I 100% agree, and this isna big reason why I find the current state of education so suboptimal. Everyone just goes on to do webdev, completely ignoring the lower levels and taking it all for granted. The thing is, there's no real innovation to be done that high up the stack. When you're that high you mostly just write glue code to stick parts someone else wrote together. Real innovation comes from quite a few levels down the stack, starting at the native code level downwards.

Like you pointed out, the current stack is heavily unoptimized and has a terrible architecture; it's only the way it is because of happenstance and tides of the market (companies always reaching for faster over better). An actual "nirvana" in computing like the other guy said would require bulldozing a good chunk of our current stack, keeping only kernels and core utilities, if even.

I really wish we had a bigger focus on getting good foundation instead of making yet another JS framework and SaaS, but then again, who's paying developers to actually do something of quality nowadays?

I've genuinely come to believe that we should just burn it all to the ground; have a great reset of the software world. I wholeheartedly believe that 99% of software today could be erased and the world would be the same, if not better. especially when you remember that most of that is web-based slop.

As much as I love the Unixes, I think the only way forward is to either start a Unix-like from scratch without caring about ports or compatibility or cross platform, or just making an entirely new architecture altogether.

It would take a couple years for a team of a few dozen very talented programmers to get a brand new OS off the ground to a semi-usable state, if they're compensated well and work full-time in good conditions and with a clear and solid plan and architecture in mind. This would save the software world in more ways than we can even imagine. But going into this great reset, one of the most important things we should do is gatekeep.

Computer science/engineering is a science like any other, but we haven't held our professionals go even near the same standard as other STEM fields; we've accepted and tolerated mediocrity for way too long. That's the reason we have a macro language to generate scripts to build the browser or whatever the fuck, and why we have React in the terminal and React in Windows and React in fucking everything; why everything is so slow and bloated.

We need to keep finance bros out of tech, keep managers and HR and marketing and anybody else out of tech. Keep web-devs out of tech. Keep vibe coders out of tech. Keep incompetent people out of tech. We're in the digital era now and the current digital world is ruled by slop and incompetence.

i don't think the core problem here has anything to do with trust to be honest. The problem here os developers using so many external packages and code and libraries for their projects; commercial or otherwise. them just having to ho on trusting everything by default is just one of the many side effects of that.

>Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. Yea, idk about that one. They definitely did care in the past. They had to if they wanted to get users. But they've stopped caring a good while ago. Especially Microsoft. The costs that bad code would bring them is lower than the cost of developping good code, because they can mostly rely on monopolies and anti-competitive practices for user retention. Their users are more like hostages than anything else.

Is Google much better? I don't see, for example, the care that used to go into the quality of organic search results.

They seem fine with the output of the current hodge-podge of the original algorithm results plus massaging by many downstream ML pipelines that run one after the other without context of how each stop might affect the next.

I'm not sure about op, but as someone who agrees with their comment, yes, I absolutely am. I despise 99% of all digital """services""" that exist. Whether it's cloud, music/movies/series/whatever streaming, subscriptions of almost any kind... They're all extremely dystopian and anti-human. I sail the high seas for almost everything I consume digitally. When I want to support a creator I enjoy, I pay them directly (buy their merch, buy a physical copy of their album, purchase their game and dlcs, or simply directly donate).

In my opinion, corporations being allowed free reign and control over the internet and digital world in general without guardrails was *THE* biggest legislative mistake (although I believe it was done on purpose )in the past century, considering how the internet will most definitely be the defining factor of the era we're currently living in in future textbooks; if we make it that far at least.

I don't think most people understand the sheer magnitude of the damage that corporate slop, control, anti-competitiveness and pursuit of infinite growth at all costs has done to our technological capabilities and advancement.

Hardware is the only area of tech that continually gets better, whilst software continually regresses and gets worse. 90% of "new" code is web-based slop (and now AI generated web slop) that hogs memory and cpu usage, completely undermining all advances in hardware just because companies weren't willing to pay the extra buck to program a native solution that wouldn't force its users to purchase new machines.

If it wasn't for corporate (and many programmers') lazyness, computers from over a decade ago would still be fully functional, fully usable machines that could do the most bleeding-edge of tasks, safe for maybe the most graphically-demanding games and rendering.

And then maybe programmers could focus on actually advancing the science that is writing code, instead of building yet another fucking REST API and React UI. And don't forget to package it all in electron to fuck your users as much as possible, and dodge any need for real engineering.

Companies can just keep offloading costs unto the user, making users buy machines 10x as powerful as the ones they had 5 years ago, just to do the exact same tasks, but 20x slower. But at least they have a nice looking UI right?

What prevents you from using Debian and a FOSS stack?

Not much yet, that's pretty much what I do, although I run void linux and arch on my machines. But even Linux isn't safe; what if other countries adopt the OS-level age-verification laws that california is pursuing? very few distros will be safe. And then all they need to do (and you can bet that's exactly what they'd do) is keep squeezing, taking away freedom gradually until most linux distros require you to submit a digital ID on install. And chances are, the few distros and maintainers that go against that would be completely cut off from the mainstream tech ecosystem (which would make them barely usable in this day and age, at least as long as you live in a city with a job and rent and all).

This may sound like a slippery slope fallacy and it may indeed be that, but I can't think of any other possibility if we just let stuff like this keep happening. It may seem like we're just giving an inch now but in 5 years you'll suddenly realize they've taken a mile.

because there isn't really that much to change that high up the stack. It's all the same. True innovation happens at the low levels of programming and hardware.

It didn't though. Not good software at least. AI (which is what I'm guessing you're referring to here) is simply incapable of writing such mission -critical low-level code, especially for a niche and/or brand new ISA. It simply can't. It has nothing to plagiarize from, contrary to the billions of lines of JavaScript and python it has access to. This kind of work can most definitely be AI-assisted, but my estimate is that the time gained would be minimal. An LLM is able to write some functional arduino code, maybe even some semi-functional bare-metal esp32 code, but nothing deeper than that.

Yes it does, especially when you remember the fact that developers are also consumers. But even if they (we) weren't, it would still impact consumers. I, android user who's completely ignorant when it comes to android development or even mobile in general, would be heavily impacted by this. My custom youtube clients would never be approved by google. My (free) apps for watching anime and reading manga would never get approved by Google. And something that's approved today could stop being approved tomorrow. it's up to Google / Microsoft / Apple to decide after all, they're the ones in control of our devices. If they stop liking my open-source ad-free minesweeper game, then I can't play it anymore. I'll have to download their bloated proprietary version with ads and a subscription to keep playing.

> My custom youtube clients would never be approved by google. My (free) apps for watching anime and reading manga would never get approved by Google.

Google isn't approving apps though. A developer provides identity verification and a set of apps (apk names & keys) they are responsible for. There is no verification process or approval from google. The entire process as outlined in https://developer.android.com/developer-verification is that you prove you own signing keys for an apk name.

I don't see how people are against this. Especially tech-savvy people who browse HN. It really seems to me like everyone here who's on Google's side is just a bot in a botfarm somewhere. they can't possibly be real

this. just like how when you start playing a hard esoteric game like an RTS or MOBA, they ask you what your degree of comfort/experience with the genre is to avoid making a pro player go through the tutorial and vice versa.

In an ideal world where governments and corporations weren't trying to lock us into a closed system for massive surveillance and control, during the installation/setup of a mobile phone should be a question about tech literacy and protection. Selecting any option that isn't "I'm tech illiterate, please protect me" should be very annoying. There should be many warnings in uppercase bold red letters telling the user it can be dangerous and listing those dangers. But if I'm a developer and want to patch my kernel or modify the system as I please, I should be able to do so. If i want to install a malware app in a burner phone to study its behavior (or just for fun) I should be able to do so.

There would probably be one or two grandmas that would still somehow choose the pro hacker mode and get scammed down the line, but I think that minuscule amount of harm done is very much preferable to closing out *literally everyone else* from using the devices THEY BOUGHT.