who needs free software or getting rid of planned obsolescence?
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
238 points (99.2% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
6120 readers
4 users here now
A One-Stop-Shop for Evidence of our Social, Moral and Ideological Rot.
(It is also the official version of r/LateStageCapitalism/ on the Fediverse)
This community is for:
News, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge the narratives which act as legitimations for the status quo of modern class society. Posts need not be about capitalism specifically, whether late-stage or otherwise; we simply aim to cater to a socialist audience.
We do allow links to threads and comments on Lemmy/Reddit, as long as they are relevant to the content guidelines and follow the rules. Use NP links, or your post will be deleted.
Philosophy:
This community has its roots in broad-based anti-capitalist thought, with an emphasis on Marxist concepts and analysis and a commitment to antiracism and inclusive feminism.
When it comes to proposed alternatives to Capitalism, it is the general consensus of this community that class-divisions and alienated labour must be abolished; production must be collectively organized by the laborers themselves for the direct benefit of all. We call this socialism.
Find out more here: The Principles of Communism
Rules:
1. Lemmygrad-wide rules apply. Behavior such as brigading and harassment won't be permitted. Neither will posts that can be interpreted as explicit threats of/calls for violence.
2. Any post that makes a claim should have a RELIABLE source or explanation in the comments by OP. All claims, news articles, tweets and so forth that are an example of LSC should be substantiated with a reliable, factual and verifiable source. Any posts that egregiously break this rule will have their poster temporarily banned. If the Automoderator deletes the comment with sources that's fine, the moderators can still see and restore it.
3. No trolling. "I was just trolling" won't be accepted as a defense for breaking rules, and we will ban for intentionally disruptive behavior or attacks on our community, users, or philosophy.
4. No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This community is intended for a socialist audience, and while good faith questions are allowed, pushing your own counter-narrative here is not. We do not allow support here for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it. We are not a liberal or (U.S.-/Social-) Democrat community; we are a socialist community.
5. No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or zionism. This includes not just ideologies to the right of liberalism but also right-wing fixations such as national/ethnic/cultural chauvinism and military/police worship regardless of the underlying ideology. We take no side in the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
6. No "lesser evil" rhetoric. Lesser-evil rhetoric in relation to elections or current policies is prohibited. Dismissing voting third party because they are “useless” or because you are “throwing your vote away” also violates this rule. It also encompasses saying Trump is “worse” for Gaza, as that place is already completely destroyed. Trump is merely carrying out what the American ruling class started under Biden. Resorts being built and mass relocation were already happening under Biden and Kamala would’ve continued it.
7. No bigotry. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or classism. The respect for readers who are subject to these forms of bigotry takes priority in this community over your right to speak freely.
8. Be nice to each other. Be respectful towards other socialists you disagree with, but also non-socialists who follow the rules and participate in good faith. Feel free to dunk on trolls, bigots and bootlickers to your heart’s content.
9. Bans are at moderator discretion. We reserve the right to eject users (as well as remove, lock, or otherwise moderate any content on the community) for reasons not listed if we consider it necessary to do so.
10. Don’t bother sending us personal promotion requests. We are not an advertising platform for your blog or YouTube channel.
11. Do not post content from Dan Price, any other CEO/business owner or ANY liberal politician/official.
This is regarding positive posts or posts agreeing with their statement. Negative posts are permitted but better suited to communities like /c/ShitReactionariesSay
Please note that Robert Reich or Bernie Sanders as liberals also fall under this rule.
12. Do not post NSFL content and flair NSFW posts accordingly. NSFL posts will be removed. Flair NSFW posts with the appropriate content warning flair, otherwise you will be banned temporarily.
13. This is not a debate community. Constructive questions and discussion are welcome, but our basic philosophy is non-negotiable and we aren’t interested in repeatedly having to explain or justify it. We also won’t debate about so-called “socialist” countries. There are plenty of political debate communities, so take your 'gotchas' there.
14. No AI generated content. The community does not allow for AI generated content, even if it’s pro-socialist/communist.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Without giving anything specific away, I am a software developer and a consultant, and mostly work on web stuff.
I'll try to keep this short, but in general, yes. Basically, computers keep getting faster, which allows software developers to use higher-level libraries, which are actually less efficient, and thus your average piece of software actually takes more processing power and RAM than back in the day.
As well, because of those high-level libraries, programming is a lot easier than it used to be. Unfortunately, that means that we just hire cheaper developers that aren't as skilled, and they have a harder time tracking down and fixing bugs. Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can't always fix things that arise inside of them easily.
But software development companies have basically figured out that shitty software doesn't really hurt their bottom line in the end. For the most part, people will use it if it's a name brand piece of software, like Google or Apple or Microsoft. They don't need to build high quality software because it's basically going to be used by default. The money will come in if you corner a market or if you build something unique, or contract with another business. It doesn't actually have to be high quality.
As well, websites make more money the more ads you put on them. So it doesn't matter how efficient you build it, it's going to be slow. And it doesn't matter how slow it is, because you're going to make more money the more ads and tracking you have. All you need is good search engine optimization and you will get traffic by default. SEO Is easier said than done, but the point is nobody really focuses on performance when it's more profitable to focus on search engines.
The Luke Smith/ Mental Outlaw type chuds call these developers "soydevs".
Yeah, I'm not one to use insulting terms, it's more of a natural process of an industry lowering the bar to entry.
But there really is something to be said for those old applications that were built rock solid, even if they only came out with a new version once every four years.
More frequent releases of a smaller feature set isn't wrong. I'd be happy getting high quality application updates every month or so.
But as with all things, the analysis falls on the side that capitalism just doesn't incentivize the right things. Quarterly profit drives lots of features delivered poorly instead of a few good features delivered occasionally. Of course the developers get blamed for this when really they are just a product of a broken system. We invent insulting terms for them instead of going after the real problem, Because, of course, we don't have an understanding of materialism in the west.
Oh well.
Could you elaborate on this?
So this means that an app that does basically the same thing today as in 2005 is going to be way more resource-intensive because of this right?
Yeah, this was a quick and dirty thought, but effectively that's exactly what I mean. An application built from scratch today using modern high-level programming libraries will take more RAM and more CPU to do the same thing than an app written in 2005 does, generally speaking.
Of course, for those people who still write C, C++, or choose to write Rust or Go, or some of the other low-level languages, or even Java, but without major frameworks, can still achieve the type of performance an app written in 2005 could. But for people coming out of college and/or code schools nowadays, you just reach for a big fat framework like spring or use a high level language like JavaScript or Python or Ruby with big frameworks, and your application will by default use more resources.
Though the application might still be fast enough, I'm not even saying that an application written in Python will be slow, but I will say that an application written in Python will by default use about 10x more CPU in RAM than a similar application written in Rust. I mean, maybe the application only uses 10 megabytes of RAM. When the equivalent efficient application would use 1 megabyte of RAM, both of those are very efficient and very fast and would be just fine. But when the difference is between 10 gigabytes of RAM and 1 gigabyte of RAM, yeah, at that point in time, you're pretty much just taking advantage of RAM being cheap.
And it's not even necessarily a bad thing that we do this. There's just a balance to be had. It's okay to write in higher level language if it means you can get some stuff done faster. But major applications nowadays choose to ship an entire browser to be the base layer of their Application. Just because it's more convenient to write cross-platform code that way. That's too much and there's already a lot of work going towards fixing this problem as well. We're just sort of seeing the worst of it right now.
I'm not a computer person but my understanding is that this it's what bricked my MacBook a long time ago. It worked perfectly fine. Not the fastest at seven years old but it was fine. Then along came a Google Chrome update with uncapped the RAM usage. Suddenly 8gb ram wasn't enough to do anything. Nothing else worked if the browser was open and I needed to multitask. Chrome was the only browser compatible with work software. Had to get another machine about a week later (not a Mac, that time).
If by "higher level" you mean something like Java libraries, I'd say the opposite is true - at least if you don't have the source for a Java class it is trivial to decompile and have something immediately readable. Can't say the same for something like a dll originally written in C++.
More high level in that, think really deeply embedded JavaScript frameworks. In this situation, even Java is comparatively low level. Although a lot of people just rely on spring and spring boot, and don't understand how it works.