Counterpoint: if programmers wrote programs the way structural engineers designed buildings, ecommerce apps would take half a decade to build and the software industry would have just gotten around to inventing Windows Vista and jQuery in the last year or so.

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birdsongs 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe that's okay.

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swatcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're saying e-commerce would simply be consistent and secure product catalogs with fewer promotional and tracking dark patterns, web scripting would rely on a and extensible and functional library for manipulating markup documents, and a stable OS kernel with few dark patterns and no cloud accounts, many of us would be sold in a heartbeat.

I don't think you're making the counterpoint you mean to be.

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anonym29 an hour ago | parent [-]

Don't be naïve - the industry wouldn't be any less laden with surveillance crapitalism; the presence of that isn't a product of the pace of development, it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse so long as the product "just werks", looks/feels polished, and doesn't require any kind of learning or discomfort.

Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it - robust ad and script blockers, operating systems with no coercion or user hostility, simple and stable scripting languages. They're not as polished as the products of manipulative and extractive abusers like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Discord, et al., and accordingly, users shun them, for the reason I explained above.

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19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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birdsongs 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse

Ah, there's the victim blaming.

> Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it

Do you have any idea how daily life is for non-technical people? It isn't reasonable in our society to expect everyone to switch to FOSS, and blaming 60 year olds for getting their identity stolen because they weren't using a Linux phone or rolling their own self hosted matrix chat server is such a cruel and unbelievably out of touch take.

	▲	anonym29 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hey, if the option is on the table for states to fight back, up and including enacting the corporate death penalty (forced dissolution) against Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, etc, I'm all for that. That would never happen though, the victims would plea and fight too vigorously in defense of their own abusers. Who should be blamed for the actions of corporations ultimately subject to the society-scale approval of their consumers? No amount of misbehavior, malice, negligence, or abuse from the company can alienate the modal user of their products, they've thoroughly demonstrated this too many times to count. It's not the doddering elderly folks I blame the most, it's everyone younger than them, the folks who grew up with the technology, aware of every abuse by these companies, who refuse to change their behavior. The ones who know better. The ones who can explain to you in great detail all about the surveillance, the dark patterns, the emotional manipulation, the extractive commercial angle, and who all refuse to adjust their behavior anyway. It's a choice, and it's one they make on a continual basis. And to answer your question, no, I don't have much of an idea how daily life is for non-technical people besides them voluntarily suffering abuse like theft of their time (advertisements), or voluntarily paying a bribe to avoid the abuse, for no real reason other than that they don't care enough about the abuse or the bribe to spend 5 minutes learning how avoid both for free for the rest of their life.

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dawnerd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmmm but that software would also last a century so… your point? Moving fast and building unstable software isn’t really that great.