So much of what's aimed at nontechnical consumers these days is full of dishonesty and abuse. Microsoft kinda turned Windows into something like this, you need OneDrive "for your protection", new telemetry and ads with every update, etc.

In much of the physical world thankfully there's laws and pretty-effective enforcement against people clubbing you on the head and taking your stuff, retail stores selling fake products and empty boxes, etc.

But the tech world is this ever-boiling global cauldron of intangible software processes and code - hard to get a handle on what to even regulate. Wish people would just be decent to each other, and that that would be culturally valued over materialism and moneymaking by any possible means. Perhaps it'll make a comeback.

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rkagerer a day ago | parent | next [-]

This was a nearly poetic way to put it. Thank you for ascribing words to a problem that equally frustrates me.

I spend a lot of time trying to think of concrete ways to improve the situation, and would love to hear people's ideas. Instinctively I tend to agree it largely comes down to treating your users like human beings.

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therobots927 a day ago | parent [-]

The situation won’t be improved for as long as an incentive structure exists that drives the degradation of the user experience.

Get as off-grid as you possibly can. Try to make your everyday use of technology as deterministic as possible. The free market punishes anyone who “respects their users”. Your best bet is some type of tech co-op funded partially by a billionaire who decided to be nice one day.

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pksebben 20 hours ago | parent [-]

We're not totally unempowered here, as folks who know how to tech. We can build open source alternatives that are as easy to use and install as the <epithet>-ware we are trying to combat.

Part of the problem has been that there's a mountain to climb vis a vis that extra ten miles to take something that 'works for me' and turn it into 'gramps can install this and it doesn't trigger his alopecia'.

Rather, that was the problem. If you're looking for a use case for LLMs, look no further. We do actually have the capacity to build user-friendly stuff at a fraction of the time cost that we used to.

We can make the world a better place if we actually give a shit. Make things out in the open, for free, that benefit people who aren't in tech. Chip away at the monopolies by offering a competitive service because it's the right thing to do and history will vindicate you instead of trying to squeeze a buck out of each and every thing.

I'm not saying "don't do a thing for money". You need to do that. We all need to do that. But instead of your next binge watch or fiftieth foray into Zandronum on brutal difficulty, maybe badger your llm to do all the UX/UI tweaks you could never be assed to do for that app you made that one time, so real people can use it. I'm dead certain that there are folks reading this now who have VPN or privacy solutions they've cooked up that don't steal all your data and aren't going to cost you an arm and a leg. At the very least, someone reading this has a network plugin that can sniff for exfiltrated data to known compromised networks (including data brokers) - it's probably just finicky to install, highly technical, and delicate outside of your machine. Tell claude to package that shit so larry luddite can install it and reap the benefits without learning what a bash is or how to emacs.

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therobots927 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree and with how much money people in this field can make I’m surprised their aren’t more retired hackers banding together to build something like this. Personally I still have a mortgage to pay off but eventually I would like to be involved in something like this.

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rkagerer 6 hours ago | parent [-]

What product(s) do you think present the best opportunity for reinventing today with a genuine, user-centric approach?

Personally I feel it's everything from the ground up - silicon IC's through to device platforms and cloud services. But we need a plan to chip away at the problem one bite at a time.

	▲	therobots927 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Probably a phone OS would be the most impactful. If it had the ability to really cut back on tracking and data sharing by default. But if you’re talking about building hardware… that feels like something the NSA would be happy to be involved with whether you want them to be or not. I’d vote for an 80/20 solution that gets people protected from some of the most rampant data mining going on by corporations vs. state actors. The other issue to keep in mind is that the tech ecosystem absolutely will suffocate anything like this by disabling access to their apps / website with this OS. So at the end of the day I really don’t know if there’s a solution to any of this.

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jacquesm a day ago | parent | prev [-]

And still, there is plenty of software that you can't run on anything but Windows. That's a major blocker at this point and projects like 'mono' and 'wine', while extremely impressive, are still not good enough to run that same software on Linux.