I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
Needless complexity in software is something that gets on my nerves, especially on the web. We went from simple HTML to such a bloated mess that only like 2 web browsers can manage to keep up with it. I mean, does a web browser really need to do everything? Why use an office suite written in JavaScript in a web browser when there are native programs you could use?
As someone who makes websites for work, I agree
As someone who used to, I also agree
if the ‘big three’ have their way, it won’t be a browser to do ‘everything’, it’ll be individual apps instead. where they control everything, including ads and trackers and data collection, instead of in a browser where users at least have some control. but yea, where it’s possible or expected, an ‘app’ should have a standalone application to install or run available. and knock it off already with ‘apps’ that are basically just wrappers around a ‘mobile-first’ web page. apps should do something other than just browse your damn web site.
The big three killed my baby
It goes deeper than you think. Frameworks like Angular are used everywhere. So you not only have an abstraction of the underlying language (Typescript compiles down to Javascript), but you have additional abstractions like the virtual DOM. Basically, Angular acts like a go between from the code you write and the end result webpage. It makes both writing complex interactions and debugging a major pain.
And this is more being done for even simple websites now. It’s the equivalent of building a small garden shed with a kitchen, fridge, furnace, bedroom, bathroom, insulation, etc.
It’s so overkill nowadays.
Standards based thin clients, basically. It’s not exactly a bad thing, but I do get your frustration. I still like working with tiny little static sites.
Mostly though, JavaScript is also just trash. The only language we transpile because working in the vanilla version is so miserable.
Surely you mean Typescript? Plain Javascript is as vanilla as you can get on the web (aside from plain plain HTML).
TS is basically a JS extension, but no, I meant JavaScript. Webpack, esbuild, babel, and probably a dozen others were not originally built for TS.
I’m trying to understand what you meant by “The only language we transpile because working in the vanilla version is so miserable.”
ok
Just “ok”?
The statement “the only language we transpile” is just wrong. Java is a language that we (usually) transpile.
Then there’s LLVM, and how the frontend transpiles a language into an IR before being sent to a backend that targets a hardware architecture.
I think they meant the only language we transpile to for the express reason that working with it directly is so unpleasant.
Java is not transpiled to another language intended for human use, it’s compiled to JVM bytecode.
People don’t usually develop software directly in the IR of LLVM. They do develop software using vanilla JavaScript.
The fact the Turbo PR caused so much drama earlier this week says it all about JavaScript really. And it’s my daily driver ATM. I’d rather be using PHP. Yes, you read right. At least they’re fixing the duck typing.
I agree with you. But with how fractured the software and hardware space has become. Building native is expensive and time consuming.
For example a web browser is compatible with x86 amd64 armv7 aarch64 on any OS from Windows, Linux, Mac OS, iPad/iOS, and Android.
Which means that if I make 1 web page, I can support all these platforms at once.
The customer doesn’t care, they just want funny cat pics.
Building native requires both the hardware (especially if you need to build for the walled garden known as iOS), and frameworks. Where its just easier to recompile chrome, and bake in a Web Page, I.e. react native
I help maintain Etherpad and this cuts so deep.
The main counter-argument I have is restrictive installation policies especially in Edu/bluechip IE you can do whatever the fuck you want in the sandbox that is your web browser but if you want to install some software you have to wait 4 weeks for approval then another 4 weeks to get approval for each update.
Also security updates/patches for native applications can be really shitty especially on Microsoft inflicted devices… For example, if you want to update Inkscape on Windows you have to do a whole download/install process. This can lead to security related issues…
The loss of the actual internet + The loss of actual search engines.
Let me explain. The internet used to be an open playground where anyone could post a website dedicated to their interests, and did so. There were websites about octopuses and electomagnets and all sorts of obscure niche interests. Free website space with plentiful, and everybody used it. You could see 50 pages of information about someone’s dog Fifi, just because they wanted to put it out there. Or hand loading ammunition if that was their bag. Or why the Communist manifesto was a better document than the declaration of Independence. Anything went on your own web page.
And it became massive; so big that we needed search engines to find the exact thing we were looking for. When we wanted to find information about octopuses, we needed to search through all those obscure websites and find what we needed to find about octopuses.
So the search engine wars began.
We also had things like stumble upon, where you could be surprised by some interesting site, and there were rings, where interesting sites of the same genre linked together so you could follow a threat of interest through a bunch of obscure sites.
None of this was forced on you.
Now we have possibly 20 to 30 large websites that account for 95% of all the traffic on the internet? We have search engines that show us what they think we meant by our question, but not the exact answer to our question.
It’s gone. We wondered how they were possibly going to tame the internet how they were going to close Pandora’s box.
It’s all gone.
1993-2002ish was the golden age of the web. Now everybody just goes to the same handful of websites for everything. Even if you hate Spez, you still can’t find any quality answers to anything without adding site:reddit.com to your searches. Everything else is SEO-optimized blogspam generated by a bot. There are no real personal webpages being run by a single person or a small entity anymore. Everything is corporate and centralized.
That’s some rose tinted glasses, and misunderstands why we don’t do that anymore, despite being perfectly able to.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry, they required the person to know how to host and code some basic HTML. Sure, it had more personality, but that barrier meant there was far less people who could do that. So then platforms like geocities came out, where instead you now needed just an account and to fill out some forms to create your own little site, you didn’t even have to host anymore! That was the beginning of web2. Those people who now were creating pages on geocities didn’t have a voice before, they could have posted their own websites but simply did not have the means to, nor should they be required to just so they can post online.
Well, now we’re on geocities on crack, which the websites we post our content on have gotten much more advance, to the point that we are now. Those big internet monoliths exist because of web2, because people didn’t want to handle their own self hosting stack just to post some stuff to the internet, so no wonder we’ve reached this point. People then gravitated to the best places to post their content, and to explore other’s content. Because that’s essentially what the internet is, exploring other’s content.
That’s not right and I’ll tell you why. You’re not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here’s where corporations threw the control element in.
They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.
So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend’s posts. I’m looking at you Instagram.
But by all means disagree with me. But you won’t convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.
Not just control. Manipulation, subtle and not-so-subtle.
That’s not right and I’ll tell you why.
This could be the tagline for the entire internet.
What’s more, they created a standardized format for how people add content. Facebook has template, Instagram has a template and users just plug in what they want to contribute. It has made it easier for more people to post things, for better or worse, but it sucked so much creativity from the internet. The individuality of personal websites has been crushed by these entities forcing people to use their format.
There’s only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.
Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry
Barrier for entry? I had a geocities page when I was around 11 or 12 (and it was free, geocities ran banner ads on my page. I could host something like 50mb-100mb in pictures). I learned HTML because I played a webgame called Neopets, and you could customize little webpages for your pets and your shopfront. I think it had CSS too (and it was the new thing!).
The barrier wasn’t making a website, it was visibility. How many human visitors do you think my geocities page got? Pretty sure just the people in the webring I joined, and my mom. But I spent a lot of my time looking at other people’s obscure geocities pages about pokemon or their doodles or whatever. Was my page very useful or interesting? No, but it was my little corner of the internet, and I was so excited to visit other people’s fan pages and add them to my links list or whatever. Or figure out how they pulled off some new rad html stuff that I had to do for myself.
I had to take my geocities page down. There was a form on my site so people could send me cool facts about pokemon (it would show up in my email which my mom had access to), and someone typed up some awful pokemon sex story, so my mom made me take it down!
Anyway, I’m not sure what I was trying to say, but no, it was braindead simple and freely available to make a website. The internet was more human. Other kids at my school knew how to do it. Not sure what kids would say these days if you asked them to put their doodles on the internet. They’d upload it somewhere, where people can comment on it, upvote it, downvote it. My geocities page was entirely mine, nobody was there to judge or monetize my shitty doodles (outside of banner ads)
I think about this constantly. I’m constantly very upset about it. I’ve lost friends to cancer and freak accidents, and the loss of the internet is still genuinely the greatest tragedy in my life. The internet is, in large part, nothing more than a series of very customizable and semi-niche subscription packages and big box stores now. VR, particularly VR Chat, is close to/reminiscent of what it used to be like, so I cling to that, Lemmy, piracy, archive.org, and a few other things very tightly, but VR is starting to enter an era comparable to when cable internet started to become commonly available (and full of obnoxious unsupervised children), so it’s on its way out; not to mention the continued attempts to ruin the internet archive, which will be, not hyperbolically, the greatest loss to our species since the destruction of Alexandria.
We had it all, and it got bought out from under us, and there’s nothing to be done about it. People en masse don’t even know what we’re missing. I hate it. I’ll never get over the obsolescence of specialized forums in favor of social media, in particular.
I too feel nostalgic sometimes for the “turnpike” days…
Check out perplexity search engine. It’s like having Google back the way it used to be
How so, isn’t this just another AI search engine? How is that like old school Google in any way? It’s like, literally the complete opposite lol.
Are you talking about perplexity.ai ? because it looks like a shitty LLM answering questions instead of an actual search engine. It looks absolutely atrocious privacy-wise, too.
Explain?
I just moved into a new student dorm today and every single thing is done by a different app run by a different company and the “help desk” only say “use the app” whenever you have an issue. Only problem is I can barely even download the thing because the wifi is broken and I can’t report that I can’t connect to it because I can’t download the app to report it.
On that note I am noticing with growing concern the big push to transition to and rely on technology that is nowhere close to the level of reliability that is being presented. I am not a Luddite in any way but pushing apps everywhere with little regard for functionality and privacy, as well as endless “do you have an app for this?” questions are unnerving. Same with AI.
I like the contrast with this comment about how web is starting to do too much. I agree with both sentiments, so it would be great to find the golden mean.
Honestly, I’m so fed up with EVERYTHING having an app. I don’t need an app to pick up some Taco Bell
I’m somebody who likes to take care of things himself, especially if an app can handle it, but ultimately I want there to be a clear way to get a person for when things just aren’t working. I feel like so many companies work so hard to make sure I never talk to a person ever.
Noise pollution and how comfortable people feel contributing to it. I’m mostly talking about people playing videos and listening to music in public (bars, restaurants, etc), but also the new “stereos” on motorcycles that are essentially just PA systems. Sometimes it feels like nowhere’s quiet anymore.
Tangentially related, light pollution. Not just the damn city preventing me from seeing Nishimura, but also inside your own home. How many electronics do you have that put out constant light? I should not be able to cast a shadow on my wall while my TV is off.
Does anyone know where I can get a large, dim, red alarm clock? It always seems like I have to choose one of those, two if I’m lucky.
It seems like people are scared of silence after being raised on constant stimulation. They go everywhere with airpods and then blast the music when those aren’t enough. Even nature trails aren’t enough anymore because there’s always some asshole blasting their music.
Some people get downright feral when their noise machines are even brought up. It’s competitive aggression against other competitive aggressors and it’s supposed to go without criticism, or else.
This is precisely why I don’t say anything when it happens. It doesn’t seem to bother others — for some odd reason — and I don’t want to get my ass beat if they end up being unreasonable.
That’s also why I just have to put up with the floorboards shaking at 3 in the morning because a very divorced
needs to tell the neighborhood about his divorce while doing figure eights in the nearby parking lot.
also the new “stereos” on motorcycles that are essentially just PA systems
God I was walking to the store on Saturday and some douche was driving around blasting one of the SHITTIEST red hot chili pepper songs ever and he fucking circled the block a couple times so me and everyone walking down the sidewalks had to endure this fucking god awful song at full fucking volume.
Fucking inconsiderate as hell.
Fuck cars
yeah the whole dang teenagers and their bluetooth boxes always struck me as odd. I mean not that it’s not dick behaviour but considering we allow sports cars to annoy everyone in like a 1 mile radius when the owner decides to compensate for whatever it feels odd that there’s this focus on people listening to music
and lawn equipment
Fuck lawns
On a related note, speakerphone calls in public spaces.
You are not the main character.
Another one that gets me: buying things but not actually owning them. You buy a game but you don’t actually own the game, you own a license to play a game on a service that might shut down sometime in the future or change their mind about the license they sold you. You buy an e-book but the storefront you bought it from might change or remove it, and then forcibly update or remove any copies you have on e-readers. Most people don’t even buy movies or TV shows, they just subscribe to some streaming service, and if they do “buy” an electronic copy it’s the same issue as e-books.
At least physical copies of movies and tv shows and books are still a thing, but even then we’re heading towards a future where physical media may require phoning in before it’ll play.
It needs to be made illegal for any store to call a lease a purchase. If what you’re buying is a temporary, revokable license to download and play a game or watch a movie, the store you buy it from should be forced to make that perfectly clear.
And that lack of ownership should be reflected in the price.
deleted by creator
Burn the stores and plunder their booty, yo-ho, yo-ho
The proliferation of tiktok and other extremely short-form content, and parents being comfortable with their kids using it.
Ridiculously bright headlights on cars, in particular those the driver cannot control when they dim. I can’t fucking see when driving at night against incoming traffic. Yet the majority of people seem to love them somehow.
Baseball is unwatchable to me anymore because of ads the announcers read during innings.
Everyone hates advertising, but it’s an unavoidable part of life and it’s never bothered me when there’s a 3 minute commercial break. I’ll mute it until the show comes back on and look at my phone or get up or something. Or I’ll fast forward if I have a buffer.
But baseball TV and radio announcers reading frequent quick ads between pitches or between at bats can’t be skipped/muted and it’s like fingernails on a blackboard for me. After 30+ years watching baseball, I’m essentially done with it now.
Everyone complains about ads but I seem to be the only one who thinks real TV with its easily skippable commercials is the least bad option. Streaming services aren’t going to let us control the video stream the way DVRs do.
I’m from the UK and the bombardment of adverts you guys have in sports has always been ridiculous, but it’s getting even worse.
Anytime there’s a break in play, they’ll bring up an ad at the side of the screen. And literally everything has a sponsor. They’ll show footage of a previous game and tell you it’s brought to you by Dunkin’ Donuts, or something.
Watching the superbowl on the bbc its always funny how much time the broadcast spends in the studio, because they can only show so many ads on uk tv.
Every single break in play!
How the fuck a 60 minute game can take 3+ hours to play is beyond me.
The BBC cannot show any ads at all - other networks can show ads but there is a lot of regulation.
Good point, I must have watched it on channel 4 or whatever it was on this year.
Yeah plus baseball like cricket is perfectly suited for advertisement withjts frequent breaks unlike smth like football that has just the halftime
an unavoidable part of life
It may be impossible to completely remove ads from your life (without going all Ted Kaczynski on every billboard you drive past), but an ad blocking DNS, uBlock Origin, youtube premium, and sketchy websites to watch your shows and movies on go a looong way
That being said, I was forced to watch an ad while getting gas the other day, and I may actually do some praxis if that hits my preferred gas station. Hello FBI algorithm
Start hitting random buttons along the side of the screen. Most of the time one of them will at least mute the ad.
I remember back in the 90’s seeing news stories about the Taco Bell Doritos War in Iraq.
Same with YouTube content creators integrating ad reads into their content.
“But first, a word from ou-”
Skipskipskipskipskipskipskipskipskip
Rewindrewind
“-ack to the video”
You need an extension called Sponsorblock
Vagisil!
Everyone complains about ads but I seem to be the only one who thinks real TV with its easily skippable commercials is the least bad option
I completely agree and I’ve had lemmy users go completely unhinged at me for enjoying ad’s. It’s unreal.
I stopped watching all sports a few years ago for the same reason. Games with an hour long play clock, were taking 3+ hours to get through due to ads.
Microplastics showing up in our organ tissue and managing to pass the blood brain barrier. We’re going to cure Alzhemers just in time for Plazhemer’s to take us down.
The centralisation of all web browsing in the hands of a handful of aggregated front ends that basically monopolise on content provided by other people. Goodbye websites and independent communities.
Hello auto generated websites that exist to push ads and optimise SEO.
Capitalism is growing, it has successfully seeped through every aspect of our life, creating consensus and effectively becoming more and more the norm in the social fabric. Right now there are many opinions against capitalism that are beginning to become almost taboo.
- It has taken our privacy: it is almost mandatory nowdays to use things like social media and operating systems that track you. You can’t opt out without being a social outcast. As much as I wish I could live with pure Linux on every single device I use (including my phone) and without touching any proprietary software (except games and professional software with no privacy - invading tracking, but that doesn’t work well financially with a FOSS business model) belive me I would. But I would have to give up so much, it becomes almost impossible.
- It’s beginning normal to defend profit and condone terrible things for profit. Everybody knows about how the supply chain relies on several human rights violations to continue, but it’s considered normal.
- It has instilled the idea that everything you do must be useful. I’m seeing the idea that your hobbies must be “productive” in some kind of tangible way in your life spread around more and more, and it is making us appreciate life less, as “doing it for the sake of doing it” is beginning to be shunned as an useless waste of time.
- Relationships are becoming molded by capitalism. Think about the dating apps culture, swiping left and right on people who basically sell themselves as products on a market. It is becoming normal to see different people in parallel and then just committing to the one you like best - as if you were trying a bunch of laptops in an electronics store. Relationships themselves are less committed and more transactional, as we are normalizing stuff that makes me raise both eyebrows at once. People are starting to become scared of commitment and scared of committing to one person. More and more people are not only opting out of monogamy, but shunning those who choose to practice it as some kind of close - minded conservatives. There is more and more pushing and popularity in something like fluid and open relationships - which allows you to be in a relationship but still be on the market, never fully commit to a person, always keep looking for something better to jump onto, and have a normalized free trial with your partner’s consent. While it does work for some people and I don’t put that in doubt, I feel like at large this is being used to commodify relationships, sell ourselves as products on a market, lose our ability to commit to another human and get used to returning people like an Amazon package. It’s literally treating relationships as products. People want to live in the comfort that, if they decide to try a MacBook Pro M2 and later a more powerful M3-based iteration comes out, they can smoothly transition to the newer model - but for relationships - which is, in turn, damaging the very idea of a serious long-term relationship.
- Likewise, we are becoming all too trigger-happy in throwing people away from our lives like yesterday’s trash. Is your relationship or friendship hitting a rough spot? Nuanced opinions are getting more and more rare. “They’re a narcisist and you need to cut them out”, “they’re gaslighting or manipulating you”, “They don’t deserve you, you should leave immediately”. It’s super good that we are finally starting to take mental health seriously, thank goodness this is one of the things where I think the present is much better than the past at, but people we are overdoing it and using it out of context. In a world where people are commodified, they are too considered as disposable as products, and as such, easy to throw away and replace. The tendency to do real and actual work to work on a relationship or friendship with a person you love is starting to go out of fashion.
- We are making people work several jobs at once and completely drain themselves to even be able to afford their rent and basic survival. Everyone is becoming lonelier. Real friendships and relationships are being replaced with parasocial ones - only accessible through proprietary software with Draconian privacy policies that you would be very hesitant to accept if you took the time to actually read them, of course. There is a push to get part of our social need met by watching “stories” and social media updates by friends, mistaking a few reactions and comments here and there for actual interaction, and parasocial romantic relationships are actively being sold on platforms like Onlyfans, where not only creators sell their content (which I think it’s fair - content is content and everybody should be free to distribute it and sell it as they want and take profit for it), but also chat (or, more often and more unethically, hire someone else to chat with) lonely people who pay them to have someone to talk to and a semblance of a connection, one they cannot get in today’s hyper capitalist lives with low energy and low free time
- The rise of the right. Have you noticed that, right around when capitalism has gotten this intense, it has become almost acceptable once again to be openly fascist, without euphemisms? Have you noticed the sudden rise in far-right leaders in elections worldwide? It’s not just you, this is happening, the far right is making a huge comeback.
I absolutely look like a boomer typing this, and I am fully aware of this. I hate absolutely everything about contemporary culture, except for the much higher attention to mental health, broader acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, more attention on the problems of feminism and a few other things that I think are a net positive to out society. I think capitalism is fully to blame for most of the things that are going to shit right now.
I’m with OP on this one, I can’t stand that everything needs an app to do simple tasks either. And subscriptions are getting way out of hand, the whole technological scope seems way more intrusive then it needs to be.
i can’t stand the apps and crap either. no i don’t want to browse your menu from my phone–hell, i literally can’t (flip phone). no i don’t want to use the app or ‘order ahead’ for an ‘exclusive’ discount. that just tells me you’re charging everybody else too much. no i don’t want to pay with a card or debit and pay extra for that ‘convenience’. no i don’'t want to just ‘sign up’ either, why do i need to do that to read or consume ‘free’ content or to use a ‘free’ app or application?
ad placements and ‘shrinkflation’ are out-of-control, as is the incessant need for companies to nickle-and-dime you to death–and that’s on top of the usual greedy price increases ‘just because’ they can, which are also out-of-control the last few years. the push to the subscription model for everything is part of the latter.
Ditto. Subscriptions for something you should just pay once is ridiculous. No, I do not owe you a monthly sub for an app that I already paid for.
Worse is went you’ve already paid for a lifetime license and they pull the rug out saying they’ll no longer honor it after a certain date.
That’s the quickest way to to get on my ‘Always Pirate’ list
If a piece of software doesn’t have a perpetual license, I’m not using it. I wish more people would do the same, so this predatory business model dies.
Subscriptions are definitely out of hand.
I’ve looked at a few wearable fitness things and most of them come with subscriptions to access the data you want from the sensors, it’s insane.
Yeah, the subscription thing is called Software As A Service, or SAAS for short. Lots of entrepreneurs have been jumping on the SAAS bandwagon in recent years, because it allows them to grow a large user base and passive income, with very little up-front investment.
AI image generation is a good example. We suddenly have a bunch of SAAS image generator apps, which are basically just two or three programmers and a GPU crypto farm rig acting as a server. It’s a relatively small up-front cost (at least when compared to traditional businesses which can take upwards of a million dollars to get started,) and your only real support for the service is keeping the AI model up-to-date and making sure the app’s API is working properly. And your only real ongoing cost for it is the electricity to keep your server running, and an income for your software dev (bonus points if you’re the only software dev, so 100% of the income goes to you.)
Temu, Shein, Alibaba and even Amazon are full of unsafe products not manufactured under sufficient quality standards.
Recently we bought some plates for a party that had gold metallic polka dots on them. I was able to use a plastic fork to scrape off these polka dots. People were eating cake off these plates. The metallic paint was going into people’s mouths.
Also, many of these products are only designed to last for a short time before they break, so we are literally filling landfills with this plastic junk we get sent over to us from China by the shipping container load.
Might be a controversial take, but I’m concerned about people letting themselves shape sweeping, negative views on things that are (keyword: relatively) minor or just don’t fully know the story behind. For example, EA was voted “Worst Company in America” multiple years in a row, when it’s really just a software company whose worst sins would probably amount to gross overworking/general poor treatment of their employees. That’s bad, but I feel like it’s pretty inarguably better than chocolate companies who use child labor to harvest cocoa beans.
It’s especially concerning when it extends to global/political issues (this is why I said this might be controversial). We don’t tend to realize that we share much more in common with people in other countries than we realize, probably helped by the fact that most news sites tend to leave out details or exaggerate bad parts when talking about governments other than their own (a notorious example is the reporting on North Korea . Here’s a good vid about it (CW: very graphic) Not saying it’s a wonderful place to live, just that it’s exaggerated.) Part of the reason political conversations feel so toxic is because so many of us just don’t know a lot of what’s going on or what each other is talking about, so we’re rarely on the same page. Reading a quick Wikipedia summary and/or article can go a long way