| ▲ | niemandhier a day ago |
| Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it. I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI. There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same. |
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| ▲ | saidinesh5 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In the last couple of months people, with modern tech, * Built really cool Photo, Video, Music editing/CAD software and released it for free * Reverse engineered playstation 5 and started making more of our games playable on platforms we like * Helped normal people remove adware, debloat their TVs and made them lot smoother. These are just some of the fun use cases from people passionate about the topics I am interested in ... When i was younger, there were different passionate people making different cool things.. demoscene, geocities, reverse engineering software, making flash animations, running neural networks on microcontrollers etc... which was the modern tech back then. Back then my parents didn't know what a filesystem was. Now my college aged nephews don't know what it is - even though they grew up in the smartphone age. What I'm saying is ... I feel lot more optimistic about the "modern technology" now than back when i had to walk to a library and request a book about the topics I'm interested in and wait a week to get it ... |
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| ▲ | GuB-42 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Built really cool Photo, Video, Music editing/CAD software and released it for free Built, really? From what I have seen, it is more like knockoffs, strictly worse than the original except that they are free, and unlike cracks, presumably legal. I agree with the other two, though it is getting close to the cracking scene, which is certainly cool, but a bit different in sprit to what led to Linux and Wikipedia. What we are seeing more of is "I had this specific need and I quickly vibecoded some software to do it". This is actually really cool, but it doesn't scale. These tools answer to the need of one person, they may break everywhere else but who cares, it does the job. But for a community project, it is not acceptable, everything has to work for everyone. | | |
| ▲ | hocusPokeUs 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Software is not building a bridge; trying to peddle the effort as akin to 996 in a textile sweatshop is one of the cheesiest tropes of the IT industry The amount of artisanal code slop expertly crafted by hand I have cleaned up suggests to me the human effort is just as big a mess; see all the unknown unknown security issues being spotted by LLMs |
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| ▲ | palata a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I feel that modern tech first took away the passion As soon as something becomes potentially profitable, the MBAs enter the room, and the fun goes away. The more profitable it gets, the more toxic it gets, too. |
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| ▲ | noufalibrahim a day ago | parent | next [-] | | As a corollary, I think if something is utterly useless but cool, it's usually worth giving it a second look. Who, for example, would create a demoscene program or anything like that but for the coolness and the desire to show off? | | |
| ▲ | jonhohle a day ago | parent [-] | | These spaces are increasingly being overrun by AI generated slop and pushing out the cool. | | |
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| ▲ | purplepatrick a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I object to your essentialism. Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is just as false as presuming them from someone’s skin color, race, sex, gender, occupation, age, or other observable characteristics. I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking, especially as you are also factually wrong: arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs. In fact, two of them were started by Harvard college dropouts and one of them by Stanford PhDs. The big tech companies I can think of that were started by MBAs (eBay, grubhub, intuit, Bloomberg) are arguably much less harmful, though two of them became quasi-monopolies. The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming). | | |
| ▲ | anticorporate a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs The parent commenter didn't say anything about founders, that was your addition. A reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that these companies were in fact fun places to work until the MBAs arrived. Personally I don't take offense using MBA as a shorthand for "individuals more focused on profitability than purpose" even though I recognize that doesn't describe everyone with that degree, although admittedly, part of that is because I don't have a better term for it. It's a bit like my own handle; I don't in fact think every corporation is inherently evil, but when I say "anticorporate" there is a common understanding that I'm opposed to many of the shitty behavior of modern corporations, and not that I'm nitpicking that LLCs or sole proprietorships are somehow better forms of legal entity. | |
| ▲ | sophacles 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Absolutely not. First of all color, race, gender and age are not functions of personal choice. MBA degree is the result of making choices. One can assume many things from the choices a person makes. Further, choice is influenced by training and experience, and the point of MBA programs is to teach people how to make certain types of business choices in a certain way. Of course their motivations and behaviors are influenced by their degree to some extend. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming). Oh there absolutely are cabals at work. The infamous "Paypal mafia" [1] where multiple members eventually infiltrated the US government comes to my mind, and Ivy League universities in general are even more infamous for very close knit alumni networks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia | |
| ▲ | alala-lala-lon 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | palata 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is You didn't get my point (or you were looking for a way to nitpick). When I said "the MBAs", I did not mean "the human beings in possession of a paper saying that they passed the exam required to say that they have an MBA on their CV". It was a shortcut to design a kind of people who may join at that point. > I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking I'm sure you meant no harm, but think you can try to understand the meaning of a message. I try to express an idea with words. What matters is the idea. If you nitpick on the words, you may never get the idea. > arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs Nope, but all of them became as big as they did by becoming the toxic entities they are, for the sake of money and power. | |
| ▲ | bobsmooth a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | MBAs are like mold. They appear when the conditions are right. | |
| ▲ | bothers a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is just as false as presuming them from someone’s skin color, race, sex, gender, occupation, age, or other observable characteristics. No. No it is not. Source: no one is born with a degree that they had no choice in pursuing and acquiring. |
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| ▲ | kleiba2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| +1 There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost. Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV. |
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| ▲ | fl4regun a day ago | parent | next [-] | | there's an entire community of people making simple websites on places like neocities. You don't find "web development" a drag, you find making a website for some company you don't give a shit about a drag (as you should). | |
| ▲ | graemep a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nothing to stop you doing simple little websites. | | |
| ▲ | mcv a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That is the internet I want to see again: people making their own little websites with questionable design choices about whatever topics they're passionate about. I'm willing to tolerate blink tags and animated gifs for this. | | |
| ▲ | chasd00 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s all still there but you’re going to have to find it just like the “good old days”. No algorithm is going to push it to you, you’re going to have to spend the effort. | |
| ▲ | mulderc 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Check out Kagi small web. |
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| ▲ | icantevenhold a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s just much harder getting paid for that… | | |
| ▲ | nazgulsenpai a day ago | parent [-] | | The point is that it was fun to make it for yourself, about anything you're passionate about. There was never a pay calculation because you did it on your own, because you wanted to. |
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| ▲ | bawolff 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > than took away the means by making everything cloud, I think its important to keep in mind, that there was a time when software like compilers were prohibitively expensive. We dont know how lucky we are to live in a world where you can just download professional quality compilers, db engines, operating systems, etc for free. |
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| ▲ | internet_points a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same. I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control" Then comes stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th... and https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who... and https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots... and https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads... and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum... and https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps... and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts? |
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| ▲ | smallerfish a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It depends how large your definition of "cabal" is. There are plenty of corporations who are misaligned with societal positives, consisting of people individually acting in the interest of the corporation as part of their day jobs. When your job's long term success requires helping your company get an edge over the competition and you're willing to be expedient with long term thinking, in aggregate bad things can happen. | |
| ▲ | roenxi a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's something of a mix of both - the world is a web of cabals executing conspiracies but simultaneously most people are so bad at systems thinking that they can't identify the conspiracies from people acting individually in their own interests. For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly. It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation. | | |
| ▲ | Vaushite 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics The basics in this case are not some natural law. There are, in fact, a large number of powerful people who force the rest of us to execute fiat-currency capitalism. |
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| ▲ | api a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players. In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes. Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc. We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops. Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job. That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions. Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them. I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution. I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us. Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games." | | |
| ▲ | tremon 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players. But that incentive structure is exactly what has been centralized these days (through monopoly platforms, whether it's apps or video or music). Arguably, the conspiracy is the design of the algorithms on these platforms. | | |
| ▲ | api 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | The algorithms were designed that way to make number go up, and number must go up because the investors want it to, and the investors include the people who hold your savings account and your 401k. It’s a big network of feedback loops. You get what the incentive structure incentivizes. |
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| ▲ | marcosdumay 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think the stuff the GP is describing was made by a cabal. But yeah, it's undeniable that there is a cabal controlling tech. | |
| ▲ | IAmBroom 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Waaay back in the day of early WWW, Windows had an unpublicized behavior: if you attempted to select your own choice of default browser, the file search window (Open File form) would filter out firefox.exe from results. You could go to that directory, but that file was hidden. You could add it only by typing it in. Low-key evil, but still 100% evil. | | |
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| ▲ | broken-kebab 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product I find this claim unparseable in logical sense (I see where it goes emotionally, of course). Enthusiasm and "product-ness" are not mutually exclusive at all. |
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| ▲ | ryanmcbride 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| there are still tons of people making projects out of passion that are incredible, but you won't find them unless you seek them out, and the best way to do that is to make your own passion project. |
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| ▲ | fl4regun a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere.
The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do. |
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| ▲ | cowlevel 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most FOSS is developed dispassionately by corporations who find themselves locked to the project but would rather destroy it if they could. Linux, for example. Almost all code is from corporations, mainly hardware vendors who want Linux to run on their hardware. If they could sell a proprietary OS to their customers they would abandon Linux in a heartbeat. | | |
| ▲ | bawolff 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Luckily, you have the right to fork if you dont like how a FOSS project is being managed. Don't like the corporate influence in Linux? Use FreeBSD. Make your own. Whatever you want. The price of freedom is you have to put in the effort to be the change you want to see in the world. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere. Unfortunately, FOSS maintainers pretty much everywhere have been drowning for years. First it was "security researchers" meat-proxying dependabot or people looking to gamify their Github stats by filing spam merge requests for typos in readmes, and now it's "security researchers" running one of the usual AI agent suspects and flooding projects with reports of varying kinds of quality. For me, the passion is pretty much gone. It's slop everywhere. > The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do. Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet. | | |
| ▲ | account42 a day ago | parent [-] | | > Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet. You can avoid most of that with a simple static website. Even if you manage the web server and OS yourself. KISS is a lifesaver. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Even if you manage the web server and OS yourself. KISS is a lifesaver. That is not enough. Even "simple" web servers can and will be hacked - Apache, haproxy and nginx all have had their fair share. And that's before we get into the Linux kernel itself, see CVE-2026-98432 if you need a recent example. It's simply gotten untenable ever since AI entered the picture. | |
| ▲ | Vaushite 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Until it turns out your server is vulnerable to something like *sshole which you had no way to know about or defend against without formally verifying the whole OS. |
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| ▲ | brabel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it.
Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps.
And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you. |
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| ▲ | masfuerte a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Eutrophy is good! Atrophy is not. |
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| ▲ | advael a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible |
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| ▲ | ducktective a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is the incentive too which LLMs destroy: - If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts. - If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..." Damned if you do, damned if you don't. |
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| ▲ | ShinyLeftPad 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this Very bold statement |
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| ▲ | ctmlr 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the best has yet to come in open source.
Now that language models can translate machine code into human programming languages Pandora's box has been opened. Steve Ballmer called Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source as a cancer, however it really ended up being a win-win scenario for labor and business. IT workers could take these tools with them and improve upon them throughout their careers, business benefited from the massive pool of talent and avoided the licensing headaches. As it turned out the Ballmerists were a bunch of landlord thieves and closed source software was the economic cancer all long :) |
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| ▲ | ares623 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > who had the skills and the means to do it. emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job. But the gravy train is ending... |
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| ▲ | jdw64 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Personally, I think it's good that volunteers build the internet and do things like that, but fundamentally, the barrier to the web has become too high. In the past, making a website was easier than you'd think, and the legal side was a bit more lenient, but these days, as laws accumulate precedents, there are many things to pay attention to, and starting with security, the number of things you need to worry about has increased. The problem is that in the early days of the internet, people needed time to grow together. But these days, the barrier to entry is fundamentally higher than before. And even when making one site, you have to worry about various things... In my view, there is also the point that people forget the fact that as business becomes more sophisticated and technology develops, the basic skills of the people involved need to increase accordingly. The reasons the internet has gotten worse are complex. For example, there is definitely the problem of people trying to make money through advertising and such, but fundamentally, the technical barrier to attracting people's attention has also risen a lot. The amount of technology a single individual developer has to handle has also increased a lot. |
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| ▲ | rramadass a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same. Don't you believe it. You don't need a "evil cabal" in the image of a movie caricature. It is enough to discuss with a wink-and-a-nod, shared incentives, product roadmaps, sharing profits from a global pie, circular deals etc. for a concerted group to form and start gaming the system behind the scenes. The Computer Revolution was first and foremost a "People and Individual Freedoms" revolution. Cheap open PC hardware married to free open software made it happen. Networking and Data-Sharing were supposed to be neutral. Device control was taken away, specifically with Apple's iPhone showing the way, and then Network/Data control by Cloud companies showing the way. The propaganda is always the same viz. "for the ultimate benefit of the end-user". Don't think/learn too much and just pay us the money to do it for you; You are nothing but just the source of revenue/profits for us. The same thing is happening with AI where it is impossible for an individual to play due to scale and money involved. Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Walter Lippmann, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky would all feel deeply vindicated and proud. |
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| ▲ | sandworm101 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS. (lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.) |
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| ▲ | cowlevel 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Microsoft is pretty obsolete these days. Sure they still exist in their market niche but even developer laptops are trending Apple. They're not the power they were around 2005 when they controlled 95% of all computing, including servers. | | |
| ▲ | boomlinde 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | On the other hand I hardly know anyone who isn't forced, in a professional capacity, to use Microsoft products. In my work they are a disproportionate source of problems. I don't know how a company sucking that hard can have that great a share of the cloud market. I regularly fantasize about grabbing and shaking their engineers after using their products. | | |
| ▲ | cowlevel 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | As you can see it's not about product quality, it's about schmoozing skills. Same with Oracle. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then). > There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same. Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all. |
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| ▲ | bemtevi a day ago | parent [-] | | > Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all. I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples: * Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system. * If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation). Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them? That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich. |
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