My reply is low value for HN but your comment is the literal embodiment of an older meme:
- Tech Enthusiasts:
Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!
- Programmers / Engineers:
The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
P.S. More seriously I agree, we witnessed multiple times over the enshitification that inevitably follows.
We have this saying in Spanish "en casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo" (the blacksmith rather uses wooden-made knifes at home), meaning that when you're an insider to some of the nasty things that are part of certain products, you'll end up wanting to avoid it altogether. And in a sector as unregulated and wild regarding user protections as is the technology and software world, no surprise lots of engineers know that things look grim when you know the secrets of how they're done.
You jest but my first experience with this were Compuserve CD's in the 90's. I saw my hard drive light blinking when I did not ask the computer to do anything so I killed the power then powered on, ejected the CD and threw it into the trash. Ever since that experience I've been highly skeptical of any program and vindicated hundreds of times since.
That was a result of launching their program think early web client app to talk to their network. I did not install anything yet it started enumerating the hard drive. I had a LED for the CD and a LED for the hard drive. This was a 386-DX40 (40Mhz) with a 144MB RLL hard drive. There was enough flickering to indicate they were reading a lot of data.
I think the midwit meme captures this best, where at both ends of the IQ bell curve the characters say "I hate technology", and the guy in the middle loves it.
I had an ARM win11 tablet that constantly cycled my ancient printer with the $11 2000 page toner. A firewall between the tablet and the printer was the answer.
- Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!
- Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
P.S. More seriously I agree, we witnessed multiple times over the enshitification that inevitably follows.