What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech?
whofearsthenight @ whofearsthenight @lemm.ee Posts 0Comments 408Joined 2 yr. ago
whofearsthenight @ whofearsthenight @lemm.ee
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I don't think that even the languages are the problem, it's the toolchain. While certainly if you went back to C or whatever, you can design more performant systems, I think the problem overall stems from modern toolchains being kinda ridiculous. It is entirely common in any language to load in massive libraries that suck up 100's of mb of RAM (if not gigs) to get a slightly nicer function to lowercase text or something.
The other confounding factor is "write once, run anywhere" which in practice means that there is a lot of shared code and such that does nothing on your machine. The most obvious example being Electron. Pretty much all of the Electron apps I use on the reg (which are mostly just Discord and slack) are conceptually simple apps that have analogues that used to run on a few hundred mbs of storage and 10's of mb of RAM.
Oh, one other sidetone - how many CPUs are wasting cycles on things that no one wants, like extremely complex ad-tracking/data mining/etc.
I know why this is the case, and ease of development does enable us to have software that we probably otherwise wouldn't, but this is a thing that I think is a real blight on modern computing, and I think it's solvable. I mean, probably the dumbest idea, but improving translation layers to run platform-native code can be vastly improved. Especially in a world where we have generative AI, there has to be a way to say "hey, I've got this javascript function, I need this to work in kotlin, swift, c++, etc."
Lots of stuff -
On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It's currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that's not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn't really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.
In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I'm leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn't explicitly open source and can't be understood generally.
On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can't run modern software, but we're leaving a lot of shit behind where that's not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.
Exactly. In just a few thousand years, he'll run out of money as long as he keeps buying yachts every day.
But no, seriously, if we want him to be less relevant it's pretty simple. Stop going to Twitter (fuck x, i won't call it that ever) don't buy tesla, and lobby against SpaceX. At least, until Elon has no control (edit: and financial benefit) over any of those.
Upvote, but yeah, it's all social media. You're socializing with others. This is true even going back to BBS's, and granted the term was popularized with MySpace and Facebook, but I def consider reddit to be social media. Ditto for lemmy, mastodon, and the fediverse. The divide for me now is firmly the corpo-verse and the fediverse.
I guess maybe out there is an instance of whatever that's read only that doesn't allow any interaction, but still.
Same. Any minute now I'd be taking my daily jaunt around space, but alas, the major players in the space are Bezos and Musk, so because of my principled stance (and nothing else!) I am going to shit post on the fediverse instead and then maybe play some video games.
I mean, modern games are many times more complex so the idea of putting out a "finished" game these days is more like "this is an acceptable level of bugs/most players won't hit this." The problem is that the acceptable level has shifted way too fucking far in the wrong direction to the point where in some cases we're barely getting an alpha, much less a beta. In general, I have no problem with companies putting out good games that get better, like tuning for performance so you get better FPS, it's player on lower spec machines, etc. I don't like the idea of paying to be a beta tester for two years, and not getting the good game until way later.
I think there are a few major problems here:
There legitimately are powerful people who are systemically oppressing non-whites/non-straights.
There is a significant amount of people that lack empathy and have never experienced personally this type of systemic oppression, and thus don't believe it's real. This is particularly evident on the right where empathy is in short supply. See also: my abortion is the only moral abortion, the government shouldn't be supporting these freeloaders (but make sure my HUD/food stamps/social security show up on time!), Obamacare needs to be abolished (but don't drop me from my insurance I need my meds!), etc.
Back to point number one, even the blue team has been unfortunately ignorant about the level of systemic oppression and often serves as a validating factor. It's one of the small things that I think have been positive about the social media era, these stories are getting to far more people than they used to. When I was in school in the 2000's, if you asked basically anyone in my predominantly white school (including me, tbh) they probably would have said racism is basically a solved problem and is only a tiny little fraction of the actual experience for POC/LGBTQ++, etc. People with empathy pick up on this faster, but if you say ACAB in a room full of blue team, you're probably still going to get a lot of pushback...
Speaking of ACAB, a big part of the problem is that people just do not fucking get nuance. Most of even the staunchest ACAB supporters don't believe that everyone who is a cop or will become a cop is a bastard/bad person, the point is that the institution of policing in this country is systemically racist, systemically corrupt, and systemically insulated from consequences in a way that is unjust and bad for society. Or, shorter, we have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and know that when you give people this type of power you can expect bad things. Thus, there isn't a way to be a moral cop because the system removes the ability to stay moral, which is also why a lot of those that we would call "good" cops are forced out of the field. Anyway, pretty fucking hard to fit that on a bumper sticker, so we end up with things like ACAB/BLM/Pride, etc.
Consensus from those with closer experience is that he's always been kind of an asshole, just not a crazy asshole. Also, the whole "Elon's a Tony Stark genius" was literally a marketing campaign and he used to have a really good PR person. He fired that person some years back (want to say around '17-'18?) got on twitter and let that fully rot his brain.
I think this is a fairly predictable outcome when you fire anyone who contradicts you and seem to spend your whole day hotboxing your own farts with a legion of minions in tow who will stop at nothing to tell you what a great experience that is.
Apple's already out. Disney dropped today as well.
Musk is a barely part time CEO of an automaker that had a 10 year head start and is about to get passed by just about every other major maker. He's producing cars rife with QA problems, and ships about equal parts vaporware to actual cars. There is also a ticking clock on a significant part of Tesla's business which is selling carbon offset credits (side note: what's the fucking point then?) and other subsidies that seem to have no plan to solve. He spends his actual time shitposting now with extra anti-semitism (and I guess we're glossing by the anti-LGBTQ shit he's posted several times.)
SpaceX is healthier, but also has massive weakness in that they largely that way because of massive subsidy and lack of regulation on shooting satellites into space.
Literally just about any other employee, not CEO would be fired 20 times over. That Elon remains the head of any company should send investors screaming for the hills because there is basically no clearer sign that the companies have no actual board and thus no actual oversight. Elon shouldn't be in charge of picking between McDonalds or Wendy's, much less an actual company.
Douglas Achterman’s 2008 doctoral disser- tation on student achievement in California, titled “Haves, Halves and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement, ” found that the greater the number of library services offered, the higher students’ scores tended to be. “On the U.S. History test, the library program is a better predictor of scores than both school variables and community vari- ables, including parent education, poverty, ethnicity, and percentage of English language learners.”1
We're like, barely getting into the first link you post where it identifies exactly how they want to increase media literacy, with studies that confirm.
2023 folks. Give books, apparently controversial.
You're correct and this is why I think things like these are needed. We're literally talking about something that is maybe 10 years old at best. edit: in the modern context.
Stephen Miller
Yeah, I mean, his agenda if he's reelected is apparently a genocide, so I wouldn't be counting any chickens here.
Exactly. Democrats are expected to be adults, while Republicans are treated like toddler's that have just been given an 8ball and a 6 pack. Like, I saw a non-ironic headline basically saying that keeping the government open was a win for Mike Johnson. Meaning, literally doing their job at all is some kind of a win. And, of course, was he able to do it because he was able to unite his party and get things done? Of course not, it took the adults bailing him out and capitulating because everyone knows if the government was shutdown the story wouldn't be that a Republican majority can't even keep the government open, it would be that Democrats didn't get on board and bail them out.
Anyone giving Trump any sort of benefit of the doubt even in 2016 could only generously be described as extremely ignorant. Trump had even at the time an extremely proven track record, and all of us proclaiming doom and gloom if he got elected were proven right over and over. The only surprise from any of this is that he didn't start a war and instead just managed to create enough instability to lead us where we are now with Israel/Palestine and especially Russia/Ukraine. Like, there was a lot of us telling everyone exactly what was going to happen in 2016, whether that was Roe, the racist immigration shit, the threat of a pandemic, the growing wealth inequality, his ability to handle something like Hurricane Maria, etc. We knew he was a rapist then. We knew he was a conman then. He had already mocked the disabled, military families, called hispanics murderers, rapists and drug dealers. He already and still maintained the Central Park Five, who'd long been exonerated, should have been put to death. Fuck's sake the only reason he started running basically was because he got a lot of attention for the birther bullshit which tbh wasn't even a dog whistle and he might have just as well had a klan hood on during that whole thing.
I'm not sure if it's more an indictment of the media, the education system, or just Republicans working for generations to do exactly what they have that literally anyone could give him the benefit of the doubt.
Even in this very thread, we're doing their work for them. Biden's been a fairly successful president by most normal metrics, and the only thing the media (and half of this thread) want to talk about is that he's old. Meanwhile, Trump is actually, routinely now showing that he's losing his faculties and he's a spry 3 years younger with the diet of a frat party at 2am and the exercise regimen of a russet potato, but yes, let's really dissect if Biden's putting out an international fire fast enough as if the alternative in Trump wouldn't be literally to throw matches and gas at the problem.
American, have considered immigrating just for the ability to use this phrase on the reg.
Ah yes, the intellectual powerhouses in the 46th best school state for education.
FWIW this is more a dunk on republicans. They want it this way, if you had an education you wouldn't vote for them.
I'm sold on user replaceable batteries, just not necessarily like they are the Nokia's of old. Especially with phones, they're mature enough where the end of support for them is either a choice a company makes, or just purely because the battery is dead. Batteries don't necessarily need to be hot-swappable, but they should be able to be replaced by most people in-home, with tools you probably already have.