Programming

Unionizing

Attention and awareness of the ways in which modern technology is harming ourselves.

We're providing people with the electronic equivalent of heroin, from a young age, completely rewiring our brains and detaching us from nature and each other.

Three things off the top of my head:

• Unionisation
• Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
• Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.

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.

More privacy and less profit 🫣

I realize most people could rather not pay for a service they currently have for free (which is partly due to the lack of transparency regarding our data usage).

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.

That we stop fawning over tech CEOs

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.

not being forced to have an Android or Apple smartphone, so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps

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)

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:

1. Corporations treating their customers like people, not just bags of money.
2. Corporations and employers to stop spying on people. Like, it makes me feel so unsafe and that I can't really trust them.
3. People becoming more tech literate.
4. Open source software, such as Linux being used by more people, especially those who are not so tech literate.

A pivot way from cargo cult programming and excessive containerization towards simplicity and the fewest dependencies possible for a given task.

Too many projects look like a jinga tower gone horribly wrong. This has significant maintainability and security implications.

ISO-8601 only

UTF-8 only

UTC only

Oh and more self hosting. Clouds are expensive and unnecessary for some stuff.

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.

less sexism

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.

Worker ownership of tech firms

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.

User first, non-profit software companies. To maximize profits, software keeps sacrificing the users happiness. I want to stop having the argument that the user would want X, but hearing we can't do that because it will hurt profits.

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.

As a guy, I'd like to see less sexism in the field, there's no reason why gender would affect skill

Linux becoming mainstream

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.

Get rid of CRLF on windows or QWERTY keyboard layout

DOM APIs in WASM.

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

Accessibility and internationalization first. A lot of projects start without it and tack it on later. It's so much better to have good roots and promote diversity and inclusivity from the start.

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.

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.