Asklemmy

When I was in undergrad I did debate, and a term that was used to describe the debate topics was "a solution in need of a problem". I think that that very often characterizes the tech industry as a whole.

There is legitimately interesting math going on behind the scenes with AI, and it has a number of legitimate, if specialized, use-cases - sifting through large amounts of data, etc. However, if you're an AI company, there's more money to be made marketing to the general public and trying to sell AI to everyone on everything, rather than keeping it within its lane and letting it do the thing that it does well, well.

Even something like blockchain and cryptocurrency is built on top of somewhat novel and interesting math. What makes it a scam isn't the underlying technology, but rather the speculation bubbles that pop up around it, and the fact that the technology isn't being used for applications other than pushing a ponzi scheme.

For my own opinions - I don't really have anything I don't say out loud, but I definitely have some unorthodox opinions.

• I think that the ultra-convenient mobile telephone, always on your person at all times, has been a net detriment societally speaking. That is to say, the average iPhone user would be living a happier, more fulfilling, more authentic life if iPhones had not become massively popular. Modern tech too often substitutes genuine real-in-person interactions for online interactions that only approximate it. The instant gratification of always having access to all these opinions at all times has created addictions to social media that are harder to quit than cocaine (source: I have a friend who successfully quit cocaine, and she said that she could never quit instagram). The constantly-on GPS results in people not knowing how to navigate their own towns; if you automate something without learning how to do it, you will never learn how to do it. While that's fine most of the time, there are emergency situations where it just results in people being generally less competent than they otherwise would have been.

• For the same reason, I don't like using IDEs. For example when I code in java, the ritual of typing "import javafx.application.Application;" or whatever helps make me consciously aware that I'm using that specific package, and gets me in the headspace. Plus, being constantly reminded of what every single little thing does makes it much easier for me at least to read and parse code quickly. (But I also haven't done extensive coding since I was in undergrad).

• Microsoft Office Excel needs to remove February 29th 1900. I get that they have it so that it's backwards compatible with some archaic software from the 1990s; it's an annoying pet peeve.

• Technology is not the solution to every problem, and technology can make things worse as much as it can make things better. Society seems to have a cult around technological progress, where any new tech is intrinsically a net good for society, and where given any problem the first attempted solution should be a technological one. But for example things like the hyperloop and tesla self-driving cars and so forth are just new modern technology that doesn't come anywhere near as close to solving transportation problems as just implementing a robust public transit network with tech that's existed for 200 years (trains, trolleys, busses) would.

Dear Skippy,

I'm sorry to hear you're going home and leaving one of the prettiest cities in the country. I understand you were frustrated with the pacing and guardrails in place around large-scale enterprise projects where privacy and security and auditing are paramount.

I worry that it took you a long time to realize that you weren't a good fit for the job, and I worry that blaming the inability to find a decent house to buy near work - when you could have moved anywhere in the country in the WFH programme and found a place that brought you joy or just something to rent - on your decisions to move away to where your schoolchums and your parents live, may make that discovery harder to reach than ever. I'm glad if you're going somewhere you believe will make you happier, but a clear audit of this last situation needs to be done.

The truth is, you weren't a good fit. The first, last, and every word in any solution you suggested to every problem was merely a regurge of every last-5-years buzzword, and incredibly short-sighted. "Just use AI in the cloud" was neat to discuss the first time, but no solution built on such jello could pass muster by security people who were not new in their job -- which meant they were maybe old, but also VERY experienced. It's this experience that seemed to cockblock every resume-based solution you dreamt up.

I'm relieved you've landed a job at some dot-co-dot-in startup -- not because I bear you any ill-will "boy needs to learn a lesson" thing and I know that the odds are vastly against long-term employment, but because chasing the constant churn of buzzword products will get it out of your system; and in this day and age, still suffering from the loss of our mentors and gurus 20 years ago and the Lost Boys age of Tech that followed, you need to discover yourself the things you refuse to hear from people eschewing certain tech not because they're old but because they're critical of the gilded shit that likely will never survive long enough to realize a return on the investment and churn costs.

I wish you a speedy end to that slow soul-search and a placement at the company ready to receive the mature you as we hope to gain a more mature version of your astounding intellect and enthusiasm in your seat very quickly to carry on the work you should have been fucking doing.

Keep in touch, so I can witness your transformation into a focused force of nature.

Sincerely, your friend and peer,

--cg

I’m personally very conflicted between my love of computers and the seeming necessity of conflict minerals in their construction. How much coltan is dug up every year just to be shoved into an IoT device whose company will be defunct in six months, effectively bricking the thing? Even if the mining practices were made humane, they wouldn’t be sustainable. My coworkers are very cool for tech workers. Vague anticapitalist sentiments. Hate Elon. But I don’t think they’re ready for this conversation.

It's one of the reasons I enjoy working on open source. Sure the companies that pay the bills for that maintenance might not be the ones you would work for directly but I satisfy myself that we are improving a commons that everyone can take advantage of.

The proliferators of theftbox technology and everyone who ups it/demands it for my career's advancement deserves to get put on an upturned pike, chest-first. To me it's like being a battle rapper: like a battle rapper better not EVER be relying on ghostwriters for their bars, if you need CoPilot to code, you don't deserve to call yourself a programmer; and I was an artist first-- so I don't see any of this LLM bullshit as anything more than tricknology that robbed me and everybody I consider my actual peers (which is to say, not the theftbox touchers).

I'd rather see a journeyman programmer cracking open the books they taught themselves out of than see them turning to CoPilot.

'Using cloud software will lead to lower costs and a better overall service quality'

Software dev tools and process are so convoluted and unnecessary. We need to find a happy medium between sites being published via FTP uploads like before and the CI/CD madness of today. And there’s too many tooling options available. It’s caused a huge amount of disparity between options. Look at the JavaScript ecosystem for example.

You’re becoming an old man yelling at clouds. People sad all the same shit about websites back in the 90s. They said the same shit about personal computers in offices in general over the mainframe systems. Unless your software is going to be responsible for actual lives it’s better to get something buggy out on time then drag things out like star citizen soaking up money for no returns.

Commercial freebie tech turns us into short-sighted muppets and pulls apart the fabric of society

The job of a software developer should be regulated like a job of a lawyer/doctor/real engineer, that is a requirement of a degree/formal training and a professional society

I think that the industries based around cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have always been, and have repeatedly proven themselves to be, nothing more or less than scams run and perpetuated by scam artists.

Can you please expand on this and help me out here?

I’m coming across people who are true believers in crypto and while I insist it’s a scam and it’s destroying the fucking planet, they go down the rabbit hole into places I can’t follow because I’ve literally not had the interest nor desire to read up on crypto.

They keep saying that what’s really destroying the planet is the existing financial system with all of the logistics involved with keeping it up as opposed to the cryptofarms adding to the demand on the electric grid. They say that is the goal, to replace the existing financial energy demand with crypto but again, it’s only added to it. Another talking point is that in the case of global climate catastrophe there will be pockets of electricity and cryptoservers somewhere on the planet and that while crypto will remain all the other financial systems will disappear

They also seem to somehow think it’s the fix to workplace bureaucracy somehow and everything in sight

Please impart some knowledge.