Youtube, twitter, and reddit have obviously been in the news a lot recently, but every day business applications also seem to just keep getting worse. Got new PCs at work which means version updates, and pretty much everything we use (autocad, adobe acrobat, and ms office, mainly) all seem to run much slower, despite the computers having substantially higher specs. Love that I can’t use any old versions or alternatives because they refuse to grant me admin access.
I love capitalist innovation! Why make things better when you could just make them worse and charge more?
Every service needs an app and you can’t use their service without the app and the app was put together by an intern that was actively being sexually harassed by the CFO. And if a company has had an app that’s functioned for 5 years they’ll update it now every 8 months in a way that either breaks all functionality or puts in an awful redesign that has basically the same outcome
something i’ve fantasized about, as taking a collective hammer to the knees of enormous asshole software companies, would be if the schools/colleges/universities etc all switched away from proprietary software. right now, i know the decision makers are getting insane discounts and kickbacks and whatever the fuck to agree to enterprise licenses for things like MS Office, ESRI, Adobe so that those programs are what students learn to use in writing articles, creating/processing data, doing analysis, copy editing, visual design, etc. it’s all done under the justification that “these programs look good on a resume”, but it mostly creates a dependency. also, if you leave school to become self-employed, you’re SOL or you have to start kind-of anew with FOSS.
when i was in grad school i did a supplemental concentration in digital mapping that, looking back, was clearly run by some buck-the-system types… because the 3 course curriculum was entirely developed around using only open source software. all QGIS, free / open data sources, open mapping projects, open source scripts for developing our own interfaces for interactive maps. it was wildly empowering and it made me realize how only learning how to do things on proprietary software is extremely limiting for the student in a way that is difficult to recognize by the student and really only services the software company, which is getting devoted customers out of the deal.
anyway, clearly the machine that makes proprietary software the default has been wildly successful and seems deeply entrenched at this point, so it would have to be part of a much larger reform for our school systems to transition away. but i imagine once it started, those companies would be on the road to collapse.
I actually can’t stand it anymore. Everything is so infected. Yesterday I watched a MrBeast video out of curiousity and it sent me into a doom spiral. The kids are fucked.
Yesterday I watched a MrBeast video
You have my condolences😔
It’s sad that he is basically every child’s idol.
I use my young cousin as a yardstick for what kids are into these days. I know all kids are different, but this one in particular loves Tesla cars and Mr Beast. He even bought a bottle of prime on eBay for like £15. I feel so bad for him. Advertising has melted his brain. There’s no reason for a kid to be obsessed with an energy drink brand. There’s no reason for a kid to really even like a Tesla. Car kids when I was growing up all liked the big fat trucks or the super fast sports cars, which makes sense because really they are impressive feats of engineering and look pretty sleek. Tesla’s are just some overmarketed and overrated electric car.
TV basically isn’t a thing anymore. No more shows about fantasy worlds and interesting characters. No stories that play out over an episode. Just YouTube, an endless supply of advertisement sludge, with maximised attention grabbing short term stimulation. I really do fear that this next generation is going to turn out utterly brain-dead. I’m only the generation before that and we’re all total fuckwits already.
I tell idiot neoliberals this all the time. Yes capitalism rewards innovation more than any system in history. That’s true. But the innovation it rewards is “innovative new ways to make profit” not “innovative new ways to make the world better.” Innovation for innovations sake is worthless and the rapid enshitification of the Internet is a great example
Mfs tell me insurance companies are innovative
yes, software quality just keeps getting exponentially worse and I’ve been complaining about it for a while. Stuff like microsoft office, visual studio etc are essentially the same programs they were 20 years ago, but they seem to somehow require computers that are 100x more powerful and are unbelievably buggy. It’s just not sustainable
I was just talking about this with some of my CS meet-up people in our virtual hangout. The group is most 25-45 in age from all sorts of backgrounds and stuff, and we all agree it’s bonkers pretty much every program are so bogged down with features and functions that are used by like .0001% user-base but add an 100X in load times and performance costs.
Not only are these programs full of bloat, I can only imagine the code that makes these things are just full of hacks and “fixes” that need to be reworked from the ground up. I think the craft of building software has been negatively impacted by the whole “get it done” mindset of startups rather than “get it right” of yesteryear.
I’ve heard people suggest that the craft of software development has been hobbled by Moore’s Law. The available computing power has increased so rapidly that there has never been pressure on devs to produce clean, elegant, efficient software. Instead they just produce endless spaghetti code and the problems and inefficiencies are hidden by the available compute power.
It’s cheaper for companies to force end users to upgrade their hardware, than it is for the software companies to hire more people to optimise software
