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  • My new video about the anti-design of the tech industry where I talk about this little passage from an ACM article that set me off when I found it a few years back.

    In short, before software started eating all the stuff "design" meant something. It described a process of finding the best way to satisfy a purpose. It was a response to the purpose.

    The tech industry takes computation as being an immutable means and finds purposes it may satisfy. The purpose is a response to the tech.

    p.s. sorry to spam. :)

    vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollyMSWSWOY pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/8ffce464/tech-as-anti-design

    threads bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3ltwles4hkk2t masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114852024025529148

  • "businesses and employees"

    the business pays for it, the employees "use" it.

    the business measures the value by how many employees they can remove.

    if the business is measuring "productivity", how are they doing that? Is it jira tickets? Is it timesheets? are they measuring quality? Is it starting to seem like you're trying to pick up water with your fingers?

    if you pretend that ai ceos are actually doing marketing the trajectory is right there staring you in the face

  • David pulled it all together perfectly here. It's amazing how well it fits the hook model, whether they intended it or not

  • Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

    https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

    Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Edge-case marketing

  • how much is templated now? reckon it'll be 3hrs every time?

  • I get where you're coming from but we're talking about two completely separate layers of abstraction.

    If you define data as a material, which you can, then software is going to be a very good means for working with data. It'll be the best!

    But for that to happen you have to have decided that data is the key to whatever purpose you are aiming to satisfy. You're saying that all purposes are a matter of data manipulation.

    I don't actually say that software cannot be a product, I say that it can't be categorised as a product in itself. As in, it doesn't make sense to have "furniture products, exercise products, data products, surveillance products, and SOFTWARE products" - that doesn't mean something made out of software can't be a product.

    BTW I'm not claiming this is novel, in fact I know it's not. I'm also not taking it personal, feedback is why I post this shit.

  • I don't know what part of my post you are responding to

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    Dispatch about software being a material, really, not a product category in itself

  • thanks! I'm glad it sparked this response

    and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.

    Is a key thing here, hey. It's also important to be able to pull things in as you need them and be aware of how those things put a load on your computer. So then it's important to be able to take them out 100% as well.

    I know this is kind of how stuff works but it's the kinda that is the thing for me. One of the design goals of my project is that 100% of what is running is 100% of what is needed at that time

  • Just to add, this video doesn't say much about the actual idea in detail. I have plenty more to say about that. It is more philosophical groundwork to lead into an upcoming video about the thing itself

  • FreeAssembly @awful.systems

    A video I made about "do less" tech products that should have been software for obsoleted hardware

  • I hate how much firefox has been growing to this point of being the best, by a smaller and smaller margin, of a fucking shit bunch

  • This is great, thanks for sharing

  • It's probably more sensible for me to try writing short bits too, instead of faffing around with videos

  • MoreWrite @awful.systems

    The incongruence of the designed and the designer

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    Building his own CCD full-frame mirrorless camera

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    provocation: innovation can't be stifled because innovation is a response to stifles (constraints)

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    A Rant about Front-end Development

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Is this a thing? UX is the new brand

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Jakob Nielsen is betting it all on gen AI

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Omegle dot com ded

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Marc Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto…

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    The secret to killing X is a social network for bots to talk to bots

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Web Three will succeed if we have to trick you into using it

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Holier than thou Gitcoin announce partnership with Shell

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    "Is Laravel the happiest developer community on the planet?"

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    UX and "Human Centeredness" is a grift

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Article outline: Design rhetoric analysis "What's good for the user is good for the business"

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Google should never be allowed to claim they are acting in the interests of an open web