4 ms·

She's right and I hate it. I used to love programming and now all I can think whenever I see 99% of software is, you don't need this. It exists to prop up capit

She's right and I hate it. I used to love programming and now all I can think whenever I see 99% of software is, you don't need this. It exists to prop up capital. I can't even think of anything useful to code. All the useful stuff has been done. I just want to play board games with my friends, lift weights, read books, and never use any piece of technology more complex than SMS ever again. I am 25. If the internet weren't responsible for my coming out I'd say burn it all down.

pianoben 4y ago
This is very much how I felt around 2005-2007, just prior to the iPhone. It's incredible how quickly this feeling of stagnation fell away in the face of the New. Have faith that something New will come again, and you'll be there to break that new ground! Until then, I guess we can just grit our teeth and take solace in our own art - and of course, in weights, books, and friends.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  > feeling of stagnation fell away in the face of the New. Not to get too deep or philosophical, but that feeling of stagnation many times is a sign that you're lacking a true purpose in life. That shiny new thing is, sadly, a false God that is by it's very nature temporary, and the feeling of purpose brought out by it fleeting. Personally I think putting your hopes in The Next New Thing is a bad idea, long term. Take that all with as many grains of salt as needed.
dleslie 4y ago
As I stare at this comment on my magical handheld slab of light I can't help but wonder how many layers of virtual machines, or other abstractions, are between the pixels and the source data they represent. I can think of more than I care to admit. Lately I've been shopping for a PS/2 or equivalent; it has something to do with this.
thwayunion 4y ago
I am older than you and have gone through the same. Let me share a few thoughts. I am not trying to change your mind, just riffing. Thought #1: You don't have to use technology. I have a laptop, but I do not use much software aside from what's required to interact with people and do my work. I have some other technology in my house, such as various home-built robots, but they are only used when I am actively working. Thought #2: There is still a lot of software that is making the world a better place. My mother was in a serious car accident and never really got her mobility back. I am not a fan of car culture, but it's the world we live in. ADAS systems are saving people from life-altering car accidents every day. Thought #3: There is a lot of very positive technology that is totally impossible without software. Genetics is the elephant in the room, of course, since basically everything about the field is totally impossible without good software. But basically every natural science is similar at this point. Even ecology. Thought #4 is about this quote: > If the internet weren't responsible for my coming out I'd say burn it all down. Even with marriage equality and other progress, I do not think the modern transgender rights movement would have been at all possible without the internet. My final thought is a different perspective on the final thought of the essay: > No one knows what they’re doing, and it’s a civilizational problem. There is a lot of essential complexity that we absolutely need in order to make the world a better place -- in biotechnology, energy, and materials in particular. Without modern information retrieval systems, I think our civilization would stop making progress and rapidly collapse.
- sverona 4y ago
  > Even with marriage equality and other progress, I do not think the modern transgender rights movement would have been at all possible without the internet. This is what kills me, because it's absolutely right. I'm trans and my people are all I have. I would love to have just a dumbphone, but being alone again, searching desperately for anyone who gets it, whom I can see and know knows me --- that is soul-rendingly painful. We are a diaspora connected by wires and lights on a screen. The knowledge that I'm not alone, I'm not crazy, I'm not broken saved my life. I can't go back now.
- phoehne 4y ago
  We should totally have nice things. I hundred percent agree. But I have this nightmare that one day a cloud provider goes bankrupt because they can't understand why half their fleet won't boot. And as the go through the entire process, from the initial PXE boot to the full boot and so on, there are just too many ways things can break. They fix one 'issue' only to realize it wasn't the issue. Then the next, issue, and so on, but not coming up for days. And the issue might even be completely out of their control in the proprietary, CPU vendor supplied blob, or the network OEM supplied blob, or the storage supplied blob, or the TPM blob, or the way they rolled certs (because everyone screws that up at some point), etc. etc. And the complexity isn't essential. It's a byproduct of short-term choices, compromises, lowest common denominator thinking, and a lack of risk taking on new approaches to the problem. This leads to systems we cannot reason over. Companies like 0xide computer are taking a stab at these kinds of problems.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
letsburnthis 4y ago
I 100% agree with you when it comes to software meant for me. But there's a lot of software that doesn't exist for people who can't prop up capital like we can. Where I live, you have to pay a lawyer something like $1,200 to clear an old arrest off your record and good luck affording that if you can't get a job or housing because of an arrest that happened a decade ago. I'm currently working to automate as much of the process as possible to bring the cost down to closer to what I think it should be ($0). If you want to find things to program that are useful to someone, it might be worth your time to go looking for things. https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/ This is one organization that's focused on that sort of thing. The local group in my area is more focused on data analysis, but maybe yours will be more up your alley.
lmm 4y ago
Heh, as someone who moved around the world I'm relying on technology for half of that. I can only boardgame with my friends thanks to TTS (even those in my new country aren't meeting up in-person an the moment). And the selection of books available in my native languages would be very limited and expensive if ebooks weren't an option.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> I am 25. I am very interested in your generation and the phenomenon of nascent tech rejection. I think it may be a great hope for us finally solving many problems in software engineering that are more to do with culture and society than bits and bytes. There's a famous Douglas Adams witticism: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. He was absolutely spot-on for my generation. But this doesn't hold any longer, and I've been pondering why. I think my generation saw tech as a hope, as rebellious and progressive, and exciting from the get-go. We were raised on mostly optimistic sci-fi and ideas of space exploration etc. Today, kids are born into a world where tech represents a threat. It's systems of control and stuff that makes their parents unavailable, frustrated and sick. They inutially accept that until reaching teens when they become rebellious and independent thinkers who reject that way of suffering and subjugation. Am I close to the mark?
- sverona 4y ago
  I was very bullish on tech for a long time. What turned me off was the bad patterns that crop up all over social networks (see Twitter/Facebook culture in re: performative activism) and, more than anything, actually writing code in the year 202X.

pianoben 4y ago

This is very much how I felt around 2005-2007, just prior to the iPhone. It's incredible how quickly this feeling of stagnation fell away in the face of the New. Have faith that something New will come again, and you'll be there to break that new ground! Until then, I guess we can just grit our teeth and take solace in our own art - and of course, in weights, books, and friends.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
> feeling of stagnation fell away in the face of the New. Not to get too deep or philosophical, but that feeling of stagnation many times is a sign that you're lacking a true purpose in life. That shiny new thing is, sadly, a false God that is by it's very nature temporary, and the feeling of purpose brought out by it fleeting. Personally I think putting your hopes in The Next New Thing is a bad idea, long term. Take that all with as many grains of salt as needed.

dleslie 4y ago

As I stare at this comment on my magical handheld slab of light I can't help but wonder how many layers of virtual machines, or other abstractions, are between the pixels and the source data they represent. I can think of more than I care to admit. Lately I've been shopping for a PS/2 or equivalent; it has something to do with this.

thwayunion 4y ago

I am older than you and have gone through the same. Let me share a few thoughts. I am not trying to change your mind, just riffing. Thought #1: You don't have to use technology. I have a laptop, but I do not use much software aside from what's required to interact with people and do my work. I have some other technology in my house, such as various home-built robots, but they are only used when I am actively working. Thought #2: There is still a lot of software that is making the world a better place. My mother was in a serious car accident and never really got her mobility back. I am not a fan of car culture, but it's the world we live in. ADAS systems are saving people from life-altering car accidents every day. Thought #3: There is a lot of very positive technology that is totally impossible without software. Genetics is the elephant in the room, of course, since basically everything about the field is totally impossible without good software. But basically every natural science is similar at this point. Even ecology. Thought #4 is about this quote: > If the internet weren't responsible for my coming out I'd say burn it all down. Even with marriage equality and other progress, I do not think the modern transgender rights movement would have been at all possible without the internet. My final thought is a different perspective on the final thought of the essay: > No one knows what they’re doing, and it’s a civilizational problem. There is a lot of essential complexity that we absolutely need in order to make the world a better place -- in biotechnology, energy, and materials in particular. Without modern information retrieval systems, I think our civilization would stop making progress and rapidly collapse.

sverona 4y ago
> Even with marriage equality and other progress, I do not think the modern transgender rights movement would have been at all possible without the internet. This is what kills me, because it's absolutely right. I'm trans and my people are all I have. I would love to have just a dumbphone, but being alone again, searching desperately for anyone who gets it, whom I can see and know knows me --- that is soul-rendingly painful. We are a diaspora connected by wires and lights on a screen. The knowledge that I'm not alone, I'm not crazy, I'm not broken saved my life. I can't go back now.
phoehne 4y ago
We should totally have nice things. I hundred percent agree. But I have this nightmare that one day a cloud provider goes bankrupt because they can't understand why half their fleet won't boot. And as the go through the entire process, from the initial PXE boot to the full boot and so on, there are just too many ways things can break. They fix one 'issue' only to realize it wasn't the issue. Then the next, issue, and so on, but not coming up for days. And the issue might even be completely out of their control in the proprietary, CPU vendor supplied blob, or the network OEM supplied blob, or the storage supplied blob, or the TPM blob, or the way they rolled certs (because everyone screws that up at some point), etc. etc. And the complexity isn't essential. It's a byproduct of short-term choices, compromises, lowest common denominator thinking, and a lack of risk taking on new approaches to the problem. This leads to systems we cannot reason over. Companies like 0xide computer are taking a stab at these kinds of problems.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

letsburnthis 4y ago

I 100% agree with you when it comes to software meant for me. But there's a lot of software that doesn't exist for people who can't prop up capital like we can. Where I live, you have to pay a lawyer something like $1,200 to clear an old arrest off your record and good luck affording that if you can't get a job or housing because of an arrest that happened a decade ago. I'm currently working to automate as much of the process as possible to bring the cost down to closer to what I think it should be ($0). If you want to find things to program that are useful to someone, it might be worth your time to go looking for things. https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/ This is one organization that's focused on that sort of thing. The local group in my area is more focused on data analysis, but maybe yours will be more up your alley.

lmm 4y ago

Heh, as someone who moved around the world I'm relying on technology for half of that. I can only boardgame with my friends thanks to TTS (even those in my new country aren't meeting up in-person an the moment). And the selection of books available in my native languages would be very limited and expensive if ebooks weren't an option.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> I am 25. I am very interested in your generation and the phenomenon of nascent tech rejection. I think it may be a great hope for us finally solving many problems in software engineering that are more to do with culture and society than bits and bytes. There's a famous Douglas Adams witticism: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. He was absolutely spot-on for my generation. But this doesn't hold any longer, and I've been pondering why. I think my generation saw tech as a hope, as rebellious and progressive, and exciting from the get-go. We were raised on mostly optimistic sci-fi and ideas of space exploration etc. Today, kids are born into a world where tech represents a threat. It's systems of control and stuff that makes their parents unavailable, frustrated and sick. They inutially accept that until reaching teens when they become rebellious and independent thinkers who reject that way of suffering and subjugation. Am I close to the mark?

sverona 4y ago
I was very bullish on tech for a long time. What turned me off was the bad patterns that crop up all over social networks (see Twitter/Facebook culture in re: performative activism) and, more than anything, actually writing code in the year 202X.