3 ms·

> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users [... caused by] a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and wh

> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users [... caused by] a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable [... so] perhaps we should take a stronger ethical stand not to harm users. Or, we could ditch the "biz" part. It just so happens that software not written to serve business interests tends to also respect users.

vasco 3y ago
If we ditch the business part what's your recommendation to pay rent?
- cybrox 3y ago
  Just ditch the paying rent part.
- layer8 3y ago
  It's possible to get paid for writing software that secretly doesn’t solely serve business interests but also and even primarily repects users.
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  I happen to believe in subsidised/affordable housing (I assume a UBI is what cybrox meant by not paying rent; also cracking down on housing-as-investments[1] sounds good to me, a layman, though apparently it wouldn't be enough[2] in our case, supply just needs to increase)—but I'm sure that other, less drastic societal changes would also be sufficient. For example, medium to large businesses could fund any open-source projects they make direct use of[3]. With the likes of OpenCollective[4][5] and GitHub Sponsors[6], the only roadblocks to adopting such a policy are corporate red tape and corporate greed. (And if it leads to smaller SBOMs, well, that's just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.) All that said, I was actually referring to individuals (who aren't necessarily developers) choosing which software to use. Over the last 20 years, we've all taken free downloads and sign-ups for granted, ignorant to that whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" thing, and a lot of us now have a $500+ supercomputer in our pockets which is to some extent owned by a tech giant and not its nominal owner. It's apparent that such centralised platforms have some intrinsic problems with regards to users' freedom. That's what I'm cautioning against—not the idea of selling your programming labour to a business, which is fine. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble#Foreign_investment_in_residential_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble#For... (This article is outdated. From a quick web search, it seems foreign real estate investment fell during the pandemic but has now picked up again.) [2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-02/housing-property-australias-one-million-empty-homes/101396656 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-02/housing-property-aust... (1M unoccupied houses in a country of 26M, ~120k of whom don't have secure housing...) [3]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/07/open-source-has-a-funding-problem/#h2-e80da1e18ef10 https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/07/open-source-has-a-fund... [4]: https://blog.opencollective.com/funds-for-open-source/ https://blog.opencollective.com/funds-for-open-source/ [5]: https://docs.opencollective.com/help/financial-contributors/organizations/sustainer-resources https://docs.opencollective.com/help/financial-contributors/... [6]: https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-contributors/sponsoring-an-open-source-contributor-through-github#sponsoring-accounts-in-bulk https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
  - vasco 3y ago
    I thought you'd have something practical in mind like specific industries or working for non-profits or something that would work today, not some theories of how the world could work. I can't go tell my landlord he should believe in subsidised housing like you do unfortunately.
wruza 3y ago
To ditch the biz we have to make dev and ops accessible to ourselves. Nobody does that. Making a proper login form still requires a team and a week. The biz sits there rubbing its hands, watching us making the means of production more and more complex and expensive to use, so that it has a complete monopoly on creating software. Devs are so used to relatively big paychecks from the biz that unconsciously tend to ignore these issues. It’s not implementing dark patterns and cookie popups that makes you on the biz > * side. Tolerating the complexity of software development is. “Biz > complexity > *”. Push the complexity to the right as much as possible to ditch the biz. Due to developer deformation it should be explicitly stated what the complexity is: - Pointless “constant evolution” (version.major++ in less than 5-7 years, previous versions abandoned), - Embracing epoch-breaking changes (2/3, ESM) - Low-level as the norm (scaffold, config, listen, route, ddl, connect, hash, jwt, css, setstate, useeffect, fetch, … in place of business logic)
- YoshiRulz 3y ago
  It's interesting to hear you say that reducing complexity and building to last(?) is the solution. Do you know of any case studies (not even peer-reviewed necessarily, just examples) showing a "recovery" in terms of user freedom after making such changes? My view has always been that complexity should be reduced, but because it makes maintenance easier—reducing cost if you're paying maintainers—and can prevent bugs/vulns. Only tangentially related to privacy, via the latter. Also, I don't understand your last point. Are they all React builtins or something? If you're suggesting that the "shape" of an app's navigation, or of network or system calls, etc. should be how business logic is made concrete, I'd have to disagree. That sounds like microservices but with worse intrinsic documentation (the purest documentation there is).
  - wruza 3y ago
    The kind of complexity I mentioned never gets reduced, or so to say the reduction happens in volumes, not in levels. E.g. an app that uses fetch() to access backend that uses SQL/DDL to init and access database. It never gets reduced into a thing that models data graphically and then uses out of box objects in frontend like `await main_obj.get_linked_obj()`. But it may be simplified by removing all the abstractions which ought to poorly simulate this but failed. A maintainer skill is still required to be high, only their mental capacity is taken care of. Keywords in the last point are from all over the stack. They should be erased from code in favor of much simpler concepts. How you name the users table, which routes access it, should that be fetched or cached, how to structure code to display it — all that is not a businesses business. It should look like e.g. “root.current_user = await User.login(username, password)”. Everything else is low-level.
cousin_it 3y ago
I think it might be enough to tax all electronic ads per viewer-second. It's what directly or indirectly drives most mistreatment of users. Such a tax could be pretty popular too.

vasco 3y ago

If we ditch the business part what's your recommendation to pay rent?

cybrox 3y ago
Just ditch the paying rent part.
layer8 3y ago
It's possible to get paid for writing software that secretly doesn’t solely serve business interests but also and even primarily repects users.
YoshiRulz 3y ago
I happen to believe in subsidised/affordable housing (I assume a UBI is what cybrox meant by not paying rent; also cracking down on housing-as-investments[1] sounds good to me, a layman, though apparently it wouldn't be enough[2] in our case, supply just needs to increase)—but I'm sure that other, less drastic societal changes would also be sufficient. For example, medium to large businesses could fund any open-source projects they make direct use of[3]. With the likes of OpenCollective[4][5] and GitHub Sponsors[6], the only roadblocks to adopting such a policy are corporate red tape and corporate greed. (And if it leads to smaller SBOMs, well, that's just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.) All that said, I was actually referring to individuals (who aren't necessarily developers) choosing which software to use. Over the last 20 years, we've all taken free downloads and sign-ups for granted, ignorant to that whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" thing, and a lot of us now have a $500+ supercomputer in our pockets which is to some extent owned by a tech giant and not its nominal owner. It's apparent that such centralised platforms have some intrinsic problems with regards to users' freedom. That's what I'm cautioning against—not the idea of selling your programming labour to a business, which is fine. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble#Foreign_investment_in_residential_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble#For... (This article is outdated. From a quick web search, it seems foreign real estate investment fell during the pandemic but has now picked up again.) [2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-02/housing-property-australias-one-million-empty-homes/101396656 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-02/housing-property-aust... (1M unoccupied houses in a country of 26M, ~120k of whom don't have secure housing...) [3]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/07/open-source-has-a-funding-problem/#h2-e80da1e18ef10 https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/07/open-source-has-a-fund... [4]: https://blog.opencollective.com/funds-for-open-source/ https://blog.opencollective.com/funds-for-open-source/ [5]: https://docs.opencollective.com/help/financial-contributors/organizations/sustainer-resources https://docs.opencollective.com/help/financial-contributors/... [6]: https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-contributors/sponsoring-an-open-source-contributor-through-github#sponsoring-accounts-in-bulk https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
- vasco 3y ago
  I thought you'd have something practical in mind like specific industries or working for non-profits or something that would work today, not some theories of how the world could work. I can't go tell my landlord he should believe in subsidised housing like you do unfortunately.

wruza 3y ago

To ditch the biz we have to make dev and ops accessible to ourselves. Nobody does that. Making a proper login form still requires a team and a week. The biz sits there rubbing its hands, watching us making the means of production more and more complex and expensive to use, so that it has a complete monopoly on creating software. Devs are so used to relatively big paychecks from the biz that unconsciously tend to ignore these issues. It’s not implementing dark patterns and cookie popups that makes you on the biz > * side. Tolerating the complexity of software development is. “Biz > complexity > *”. Push the complexity to the right as much as possible to ditch the biz. Due to developer deformation it should be explicitly stated what the complexity is: - Pointless “constant evolution” (version.major++ in less than 5-7 years, previous versions abandoned), - Embracing epoch-breaking changes (2/3, ESM) - Low-level as the norm (scaffold, config, listen, route, ddl, connect, hash, jwt, css, setstate, useeffect, fetch, … in place of business logic)

YoshiRulz 3y ago
It's interesting to hear you say that reducing complexity and building to last(?) is the solution. Do you know of any case studies (not even peer-reviewed necessarily, just examples) showing a "recovery" in terms of user freedom after making such changes? My view has always been that complexity should be reduced, but because it makes maintenance easier—reducing cost if you're paying maintainers—and can prevent bugs/vulns. Only tangentially related to privacy, via the latter. Also, I don't understand your last point. Are they all React builtins or something? If you're suggesting that the "shape" of an app's navigation, or of network or system calls, etc. should be how business logic is made concrete, I'd have to disagree. That sounds like microservices but with worse intrinsic documentation (the purest documentation there is).
- wruza 3y ago
  The kind of complexity I mentioned never gets reduced, or so to say the reduction happens in volumes, not in levels. E.g. an app that uses fetch() to access backend that uses SQL/DDL to init and access database. It never gets reduced into a thing that models data graphically and then uses out of box objects in frontend like `await main_obj.get_linked_obj()`. But it may be simplified by removing all the abstractions which ought to poorly simulate this but failed. A maintainer skill is still required to be high, only their mental capacity is taken care of. Keywords in the last point are from all over the stack. They should be erased from code in favor of much simpler concepts. How you name the users table, which routes access it, should that be fetched or cached, how to structure code to display it — all that is not a businesses business. It should look like e.g. “root.current_user = await User.login(username, password)”. Everything else is low-level.

cousin_it 3y ago

I think it might be enough to tax all electronic ads per viewer-second. It's what directly or indirectly drives most mistreatment of users. Such a tax could be pretty popular too.