Musing 59

At various points, I’ve found myself wanting to write desktop software and work in encryption because despite the popularity and use of online tooling, there is a necessity to desktop apps.

In some ways this is quite ironic considering how much I detest working with UI libraries in every environment I’ve worked with, but with the rise of AI, the whole RAM crisis actually makes a really good case for going back to native apps.

If you can save $1000s by needing less RAM, that’s a strong push to not use a ton of apps because more and more, they’re just an electron app, which is just a thin layer around Chrome . . . which isn’t exactly known for its memory efficiency.

At the same time, it’s hard to make the case to go back to a Unix “have 1 tool per task that does it really well” when it seems like we continually standardize on “here’s this 1 provider for all my tooling, with maybe a few addons for my specific niche”. Going back in a lot of ways is asking more now, especially since we want integration with the great data brokers of the day to make our numbers easier to work with.

But as there is increasing push to deanonymize the internet, I think we should consider going back if only as a screw you to big tech. Can’t get that juicy user data if you’re not on an app to send that telemetry.

Tech is a big contributor to our culture of convenience. Whether it be the entrenching of instant gratification (or intentional addictive design), the selling point of tech was to “make things easier”.

And because we Americans love our comfort, that selling point is mighty attractive. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with making tasks easier (especially for those impaired in some way). But at a certain point, we make an idol of that convenience and so anything that threatens that idol becomes a potential sacrifice.

So where does that leave us? Is the return to less convenient apps a good thing in light of data brokers mining us for every bit of data to feed into analytics to optimize for selling us stuff? Is it ok to regress from the usability lessons that we’ve learned in favor of something less convenient to tell big tech to screw off?

Maybe. It’s definitely a conversation we should be having.