Comment on How do you build revolutionary optimism in these dark times?
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 6 days ago
There are still many things happening that are objectively improving. You just have to look a bit harder.
One definitive field is software. It continues to get faster and better and more reliable.
It’s not the way I wanted it to happen (my country fucked it’s industry), but China understood the issue with transition to green energy and built so much production capacity for solar and wind energy, solar energy is properly exploding. Exports to Africa increased by 500% in the past 5 years. ember-energy.org/…/the-first-evidence-of-a-take-o…
Can you be more specific about software? Because it feels like the consumer software I grew up loving is all a buggy mess of poor design decisions these days.
Am I just not able to accept the bugs anymore and they were always there? I can’t tell anymore.
The fediverse is a good example. There are performance improvements happening at the language level, so even old code runs faster. More essential services are online, online banking isn’t weird and niche anymore. We have so many different messengers to choose from, it’s no longer just skype that can do video calls.
Did you know we have reproducible builds now? reproducible-builds.org
For a long time, you could make software from one piece of code and you got working software, but it wasn’t guaranteed to be identical. That made security and verification a lot harder, because you need to check for behavior instead of just comparing a check value. Now we can just compare the check value.
There are things like better testing and CI/CD pipelines now. We can measure that stuff. More projects have moved to git.
The micro computing sphere is very mature now, you can just buy a raspi or a comparable device and do home automation projects with them.
The only area where things are still messy is some areas of web technologies, because they’re constantly being rewritten.
Thanks.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
What kind of software is getting better? Most commercial software has steadily gotten worse, moving to subscription models, taking more risks with updates and breaking things. I remember clearly when Github got bought by Microsoft. Since then, outages became a common occurance whereas before they were rare.
Open source software is arguably getting better and better, but less people are willing to do it for free while big tech reaps their free labour for profit with no return.