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.
What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech?
Submitted 11 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev
Comments
aport@programming.dev 11 months ago
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m not surprised that 90% have a phone, but am surprised that’s specific to iPhone Where are you you Android people at?
fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
DroneRights@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Fun fact: car emissions cause allergies
porgamrer@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
porgamrer@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
Gabadabs@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
planish@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
space@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
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…
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months 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.whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.”
kamstrup@programming.dev 11 months ago
Thank you for saying this. Sometimes I feel like I sm the only one thinking like this 🙇♥️
Falst@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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).
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
kamstrup@programming.dev 11 months ago
That we stop fawning over tech CEOs
RonSijm@programming.dev 11 months ago
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)
Synthead@lemmy.world 11 months ago
To people that really spend time in code, this banter is meaningless.
RonSijm@programming.dev 11 months ago
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
asyncrosaurus@programming.dev 11 months ago
You can write it in whatever language you want, as long as it’s rust.
/s
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 11 months ago
As someone who’s quite vocal about my support for Rust, I can definitely see how it can go overboard.
But on the other end of the spectrum, saying that all languages are just as good or capable and it doesn’t matter which one you use is definitely wrong. There are meaningful differences. It all comes down to what your needs are (and what you/your team knows already, unless you’re willing to learn new stuff).
RonSijm@programming.dev 11 months ago
Yea, I kept my original comment language-agnostic (Just referring to it as y language) - but added the extra wink to Rust because generally they seem to be the highest offenders.
I have years of experience in loads of languages: PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, C#, C++, Rust - And that’s probably how I’d order the level of elitism. PHP Devs know everything they’re doing is shit - Python should probably be next in ranking of how shit they are, but they’re not self-aware enough - (Sarcastic elitism aside here - )
Anyways, besides that - at the end of the elitism-spectrum there seems to be Rust. Someone like me says something about Rust in a general unrelated-to-Rust thread like this - and a Rust enthusiast sees it, and it would just devolve into a dumbass back-end-forth about how good Rust is
huntrss@feddit.de 11 months ago
C’mon, a little bit of flexing is so nice.
But, I get what you’re saying. I usually filter out this bullshit (because I’m a Rustacean myself 😜) but this doesn’t mean that it is as easy for someone else as it is for me.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Rewrite it in Rust? No, no, no. Rewrite it in JavaScript because then it’s portable /s
tatterdemalion@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
profoundlynerdy@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
thelastknowngod@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Containerization (even for small things) makes modern infrastructure a LOT easier.
Miaou@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Containerization helps isolating system dependencies however
KseniyaK@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I would like to see:
- 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.
CatTrickery@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
cmeerw@programming.dev 11 months ago
not being forced to have an Android or Apple smartphone, so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
lysdexic@programming.dev 11 months ago
(…) 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?
cmeerw@programming.dev 11 months ago
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).
sour@kbin.social 11 months ago
less sexism
UFODivebomb@programming.dev 11 months ago
ISO-8601 only
UTF-8 only
UTC only
Oh and more self hosting. Clouds are expensive and unnecessary for some stuff.
Xanxia@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Maybe we could just reduce it to 4 time zones, and no DST
hascat@programming.dev 11 months ago
What do you mean by UTC only?
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Yeah, @UFODivebomb@programming.dev … UTC only?
ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider@hexbear.net 11 months ago
Worker ownership of tech firms
beeng@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Out of the cloud and back into our federated hands/the edge.
People just love the easy path at the loss of sovereignty.
j4k3@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
Jack3G@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Honestly, just less waste. Wasted time, wasted hardware, etc. We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable, and making software that fights the user instead of helping. All in the name of profits or something.
We could be making so many cool things, but instead we’re going back and forth not making any progress.
lysdexic@programming.dev 11 months ago
We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable, and making software that fights the user instead of helping.
Kudos to the EU for forcing mobile phone manufacturers to support replaceable batteries and standardize on USB-C charging.
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m not sold on user replaceable phone batteries, but USB-C was a long time coming.
I just wish they had moved faster on USB standardization - I’m trying to switch but my phone and Kindle are my only USB-C devices. Either I need to waste functioning products by updating everything else or I still need chargers for older stuff back to mini-USB. It’d be nice to standardize on USB-C charging blocks but even that would mean buying new cables or adapters for four different USB form factors
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Boot out corporate shitware, boot out adverts, and stop collecting data unless it is absolutely necessary, or alternatively just cancel the fucking product and don’t do it.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
User first, non-profit software companies. To maximize profits, software keeps sacrificing the users happiness. I want to stop having the argument that the user would want X, but hearing we can’t do that because it will hurt profits.
lysdexic@programming.dev 11 months ago
User first, non-profit software companies.
How do you expect to keep a non-profit software company afloat?
nitefox@sh.itjust.works [bot] 11 months ago
Non profit doesn’t mean they don’t earn anything
1847953620@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Floaties, foam noodles, and a special ray gun that turn anything into a float.
DroneRights@lemm.ee 11 months ago
☭
volatile@programming.dev 11 months ago
Get rid of CRLF on windows or QWERTY keyboard layout
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
What’s wrong with QWERTY?
Spazsquatch@lemmy.studio 11 months ago
It’s inefficient, there are many alternate layouts that are “better”. I feel like AI is going to give us auto-fill that makes the keyboard efficiency less important though.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
As a guy, I’d like to see less sexism in the field, there’s no reason why gender would affect skill
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
I’m curious, are you in the USA? Working in Western Europe, so far I have never seen sexism (nor racism) happen at work. Outside of it, for sure though.
Xanxia@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Are you a guy by any chance. I also hadn’t noticed until the day I asked a couple of my women colleagues. Turns out it can be very subtle but “effective”. And it can also come from women.
potterman28wxcv@beehaw.org 11 months ago
A friend of mine got asked if she had a boyfriend. She asked back “why that question”. It was to know whether she would be likely to get pregnant and miss work.
What a horrifying mentality some companies have
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
As a guy, my manager kicks ass and we’re all extra motivated to make her look good. She used to be a peer but once she became manager, her true skills shone
mydude@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Respecting privacy.
WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Linux becoming mainstream
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ll go further and say some sort of OpenStack like thing should be mainstream. Why shouldn’t home computers by default be able to deploy cloud-like services?
JakenVeina@lemm.ee 11 months ago
DOM APIs in WASM.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Wait… that doesn’t exist?
3h5Hne7t1K@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Afaik, the way it currently works is by calling via javascript. Ironically, the way strings are handled in the browser is also a major performance block with rust at least.
librecat@lemmy.basedcount.com 11 months ago
Accessibility and internationalization first. A lot of projects start without it and tack it on later. It’s so much better to have good roots and promote diversity and inclusivity from the start.
RonSijm@programming.dev 11 months ago
Could you elaborate in what context and to what extend? I can agree that bigger companies with large user-bases should have a focus on accessibility and internationalization -
But generally a lot of projects start with just one dev solving a problem they have themselves and make their solution Open-Source. Anecdotally, I’m dumping my solutions on Github that are already barely accessible to anyone somewhat tech-illiterate. No one is paying me anything for it. Why would I care whether it’s accessible or internationalized for non-English speakers?
ursakhiin@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Internationalization isn’t about the translation. It’s about not hard coding the strings that display. Putting them somewhere that is easy to swap out would allow users to provide their own if they wanted.
librecat@lemmy.basedcount.com 11 months ago
As a solo developer, some things are out of scope like writing translations or ensuring full compliance with accessibility standards. What’s important is to have some knowledge of what things block progress in these areas. For example, not treating all strings like ASCII, or preferring native widgets/html elements as those better support accessiblity tools.
pylapp@programming.dev 11 months ago
the disappearance of all these tech peacocks and web turkeys who focus on their number of followers and the quantity of talks rather than quality. The dev rel advocates made the atmosphere toxic.
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Lots of stuff -
On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It’s currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that’s not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn’t really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.
In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I’m leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn’t explicitly open source and can’t be understood generally.
On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can’t run modern software, but we’re leaving a lot of shit behind where that’s not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.
NostraDavid@programming.dev 11 months ago
Any hardware that’s abandoned needs to be forced to release the source of any needed software - the latest version.
We’d need a range of available licences, as to prevent any bullshit “you’re only allowed to read this source” license.
This is going to suck for Apple, but it’s going to be great for people who pay for some expensive microscope that’s not supported any more.
There’s probably a lot of legal nonsense that may make this impossible in practice, but I’d love to see this happen.
Miaou@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Same thing for companies that run out of the business. When you pay for something there’s a (sometimes tacit) agreement that bugs will be fixed. At least this would allow companies to do that themselves when needed.
spaduf@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Unionizing
varsock@programming.dev 11 months ago
to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don’t have to “demonstrate” myself during interviews.
I hate being in a candidate pool that all have a degree and experience, we all go through a grueling interview process on college basics, and the “best one gets picked.” Company says “our interview process works great, look at the great candidates we hire.” like, duh, your candidate pool was already full of qualified engineers with degrees/experience, what did you expect to happen?
lysdexic@programming.dev 11 months ago
I strongly disagree. There is already a standardization of qualification of competences in the form of cloud vendor certifications. They are all utter bullshit and a huge moneygrab which do nothing to attest someone’s experience or competence.
Certifications also validate optimizing for the wrong metric, like validating a “papers, please” attitude towards recruitment instead of actually demonstrate competence, skill, and experience.
Also, certifications validate the parasitic role of a IT recruiter, the likes of which is responsible for barring candidates for not having decades of experience in tech stacks they can’t even spell and released just a few months ago. Relying on certifications empower parasitic recruiters to go from clueless filterers to outright gatekeepers, and in the process validate business models of circumventing their own certification requirements.
We already went down this road. It’s a disaster. The only need this approach meets is ladder-pulling by incompetent people who paid for irrelevant certifications and have a legal mechanism to prevent extremely incompetent people from practicing, and the latter serves absolutely no purpose on software development.