Call me grumpy and sleep deprived, but every year I look at this talk again, and every year I wonder... "now, what" ? What am I supposed to do, as a programmer, to change this sad state of things ?

Start the n-th "visual" or "image based" programming language (hoping to at least, make _different_ mistakes than the ones that doomed smalltalk and all other 'assemble boxes to make a program' things ?)

Start an OS, hoping to be able to get an "hello world" in qemu in a year or two of programming in my sparse free time ?

Ask an LLM to write all that would be so cool ?

Become a millionaire selling supplements, and fund a group of smart programmers to do it for me ?

Honest question. Once you've seen this "classic" talk ("classic", in the sense that it is now old enough to work in some countries), what did you start doing ? What did you stop doing ? What did you change ?

> Call me grumpy and sleep deprived, but every year I look at this talk again, and every year I wonder... "now, what" ? What am I supposed to do, as a programmer, to change this sad state of things ?

That depends on your goals. If you are into building systems for selling them (or production), then you are bound by the business model (platform vs library) and use cases (to make money). Otherwise, you are more limited in time.

To think more realistically about reality you have to work with, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cum5uN2634o about types of (software) systems (decay), then decide what you would like to simplify and what you are willing to invest. If you want to properly fix stuff, unfortunately often you have to first properly (formally) specify the current system(s) (design space) to use it as (test,etc) reference for (partial) replacement/improvement/extension system(s).

What these type of lectures usually skip over (as the essentials) are the involved complexity, solution trade-offs and interoperability for meaningful use cases with current hw/sw/tools.

You could start a new project or contribute to an existing one. You could try out other people's projects and write about what you learned. You could write about what you learned from your own projects. You could give a talk that starts with a killer demo. You could try to find work that improves the situation, however slightly, instead of worsening it. You could sharpen your skills so that when you have more spare time you can make faster progress.