Get the latest tech news
Optimistic Computing
I recently made two new friends: Abhinav Omprakash and Dawn Walker. Abhinav said I’m an optimist and I should write about it. Dawn said I shouldn’t try to coin any new terms. I should know better, but this essay follows Abhinav’s recommendation — and credits Dawn, in the very likely event I should have followed her advice instead. I have been alive for approximately four decades. Each of those decades was witness to its own fun brand of computering.
Entire libraries have been written on the anticompetitive nature of large tech Microsofts, an Apple’s shoddy hardware designed for obsolescence, some Amazon’s ruthless business practices and exploitation of the open source ecosystem, The Google’s 20-year privacy decay and its utter lack of respect of even its paying customers, Facebook and/or Meta’s direct role in genocide, and the general deterioration of computing products. I don’t think many people can rediscover the magic of VB3, but Maggie Appleton’s “barefoot developers” might bring these old ideas to life in the text editor (or prompt box) first, rather than by drawing a button onto an empty window and double-clicking it to attach an event handler. Someone asking ChatGPT to write them a Python script that will download all their YouTube videos from an API and turn it into an Excel workbook probably has very different interests than someone running Navidrome at home so she can listen to her own MP3s instead of paying for Spotify forever.
Or read this on Hacker News