Asklemmy

I truly believe that innovating the internet is really running in place. Might be just me but I can't think of anything we can really do, to 'evolve' it. We're doing everything that we've been doing in the past three decades, but it's only just been more accessible and the speeds faster (depending where you are). But we're not actually moving the needle when it comes to progressing the internet as a whole.

And I see it this way as to why. We've experienced two big booms in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, with Web 1.0 being what some consider the Wild West of the internet. Web 2.0 is basically the great social media bubble that has blossomed for years. We're not doing anything new or different now than we did back in 2007. Every new social media platform that comes out is recycling the exact same things as many before it presented. I truly think we stopped evolving the internet the day we managed to get messengers onto phones when phones were developing and it's only been perfected by the age of the first wave of smartphones.

So I just think with all of this AI stuff, this "Web 3.0" I've been hearing about for a few years now, the Metaverse .etc are all just gimmicks. Gimmicks of shitty ideas coming from the wrong people that should be practicing said ideas, all saying that they're innovating the internet when all that they're doing is just taking advantage of the internet for themselves. All within political theater of course.

At least half of the people working in tech shouldn't be. They have 0 clue what they're doing and that's dangerous. And far to many people solve everything with a golden hammer.

You don't need a Mac to work in IT. Especially if all your doing is ansible.

Ansible sucks. It's slow, it's limited, it gives a false sense of understanding to do many. I mean it's nice that it's a structured playground for some folks I suppose. But there are better tools that do the exact same thing. Or you could just write a proper script.

No class consciousness. Too many tech workers think they're rugged individuals that can negotiate their own contracts into wealth.

Working for free on nights and weekends to "hit that deadline" is not good. You're just making the owners rich, and devaluing labor. Even if you own a lot of equity, it's not as much as the owners.

And then there's bullshit like return to office mandates and people are like "oh no none of us want to do this but there's no organized mechanism to resist"

Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn't make anybody better off.

We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to...etc etc.

Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah...

Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.

It's circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.

Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.

I'm all for advancing technology, I love technology, it's my job and my hobby.

But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.

Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.

One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.

CEOs and all management suite are mostly useless except for making the business worse for the employees and customers for the sake of investors.

Most employees are perfectly fine with slow and steady growth instead of maximizing it.

Most of the high visibility "tech bros" aren't technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.

There are some highly intelligent, very dangerous people out there, and 95% of companies will be incapable of stopping them. Most people, across all industries, are too slow, uneducated, lazy or just uncaring enough that no amount of training or tools will fix it.

My opinion on tech is that there are cool things being done that do one shiney thing, but everyone disregards the shit it produces behind the scenes. Blookchain is an awesome concept, the whole chain depends on all the other parts of it, but the fact that in order to use it, you have to download the whole thing in several systems. The size of a single will grow so large, only a few companies will be able to analyze it at scale. And AI is a huge joke. Nobody should be celebrating generative AI. A ton of computing power that is dangerous to our eco system, and it's all trained on shady material. Nobody is doing anything significant about the power consumption, just coming up with agencies to help companies use AI properly. It's all a joke. Most of our most influencial technologies are just someone asking how to make big bucks off something comes else created for free.

A very large portion (maybe not quite a majority) of software developers are not very good at their jobs. Just good enough to get by.

And that is entirely okay! Applies to most jobs, honestly. But there is really NO appropriate way to express that to a coworker.

I've seen way too much "just keep trying random things without really knowing what you're doing, and hope you eventually stumble into something that works" attitude from coworkers.

All software should be open source

Right now, Ai is a party trick.

Tomorrow, Ai will inform the FBI that #29933 is planning on murdering his sister, and deploy a team of armed drones to escort him to prison, if he makes it.

Tomorrow, the department stores and supermarkets will be empty and you'll pick up your groceries from an automated warehouse that inserts them into your car.

Tomorrow, the mail bot will barf your mail into a labeled box, wherin you'll find your prescription medication, bottled labeled and packaged by nobody, which you take right after you go out to eat at an empty restaurant, where your food is brought to you by an automated track that says tHaNk Yo in an inhuman tone before cutting off too soon.

No conversations, no traveling, no hassle, no humanity, or sincerity whatsoever.

hooray?

Why the fuck is everyone so stoked about this? Vending-machine land sounds insufferable.

Please stop with the AI pushing. It's a solution looking for a problem, it's a waste in 90% of the cases.

IT is slowly starting to get regulated like a real engineering field and that's a good developement.

I think companies that use unethically trained AI (read: basically all gen AI) should be subject to massive litigation, or at least severely damaging boycotts.

Have mentioned it to a lawyer at work, and he was like “I get it, but uh… fat chance, lol”. Would not dare mention it to the AI-hungry folks in leadership.

The whole "tech industry" naming is bulllshit, there is more technology let's say in composite used to build an aircraft wing or in a surgerical robots, than in yet another mobile app showing you ads

The whole tech sector also tend to be over evaluated on the stock market. In no world Apple is worth 3 trillion while coca cola or airbus are worth around 200 billions

I think most people who actually work in software development will agree with you on those things. The problem is that it's the marketing people and investors who disagree with you, but it's also them who get to make the decisions.

Not a software dev, but for me it’s the constant leap from today’s “next best thing” to tomorrow’s. Behind the Bastards did an episode on AI, and his take resonated with me. Particularly his Q&A session with some AI leaders at, I think, CES not long ago. When the new hotness gets popular, an obscene amount of money is paired with the “move fast and break things” attitude in a rush to profit. This often creates massive opportunities for grifters as legislators are mind numbing slow to react to these new technologies. And when regulations are finally passed (or more recently, allowed by the oligarchs), they’re often written to protect the billionaires (read: “job creators”) more than the common customer. Everyone’s bought into the idea that slow and methodical stifles innovation. At least the people funding and regulating these things have.

rabbits in skinner boxes pressing two buttons for a treat is not a far cry from tech workers sitting in cublices pressing 104 buttons for paycheck nor internet users doing it for imaginary internet points.