CodexArcanum

A pretty large amount of people don’t own a PC at all, though I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get a good number on it. Just anecdotally, most people I know who aren’t IT professionals have either no PC or 1 old laptop, often from college or on loan from work. Most folks use their phones for everything. People I know with kids have school issued Chromebooks, which barely counts.

As to exact numbers, I’m curious what others can find. I turned up between 74% and 94% of adults in the US owned a PC, which seems insanely high to me. But on the same page claiming that 89% of all households have a PC, I also saw

In the United States, the number of households with computers is projected to surge from 4.7 million to 120.45 million between 2024 and 2029, indicating a substantial increase in computer ownership.

Which… That’s bonkers. They expect the number of PCs (in homes) to go up by a factor of 30 in just 5 years, presumably that guess was before tariffs as well. I’m wondering if these household and per capita numbers somehow include corporate spending because businesses and schools do purchase literal tons of computers.

In so many ways, LLMs are just the tip of the iceberg of bad ideology in software development. There have always been people that come into the field and develop heinously bad habits. Whether it’s the “this is just my job, the only thing I think about outside work is my family” types or the juniors who only know how to copy paste snippets from web forums.

And look, I get it. I don’t think 60-80 hour weeks are required to be successful. But I’m talking about people who are actively hostile to their own career paths, who seem to hate programming except that it pays good and let’s them raise families. Hot take: that sucks. People selfishly obsessed with their own lineage and utterly incurious about the world or the thing they spend 8 hours a day doing suck, and they’re bad for society.

The juniors are less of a drain on civilization because they at least can learn to do better. Or they used to could, because as another reply mentioned, there’s no path from LLM slop to being a good developer. Not without the intervention of a more experienced dev to tell them what’s wrong with the LLM output.

It takes all the joy out of the job too, something they’ve been working on for years. What makes this work interesting is understanding people’s problems, working out the best way to model them, and building towards solutions. What they want the job to be is a slop factory: same as the dream of every rich asshole who thinks having half an idea is the same as working for years to fully realize an idea in all it’s complexity and wonder.

They never have any respect for the work that takes because they’ve never done any work. And the next generation of implementers are being taught that there are no new ideas. You just ask the oracle to give you the answer.

Objects don’t “have” colors either, if we’re being pedantic. They reflect/absorb/transmit/emit different combinations of wavelengths. So “pink” objects just reflect some wavelengths that we classify as in the range of “red” and “blue”. Color is an interaction between emission, detection, and the brain’s interpretation.

Its not even a unique trick. The ears combine various wavelengths of air vibrations to create sound, with combinations of pure waves merging into distinct timbres (sometimes called “tonal color”).

Yeah, you can just use Google’s VM, Google’s renderer, Google’s sponsored image library, write it in Google’s language, and you can probably borrow some of the WebGL code from the Servo project.

Obviously the problem is so trivial when you’re just bolting together premade components that the fairies delivered to you. Good thing none of those components are hard to write, hard to integrate, or written with corporate interests in mind.

Hey where’s your snap-together browser project? It’s so easy, all this free code just laying around.

Oh or were you arguing that I said you had to write everything from scratch? Because I didn’t say that. I also didn’t say that you needed all those things for communication, kind of the exact opposite. What exactly was the point of your “well acktshually” comment?

The modern internet, driven by corporate mandates, is rather complex. A browser needs to (at least):

• transmit and receive several protocols, usually HTTP/IP (ipv4, ipv6, http2, SSL/tsl for security, sometimes also ftp, gopher, torrents, etc)
• parse HTML documents and render them correctly to screen
• parse user input to forms
• parse CSS, correctly apply and cascade all the rules to the HTML element
• include a full, performant VM to run ECMAScript in, manipulate the rendered document tree according to those scripts
• include APIs required by ECMAScript covering the DOM, windowing, network requests, screen readers and other accessibility options
• render and work on at least 3 major desktop OS flavors and 2 mobile ones, across countless versions
• play media: images, audio, and video
• DRM handling for media
• Handle rendering of text in any world language

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! I’ve come around to the idea that the modern internet is actually, to be technical here, totally fucked. Big Tech is going to keep pushing users deeper into walled proprietary gardens. They’ve already made the open internet so complex and heavy that it requires a multimillion dollar company (dependent on Google’s allowance or massive ad dollars) to create a browser for it.

I think the only solution is to throw it all away and start over. Twitter and reddit aren’t being “saved” by the “resistance” users. The concept of free and open exchange of ideas on the net is being saved by new protocols and services that are built to resist corporate ownership, like Gemini and the Fediverse.

It’s going to be hard weening off the flashy, ad driven Web, but its the only way. Go download Lagrange and start browsing Gemini space. If you weren’t around for the 90s era of GameFAQs and the mostly-text web driven by individual writers and hosts, then here’s your chance to go back to a better way of doing things.

We can’t “fix” an internet that’s owned by Big Tech, we need new spaces owned by the people using them.

I didn’t realize Framasoft was contributing to so many open tools, that’s pretty neat! Reminds me of TROM who also fork and develop tools for a less commercialized world.

“Censorship forced me to flee a pro-nazi site to another pro-nazi site,” is a contradiction worth noting. It highlights the general pro-nazi vibe going around big tech.