Nowadays most software doesn’t let you tinker with it. Want to tinker with your chat client? Too bad, everything (that any of your friends actually use) is clos

Nowadays most software doesn’t let you tinker with it. Want to tinker with your chat client? Too bad, everything (that any of your friends actually use) is closed source and proprietary now. Frustrated with social media? Unless you can convince all your friends to switch to mastodon, you’re stuck with whatever Facebook/Instagram forces upon you. Excited about the future of virtual reality? Hope you don’t mind playing by Facebook/Oculus‘s rules. Want to fix an annoying issue with how your email client categorizes email? Well there’s no way to integrate with that system, google barely supports standards like pop and imap anymore, and outlook is transitioning away from a powerful plug-in system to a silly new web-based model. A very specific example: Something that’s been frustrating me for years is Google photos on iOS does not synchronize whether I have starred/favorited a photo on iOS‘s photos to google photos. I tried fixing this myself with a helper program, but the Google photos API does not let you set whether a photo is marked as a favorite, and you cannot manually add photos to the favorites album via API. I’ve tried several hacky workarounds but I simply cannot build the simple UX fix that seems obvious to me, nor can I get anyone from Google to acknowledge my many suggestions to them to implement this obvious feature. I looked into trying to use Plex or Microsoft onedrive as an alternate photo backup system, but they are much worse than Google Photos in terms of reliability and UX. I’ve looking into open source solutions to replace this whole workflow, but the amount of time and effort and money and compromises required for a system like that simply isn’t worth it. So I put up with the annoyance, since there’s effectively nothing I can do about it. I used to love programming because it made me omnipotent, I could change things as I wanted and tie together systems exactly the way I liked. But now I keep hitting brick walls, most of which are imposed because of business models and not for purely technology reasons. The frustration adds up, to the point where I no longer enjoy bothering to try at all. Now I am only involved in technology to the extent that I make money from it, and I’m in the process of transitioning my career away from tech altogether. So much potential squandered.