211–220 of 364 posts
My kingdom for a technology that lets me write an app once and run it acceptably on Android, iOS and in the browser. This probably beats everything else listed in this thread in terms of developer hours saved.
Make software development a true engineering discipline by making software developers and companies directly liable for bugs and security holes.
In engineering: There should be a single global content-addressed namespace for data. The space should be unguessable, rather than enumerable or searchable. The effect would be to end all problems of networked data storage, and also to end copyright. DNS, Bittorrent, IPFS are all fine attempts, but also clear and abject failures. If it's not possible, then we should prove the impossibility. In theory: Prove that one-…
Curious: 1) Why unguessable? That sounds like something one would naively use to keep secrets, but encryption is the right tool for that. Apart from that, it sounds like nodes participating in the network would inherently have to see names in order to process requests... Would something like 256 or 512 bit hashes suffice? You can try to guess or enumerate, but the chances of finding anything are slim. 2) What problem…
You are also right that we don't yet have a satisfactory proof that any of this can happen. It does indeed seem like participants in the network must, as a condition of routing, be forced to handle bundles of data to which they do not have keys, and while mixnets are real, mixnets do not completely solve the problem.
Yes, if we get concrete, the typical way of building unguessable names for data is to do something like take a Merkle tree hash, and then use that as a basis for several "exported" names which are made from further hashes.
2) This would form the basis for a data commons. Existing commons are actually centralized platforms supported by small specialized entities, leading to lots of extra details that nobody is incentivized to get right. By contrast, if there were a single namespace that existed beyond corporate or state control, where participation is platform, then people are incentivized to pay their own way on discoverability (using existing social graphs), bandwidth, latency (using existing compute hosts), retention, scaling, and censorship (using low cost of publication plus low cost of maintenance).
The global/universal nature of the network ensures that, if you can reach it, then it can reach you, and you are connected. IP gives us a hint of this; the typical connection comes with an IP address, and that address can be globally routed. For a real example today, look at how Bittorrent is diverging from the need for trackers.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that decentralized designs might be able to shard computational work or otherwise balance resources. Bittorrent famously was designed to go faster as more peers contribute more spare bandwidth, to the point where the early days of Bittorrent were marked by the protocol chewing up and choking residential ISP connections.
3) Copyright is a social solution to a technical problem in most media. The problem is that publication isn't instantaneous and uniform; there is a delay of time while a published work is copied around the world, and that delay introduces opportunity for pirates to make bootlegs and undercut official releases. On the modern Web, though, this is silly. If one wants to make a simultaneous publication to all paying customers, then one can sell customized encrypted copies at each point of sale, and release a master key which decrypts them all, a day later. The entire window of opportunity for pirates can be shrunken to mere milliseconds, which is impossibly small for pirates to make a profit.
Since we don't really need copyright in order to prevent piracy, then it makes sense to raise the eyebrow and look more cynically at such an intrusive and artificial right. In particular, the proposed namespace grants massive power to publishing artists first.
The decline of usability, recognizability and coherence in desktop user interfaces. I honestly think we reached peak UX some time in the mid-90s. With the advent of touch devices, paradigms are mixing in a way that's directly hostile to productivity.
I agree with your take that mid-90's was probably peak UX. But I think that has more to do with that being about the time when companies stopped trying to strike a balance between accommodating both power users and casual users. Since then, much more effort has been put into providing a polished/slick UI at the expense of things like automation. Of course, that also plays into the advertising model which I believe is…
This is basically what I mean by mixing paradigms, and it's getting more and more common in operating systems as well, with Windows as clear leader.
As for touch input, I personally think it's of little use on the desktop. I've already got a mouse, which when properly configured is a pixel-precision input device. I simply cannot do the things I do with a mouse on a touchpad, let alone a touchscreen.
There are several other crimes as well, big and small, mainly in Windows but also on Linux/BSD (especially in Gnome, where the worst decisions made seem to perpetuate into other FOSS DE:s). Apple is still keeping things relatively sane, even though they've slipped somewhat of late.
The decline of usability, recognizability and coherence in desktop user interfaces. I honestly think we reached peak UX some time in the mid-90s. With the advent of touch devices, paradigms are mixing in a way that's directly hostile to productivity.
It's pretty shocking that we are where we are in 2020. That year sounds like the future to me, but in computer interface terms it's definitely dystopia. The market failure to cap all market failures!
Development environments. The amount of time and hassle I've seen lost to getting a working development environment up and running is incredible. Every time I talk to someone who's learning to program I tell them: "Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it's STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone." Docker is reasonably good here…
In a nutshell: your repo contains a file (or directory) with everything needed to set up a containerized run environment for the project. VSCode adds its own server daemon, and your IDE runs half inside the container, half on the host machine. Once it's set up, everyone on the project (who has vscode) instantly has a one click clean, working development environment, including all the niceness you expect from local development (debugger, test integration, etc). It is fucking magical.
Detail: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioCodeRemoteDevelop...
Because this affects cognitive health and productivity of just about every tech employee, it truly is the biggest problem and is no overstatement at all that we would cure more diseases, feed more hungry people, develop better policies for people in need, or even just satisfy consumer demands more profitably, if the scourge of open-plan offices finally goes away.
Very few other problems faced by engineering workers are so vast and systemic as open-plan offices, with such far reaching value if it is solved.