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.

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.

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.

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)

less sexism

That we stop fawning over tech CEOs

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.

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

ISO-8601 only

UTF-8 only

UTC only

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

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.

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.

Out of the cloud and back into our federated hands/the edge.

People just love the easy path at the loss of sovereignty.

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

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.

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

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.

Get rid of CRLF on windows or QWERTY keyboard layout

DOM APIs in WASM.

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.

I want my devices to run on an OS/framework which allows everything to be scriptable. Data should be visualised using simple/consistent interface.

There will be events, Actions, variables, data-streams, etc and the operating system should provide easy interface to quickly create new programs which can

1. Visualize data streams (filterable) using simple interfaces(configurable)
2. Create scripts which can create custom events or custom actions which are just built upon existing events/actions.

In such a system, the focus of apps should not be to add fancy interfaces for simple things, but to register new events, actions, data streams, visualizers into the OS and maybe provide new templates to use these additions.

Developers should go back writing efficient code in lower level programming languages to stop wasting CPU cycles for stupid reasons, like not wanting to use types, or something more stupid than that.

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.

Focus more on stability in terms of apis. We can't be rewriting our apps constantly because they keep updating frameworks every year.

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

Move to VR and infinite screen space. We're so close. No doubt once Apple joins the fray it'll be time