More focus on the ability to maintain, repair, and perhaps even upgrade existing tech. So often people are pushed to upgrade constantly, and devices aren't really built to last anymore. For example, those yearly trade in upgrade plans that cell phone providers do. It sucks knowing that, once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage and has to be replaced. I miss my older smartphones that still had replaceable batteries, because at least then it's just the battery that's garbage.
We're throwing so much of our very limited amount of resources right into landfills because of planned obsolescence.Have developers be more mindful of the e-waste they're contributing to by indirectly deprecating CPUs when they skip over portions of their code and say "nah it isn't worth it to optimize that thing + everyone today should have a X cores CPU/Y GB of RAM anyway". Complacency like that is what leads software that is as simple in functionality as equivalent software was one or two decades ago to be 10 times more demanding today.
The death of the device and the return of the system.
A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.
A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.
A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.
Probably less elitism. "Oh you build it in x language? Well that's a shit language. You should use y language instead. We should be converting everything to y language because y language is the most superior language!"
(If this feels like a personal attack, Rust programmers, yes. But other languages as well)
That we stop fawning over tech CEOs
Phones with fully open source drivers including the bootloader and decent specs. Give me a UEFI over fastboot any day.
I'd also love it if electron and sexism would kindly go away.
I would like to see:
- Corporations treating their customers like people, not just bags of money.
- Corporations and employers to stop spying on people. Like, it makes me feel so unsafe and that I can't really trust them.
- People becoming more tech literate.
- Open source software, such as Linux being used by more people, especially those who are not so tech literate.
less sexism
Data is a part of a person's individual self. Storing such data on another person is owning a part of their person. It is slavery for exploitation, manipulation, and it is wrong.
This distinction is the difference between a new age of feudalism with all of the same abuses that happened in the last one, or a future with citizens and democracy.
Never trust anyone with a part of yourself. Trust, no matter how well initially intentioned, always leads to abuse of power.
Honestly, just less waste. Wasted time, wasted hardware, etc. We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable,, and making software that fights the user instead of helping. All in the name of profits or something.
We could be making so many cool things, but instead we're going back and forth not making any progress.
Out of the cloud and back into our federated hands/the edge.
People just love the easy path at the loss of sovereignty.
Respecting privacy.
Boot out corporate shitware, boot out adverts, and stop collecting data unless it is absolutely necessary, or alternatively just cancel the fucking product and don't do it.
Personally, I'm just sick and tired of modern UI design. Bring back density, put more information on the screen, eliminate the whitespace, use simple (and native!) widgets, get rid of those fucking sticky headers, and so on.
In addition to all the software freedom stuff, and so on. Also, I wish GPL were more popular too.
I love how we have free to use licences (MIT, GPL, CC, etc) and it would be really great to see the same idea used with terms of services and privacy policies! How great it would be to quickly see that this site uses fair tos and to understand what it includes? Maybe this would also nudge (at least smaller) companies toward not being horrible privacy invading monsters
The disappearance of all these tech peacocks and web turkeys who focus on their number of followers and the quantity of talks rather than quality. The dev rel advocates made the atmosphere toxic
Stop forcing updates on the lower level stuff that forces people to spend billions on maintaining code. This way, we could return to a world where you can just buy software and use it for years without some update borking it.
Also outlawing financially motivated (i.e. greedy) retroactive ToS changes.
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.
I want my devices to run on an OS/framework which allows everything to be scriptable. Data should be visualised using simple/consistent interface.
There will be events, Actions, variables, data-streams, etc and the operating system should provide easy interface to quickly create new programs which can
- Visualize data streams (filterable) using simple interfaces(configurable)
- Create scripts which can create custom events or custom actions which are just built upon existing events/actions.
In such a system, the focus of apps should not be to add fancy interfaces for simple things, but to register new events, actions, data streams, visualizers into the OS and maybe provide new templates to use these additions.
Any hardware that's abandoned needs to be forced to release the source of any needed software - the latest version.
We'd need a range of available licences, as to prevent any bullshit "you're only allowed to read this source" license.
This is going to suck for Apple, but it's going to be great for people who pay for some expensive microscope that's not supported any more.
There's probably a lot of legal nonsense that may make this impossible in practice, but I'd love to see this happen.
- No more proprietary software (including firmware)
- No more software that spies on its users
- No more software that disrespects user freedom
- No more corporations solely trying to extract profit from their users
- More free hardware
Less consumerism, more focus on real social aspects:
- Macro: robust (decentralized) political system, that's not easily corruptible, e.g. via something like blockchain
- Micro: more focus on direct interaction with other people, not via something like a screen, as another post here already said, we're harming ourselves (promote psychiatric issues etc.) with the current state of technology (smartphone overuse). We have gone much less social (direct interaction with others) because of this I'm sure of.
Focus more on stability in terms of apis. We can't be rewriting our apps constantly because they keep updating frameworks every year.
Awareness if not prioritizing energy efficiency. We rarely give any thought to services that run 24/7 even though they're only used 8/5 or we don't care how many CPU cycles a process uses even though it has no SLO for runtime. Most companies probably think it's a question of dumping millions of carbon units into to the atmosphere or becoming luddites.
@onlinepersona I'd like to see less skinny-jeans male faux feminists in tech and more big-chested manly men. I would also like to see less dishonest feminized virtue-signalling from soydev bugmen about what great feminist egalitarians they are. We all know that's bullshit.
@onlinepersona +1
prima donnas like Stewey on In Living Color: "Look what I kandoo!"
