i don't want to look at virtual worlds while this one keeps getting uglier, louder, and stupider. i don't care about computers anymore. i hate them and wish they never existed. unless they are all destroyed i will never have a moment of aloneness or privacy again. i resent every moment i ever spent playing a computer game. i hate these images of fake worlds meant to make us ignore the death of the world around us. we are going to reduce the earth to a single shining black rock running bitcoin and second life. whatever promise i perceived in technology has either been betrayed or never existed. the scale of the betrayal, the constant surveillance, the hateful and invasive advertising, just the pure spite, greed, and malice present in every aspect of every aspect of the logistical chain...
i want it all gone, or else i want us to use it to destroy absolutely everything. because what we have created is so hideous that only the capacity to destroy itself can justify its existence.
Can you expand on the slavery analogy? I'm aware that this is the naive perspective, but when I realized I was watching more TV than I liked, I stopped, and there was no overseer to whip, mutilate, or starve me into resuming.
That isn't to say that it's trivial: I had to identify why I was doing it (I don't even like watching TV!), and then work on myself so that I had the mental energy to replace it with activities I find rewarding, like reading in the park or playing music.
But this sounds more like "making your leisure time fulfilling is a life skill and a mental health challenge", not "leisure time doesn't exist because we're forced to use it on certain things".
it's not a fucking analogy, if I don't pay rent I get thrown out on the street, or resort to prostitution (would you call that spending free time in the entertainment biz? fuck you), that's slavery, i'm not fucking worried about watching TV, truly the least of my problems. wake the fuck up
Consider working on both your writing clarity and reading comprehension. "It's not leisure if you don't like it" and "Slavery in entertainment" are easily interpretable as claiming that the entertainment itself is slavery, not the incoherent claim that we're enslaved by the need to work and also entertainment exists. And my comment is quite clearly addressing the latter claim.
Of course, I'd work on your emotional stability first. Seriously, man: wild-eyed cursing at internet strangers for imaginary statements they didn't make is the modern equivalent of getting into a screaming match with the voices in your head. I truly wish you all the best.
i'd work on shutting the fuck up, because your speech reflects your underlying assumptions and if you don't address them soon someone like me will address them for you, slaver
I evidently misinterpreted GP's incoherent comment as claiming that we were enslaved by the entertainment itself, as some commentary about the inescapable addiction of modern media.
no, it means being forced to produce entertainment for others to live is slavery, and a very degrading form of slavery. work on your own fucking reading comprehension.
i think i'd rather draw directly on my screen than use a whole new text editor for this. what if i'm typing in vim and want to just draw some vectors on the screen? you could use a vim plugin to associate the viewport of your pad in vim with the svg data.
innovation and differentiation are not things i need or want in my messaging app, holy cow, i just want to send messages. use a standard protocol or write a new one, i don't care, but the problem you are solving is SENDING MESSAGES TO A KNOWN USER. write a protocol, document it, and let the client handle the rest. omg. grow up
alsa alone works fine for me as well… a sound server would make sense to me if i did a lot of audio processing using a bunch of different applications, but how many people really do that anyway as opposed to just working in some overengineered DAW?
i have a similar story about a 486 from the 90s. i have a lot of skills now and can do things many other people cannot, include make a lot of money if i want. but look around you, and ask, how does your personal wealth in this industry, which people are now forced to participate in to access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services, represent "progress" for anyone but you? are our operating systems secure? do they respect our privacy? or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?
> access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services
You are so very right. Do we even realize that smart cell phones have become a required utility? So 25 years ago I would have had a $50 phone bill instead of a $500 phone bill for phones that are required for me to do anything with my government, like renew a driver's license.
Many made fun of "Obama phones," but I think I understand the point of them. I'm not a fan of these phones (and technology in general) leaving people behind because they cannot pay for it.
> or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness
In the name of "security." Yes, we are being spied on and treated as human batteries, just like in the Matrix.
no, people still act like mobile phones are luxury items. they're not. they're cheap, but rent isn't. it's very easy to be homeless and have a phone. all it means is that you can complain and be literally dying on the street but someone on some social media app will say it can't be that bad, you're on the internet :p a lot of "nerd" culture is still living in a world more than ten years gone, a world of precocious suburban kids on their desktop computers… it's not like that now…
(haha wow, speaking of which, hn edits emoji out of posts on this site, amazing)
> or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?
It sounds like you're equating "tech industry" with Big Tech¹, but the tech industry is not an evil monolith. Even Alphabet is not an evil monolith, Apple is a radically different beast than Meta, etc.
If you've decided that working in tech is default evil, you could choose a political path focused on breaking up and regulating Big Tech. But there are also plenty of good people leveraging tech for good, too.
greed is evil, and i see you all every day getting paid to fuck up our world. i see you online and i see you in person when you try to spend your money on me and services i provide. you have not succeeded in distinguishing yourself, you are all members of a technocratic class enriching itself at the expense of our environmental resources.
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle is closing down. Paul Allen's estate, who gave so much money and built several Seattle organizations, seems to be focusing money elsewhere.
Like Bill Gates philanthropy, I assume they believe focusing resources towards vaccines and other general population philanthropic investments is more important.
The Living Computer Museum was unique. I remember especially they had a room set up like an old 80s living room with an Atari VCS 2600, and a window looking outside. It wasn't important in the sense of "progress", but it provided a shared historical perspective.
bill gates promoted one of the most brutal and polluting industries in the world, a complete environmental disaster rooted in slavery, with the phrase "a PC on every desk". he created a horrible and bloated ecosystem that has plagued our lives and he has just attempted to do the same with an insane biosecurity apparatus. i never want to hear any of these people's opinions on vaccines or anything like this again. they are dangerous worthless frauds. philanthropy is just what gates turned to after he got chased out of his own business for sexual harassment.
the entire point of large scale technological literacy is to replace the tech sector. no web app you write is going to be more useful to an organization than an administrative staff that just knows SQL and can use it on the fly for queries, reports, and analysis. software developers are working against the tide: think about how much simpler dev tools are than user tools. as users become more sophisticated then you expect them to need simpler rather than more complex tools.
"as users become more sophisticated then you expect them to need simpler rather than more complex tools."
That sentence seems inherently contradictory.
...and yet all the stuff being built by and large makes users less sophisticated as consumers and their 'technological literacy' questionable. At no point in the last 3 decades, and no one moving forward currently, has shown any interest in making the masses use SQL for anything at an administrative level, and users have shown ever less interest in how any of the tech works, or what it can do, as long as it fulfills whatever prima facie use case they care about.
enterprise software isn't built for users, it's built for the upper level administrators who contract the software, and for the amusement and profit of the engineers who are paid a large multiple of the salaries of any of the people who will be forced to use their systems and consume their ads at work. the result is developers getting paid a lot, not improving anyone's life, and then spending their earnings on our labor time, when we become available as food service workers, sex workers, and so on. the categories of technical competence and social awareness are not supposed to intersect.
as a developer you know perfectly well that as you become more sophisticated you can do much more using much simpler tools.
i don't think you people have any idea of the kind of environment into which your software is deployed. you're mostly happy to ship any crap that will superficially justify the infinite expansion of bloatware that you get paid to produce.
"enterprise software isn't built for users, it's built for the upper level administrators who contract the software, and for the amusement and profit of the engineers who are paid a large multiple of the salaries of any of the people who will be forced to use their systems and consume their ads at work."
That might be generally the case (and certainly historically true) but that has been changing for the last decade (disclosure, I worked in CRM for a decade and that was very much position taken internally, "focus on actual users at least as much as any upstream stakeholder" especially as mobile started to really take off).
"the categories of technical competence and social awareness are not supposed to intersect."
Not supposed to, or avoided by certain folks in order to expand a customer base to the biggest L in the LCD acronym possible?
no, it's not changing, i'm sorry to say, and thank you for your disclosure, but i'm afraid you are not in a position to see the problem clearly.
not supposed to, as in, a majority of industry stakeholders have (apparently, based on their behavior) strong motivations to mystify technology to themselves and others, to represent maintenance as innovation, and so on, because disruption and innovation are the standards we've set for ourselves.
in the meantime, we have such disasters happening as js-dependent archive.org. how can this be tolerated?
i certainly believe that your company's internal position was to "focus on users" but the truth is that managing the flaws of overengineered systems in practice takes up a huge amount of administrators' time, and they develop no competencies as a result, so it is pure wasted time. most of them have no idea that there exists a relatively simple language for looking up student data. no one has ever told them "there exists a simple way of saying 'give me a list of all the students who failed calculus last year'" or whatever. lots of them still have to navigate ancient terminal applications, and all the people who could theoretically be helping these organizations reorganize themselves and use technology better are making very big salaries just selling them overengineered software instead.
since the software is bloated and breaking the web, the organization also ends up upgrading its hardware frequently, so all the ancient contracts with dell and cisco and whatever keep grinding, and as a result video games look prettier and the military has more targeting computers and surveillance devices, and the developer class gets paid to… what? invest in real estate, vr equipment, and an illusion of progress?
"i'm afraid you are not in a position to see the problem clearly."
Actually I am. I've worked both sides of the problem (and in that regard I agree its a problem), and see deficits on both, hence a different opinion, but thanks for the condescension and presumptive dismissal, as I now know about what further effort to devote to this conversation, which ends at the following period.
this right here is why you never make any progress and never fix anything and you never understand why everything sucks, you keep rewarding perverse incentives and greed and then try to work around it as if greed were not the central problem.
making money is not noble, making money does not represent increasing value, it only represents cornering tokens of others' labor time, which you have just observed takes the form of profiteers intentionally seeking ways to waste your time.
improving the world is noble, and whether you make money or not, you get to live in a better world.
linus was awarded a salary because people were EMBARRASSED that they were profiting so much off his free work.
Making money is the practical reality and the entire foundation of the modern world. Do you really think trading chickens or loafs of bread is more practical than exchanging money for goods and services?
How ridiculously naïve! You should be ashamed that you have the utter privilege to hold such utterly ridiculous thoughts without the fear of starving or not having shelter.
get fucked eric, all slavers must be killed, you have no idea how secure food or shelter are for me, motherfucker. you think because i'm able to get here and talk to you that i'm in a situation like yours, and not facing homelessness or starvation? fuck you scum
people in this thread seriously seem to think there's some meaningful distinction between the bank notes that they collect at their bullshit jobs and wic coupons for feeding children
i want it all gone, or else i want us to use it to destroy absolutely everything. because what we have created is so hideous that only the capacity to destroy itself can justify its existence.