modern infrastructure a LOT easier.
ISO-8601 only
UTF-8 only
UTC only
Oh and more self hosting. Clouds are expensive and unnecessary for some stuff.
What do you mean by UTC only?
Yeah, @UFODivebomb@programming.dev … UTC only?
Time zones are stupid.
😂
I think what they meant is requiring that only UTC time should be in the database. This prevents ambiguity when pulling dates/times out as with many poorly designed systems it’s not possible to know whether a date represents UTC time or local time.
At my work we store local time in our database and I hate it. We only serve customers in our country, which only has one time zone, so that’s fine for now. But we’ve definitely made it harder for ourselves to expand if we ever wanted to.
Better yet, why are you not using a Date type? That’s very precisely defined, more scalable, and plenty of functionality for doing math or converting among time zones. You don’t have to care what time zone you’re in, and can give people the answer in any time zone
I get the advantage, and if I could change our schema with a click of my fingers I would, but it’s not that easy. We do use the native date type in our schema, but the dates we store in there are in local time. It’s bad, I know. It was originally written by a couple of people about 15 years ago, so software standards were a lot more lax back then.
We already have many customers with lots of data that are currently using this product, so it’s unfortunately non-trivial to fix all of their data with the current systems we have in place.
We developers often want to fix so many things but we’re often told what to do based on what the business cares more about, rather than what we actually want to fix. That’s why we always end up building shit on top of shit, because the business doesn’t want to pay us to rewrite 15-20 years worth of legacy code despite in doing so it would make the product an order of magnitude better in every conceivable way.
That is a somewhat tongue in cheek comment. I think time zones are silly and people could easily account for the differences of what a particular time point means for them at their location. More realistically, UTC should be the only way a time stamp is stored.
Maybe we could just reduce it to 4 time zones, and no DST
not being forced to have an Android or Apple smartphone, so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
(…) so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
What do you classify as “proprietary apps”, and from the user’s standpoint where do you see a difference between them and web apps?
Pretty much anything that’s only available via an app store. The difference with web apps is that I can also use them on a laptop/PC and I have a bit more control about tracking (by using ad/tracking blockers).
Data is a part of a person’s individual self. Storing such data on another person is owning a part of their person. It is slavery for exploitation, manipulation, and it is wrong.
This distinction is the difference between a new age of feudalism with all of the same abuses that happened in the last one, or a future with citizens and democracy.
Never trust anyone with a part of yourself. Trust, no matter how well initially intentioned, always leads to abuse of power.
I agree with the sentiment that personal data is owned by whoever it is about. And that other organizations shouldn’t be able to exploit it.
Respecting privacy.
