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The tech monoculture is finally breaking

jasonwillems.com

11–20 of 349 posts

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#11

Tech was probably the most fun for me in the mid to late 2000s. Definitely a lot more fun than whatever the tech industry has become now in 2026.

Tech is being run by ignorant financiers and college dropouts who don't understand institutional knowledge or technology.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#12
post #8

What a weird techno-optimist blog post, full of cherry-picked examples, with a twist of consumerism. Refreshing take in a sea of nihilism, but saying people are interested in Pokémon and N64 games again when it's mostly post-NFT "everything is an investment" mentality is cute in its naivety.

It was the "growth of Linux on the desktop" that broke my suspension of disbelief. If there was going to be any year where Linux made strong gains it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10. But the needle barely moved at all.

The author paints a nice picture but there's a lot of wishful thinking and projection there.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#13
What the author describes seems to be more specific examples in his/her circle rather than a wider movement I’d say.

The walled gardens are imo getting worse. And opting out (dumb phone) isn’t the same thing as that dissolving.

That said I’m also cautiously optimistic in some areas. Linux on desktop in particular is on a good streak. Riscv seems promising. More people are understanding lock in risk etc.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#14
post #8

What a weird techno-optimist blog post, full of cherry-picked examples, with a twist of consumerism. Refreshing take in a sea of nihilism, but saying people are interested in Pokémon and N64 games again when it's mostly post-NFT "everything is an investment" mentality is cute in its naivety.

The market for something like a ModRetro or Analogue 3D surely can't be entirely about everything being an investment?

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#15
post #2

> A Timex ad went viral this year: “Know the time without seeing you have 1,249 unanswered emails.” Having to micromanage notifications is why I have two phones - one without a SIM card. It's nice to be able to do stuff on the phone and know it won't bug you. I simply put the one with the SIM card elsewhere (other room, leave in car, etc). No - I'm not going to spend too much time learning how to "effectively" manage…

My strategy here is to default notifications off for everything other than calls and texts.

And then manually open Gmail to check mail, manually open Instagram when I feel like checking notifications, etc.

It’s such a better experience when you’re opening an app because you want to, and not because a notification is baiting you.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#16
> Looking at my own purchases from 2025, the pattern becomes obviou

As far as I can tell he's among the techies that purchase a lot of e-junk each and every year, no matter the circumstances, not sure of how that's an improvement on anything.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#17
I'm not sure I agree with all of that - that single-purpose tech is making a real comeback. But I do have one example in my daily life that supports this: A Garmin watch.

Unlike "full" smartwatches (arbitrarily defined as: You can browse the web on them in some fashion) Garmin devices are intentionally limited but in return, what they do works very well and seems fully debugged. I spent several years recording outdoor activities with the Strava app on my phone, and always there was about a 1% failure rate where for one reason or another, the GPS trace was interrupted or corrupted. With the Garmin watch this simply doesn't happen. If it's recording, the recording is good, period.

It is that, that has somehow been lost. That devices that just do one thing and do it well have been replaced by apps on a device that, in the modern software fashion, are "mostly" debugged, get constant updates that may or may not remove bugs (or features!) and usually don't add anything useful. One app got an update which, on my lower-end phone, changed it from crisply responsive to incredibly slow (5+ second response time to a tap). It worked fine before.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#18
post #8

What a weird techno-optimist blog post, full of cherry-picked examples, with a twist of consumerism. Refreshing take in a sea of nihilism, but saying people are interested in Pokémon and N64 games again when it's mostly post-NFT "everything is an investment" mentality is cute in its naivety.

It was the "growth of Linux on the desktop" that broke my suspension of disbelief. If there was going to be any year where Linux made strong gains it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10. But the needle barely moved at all. The author paints a nice picture but there's a lot of wishful thinking and projection there.

Steam is continuing to make it easier to leave Windows for gamers.

And my comment about desktop usage is based on these projections: https://www.webpronews.com/linux-breaks-5-desktop-share-in-u...

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#19
I hope he's right! I'm terrified that like 4 companies own my entire life now. I do love the movement back to analog single-purpose devices. Would be neat if they had just enough tech to make them useful but not weaponized against me.

As an aside, can they bring back Symbian OS and Windows Phone?

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#20

Tech was probably the most fun for me in the mid to late 2000s. Definitely a lot more fun than whatever the tech industry has become now in 2026.

I'd generally agree, but 3D printer mentioned in the blog post is probably one thing that I'd wish to have back then.
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