A structural engineer will not sign off on bad designs no matter how much pressure the company applies to them. They will resign and/or report the incident to their local regulator as a safety issue.
We don't have that for developers. Maybe shame/offense is our next best bet. You are free to work for a terrible company accepting and/or encouraging terrible design decisions, but you need to take into account the potential of being laughed at for said decisions.
Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.
"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).
You and I both know the answers to those questions; my point is that the average non-technical user does not and this presents significant extra friction that Instagram doesn't have.
(this kind of attitude of asserting technical superiority and blaming non-tech users for not understanding it and not willing to bother figuring it out is exactly why the free/libre software movement achieved zero impact with non-technical users; you have to meet your users where they are... or a competitor will happily do so.)
If you're not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, you are welcome to search my username and "mastodon"/"fediverse" to see my thoughts on it in more detail and why it will never be a serious competitor to mainstream social media platforms. Happy to engage with serious arguments.
To me it just looks like some kind of fear of a new thing, because technically there is nothing really complicated about Mastodon. Still, I do understand that switching to a new platform corresponds to some non-negligible effort and one would have to substantiate it with sufficient benefits. We, technical people, should not feel superior but explain that the benefits are stronger than the downsides and switching is worth it in the long term, especially due to the ongoing enshittification of all popular for-profit platform managed by megacorps.
There's no actual market pressure to be secure, so nobody cares about threat modeling, cost/benefit of security solutions, etc. The only pressure in case of breach is political blame that you need to deflect. The point of a cybersecurity solution is to be there, remind you it is there, and allow you to deflect blame in case of disaster. Whether it actually increases security is merely a bonus side-effect.
AI is moving so fast even people doing it full time can't always keep up... which is not a big deal because very little of this "AI" effort actually makes any money.
Let them burn their money figuring out what works and what doesn't, and then when you come back you can easily pick up the stuff that works without being distracted by what doesn't.
If you look back at the Cambrian explosion of frontend JS complexity, do you feel like you gained anything from being there, versus just jumping in now and focusing on the few technologies that stabilized? The same is gonna happen with AI.
That’s a great point about the frontend complexity. Picking it up now is more difficult overall but at least most of the complexity has been decided on and “stabilized” as much as possible.
I can pick my groceries faster and with less aggravation than I can navigate the online ordering UI's dark patterns and attempts to get me to "engage".
Despite all the AI slop I don't quite get it, was the track metadata pushing an incorrect cover image (a screenshot of someone's Insta profile) or was it linking to an Insta profile (meaning the track/artist metadata had a field for their Insta and it was hijacked)?
GDPR is an excellent idea if it was actually enforced, which it wasn't. To their credit, the non-enforcement was consistent regardless of whether the offender was EU-based or not.
How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete? How come OpenAI or Anthropic or Cursor didn't come out of the EU? I'll give you a hint, it's not because of big bad Google.
> How come OpenAI or Anthropic or Cursor didn't come out of the EU?
Access to VCs and funding is easier in the US. Heck, even if you try to build your own startup, with your own funds, when you're out there looking for investments soon enough being "delaware incorporated" will become a requirement.
I don't know the legislation and contract law pertains to funding, and why EU companies need to move to the US to get investor funds (and can't be funded internationally while retaining EU status).
What I can tell you from my experience in seeking out venture/angel/seed funding opportunities in the EU is that many (most) that turn up on search results don't have a "pitch us" form and more of a "we'll find you if we want to fund you". There are also incubators, a la YCombinator, that provide only mentorship and no funding (ie. I would need to quit my job and sustain myself to build a startup).
> How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete?
It's not required to compete. It's just their style and old fashioned. A 1 point hitting kids was the way to go. We all know how that went. The world has changed. Those kingdom eras no longer exist. The EU should bring out real substance.
While I agree with the sentiment, it is not true that only EU takes a “nationalistic” stance and safeguards its interests. US is famously doing it with tariffs..to bring back manufacturing, and I also remember hearing “America first”.
Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.
> only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete [emphasis mine]
Tell me another country that competes with the US on monopolistic tech platforms? The only one I know of is China, and that's because their GFW and regulations essentially prevented US platforms from taking hold to begin with, and their stronghold on tech manufacturing means they actually have teeth when it comes to securing concessions from Western techbros (where as the EU couldn't even be bothered to enforce the GDPR).
Competition by whom? The entire EU software industry is completely pathetic.
The EU has been regulating the US tech for over a decade. In that time the EU has only fallen further behind.
Meanwhile China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US, while the EU is loosing the one large industry which it has left, manufacturing, to China.
This whole thing is pathetic. Of the goal of the EC ever was the creation of a competitive EU software industry it was a total failure and it was bound to be a total failure. Because what they did were idiotic regulations.
Everything the regulations have accomplished is that trying to compete in the EU puts such an enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed.
> China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US
China is in this position because of regulations (and technological enforcement of them like GFW), which prevented US tech from taking any significant foothold and left the market available for local competition.
> enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed
Can you tell me which business can't work in the EU? Selling software is legal. Operating a SaaS is legal. Hell, even industrial-scale spyware is legal, as long as you become big quickly enough so that enforcing the GDPR against you becomes counterproductive. The only thing I see that can't be done is industrial-scale corporation-on-consumer fraud, but I don't think we're losing much because of that.
The regulations were good, it's just that enforcement was and remains dysfunctional and basically non-existent.
Those business-ending GDPR fines HN loves fear-mongering about never materialized. Similarly with the DMA - Apple is still being allowed to stall and wage bureaucratic warfare to not comply.
In contrast, when in China people were found to be using AirDrop's "open to everyone" feature to share content the CCP deemed inappropriate, we quickly got a change where AirDrop would only stay open to everyone for 10 mins before reverting back to "contacts only".
If the EU had the same balls they would give Apple an ultimatum and you'd get alternate browser engines, app stores, and the right to "sideload" overnight.
A lot of said Big Tech is based on industrial-scale fraud and exploitation of the consumer so that a rich few can benefit. Not exactly something to be proud of.
(though we too have that in Europe in the form of high taxes, so that a rich few politicians benefit)
We don't have that for developers. Maybe shame/offense is our next best bet. You are free to work for a terrible company accepting and/or encouraging terrible design decisions, but you need to take into account the potential of being laughed at for said decisions.
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