HACKER Q&A
📣 catstor

What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?


Could be any modern technology that is popular, trendy but you refuse to adopt it for any particular reason. It could be environmental, social, political, legacy support or simple belief that it does not solve any significant problem.


  👤 catstor Accepted Answer ✓
For me it's: Smart Watch, AI image generators, cryptocurrencies, auto payments of bills.

👤 bontaq
Any new editor, airplanes, tablets, smart watches (as mentioned by catstor), VR, e-readers (though these are actually very good, mine just died).

It's not any particular reason, they don't seem to improve my life much? The e-reader was best for sure.


👤 al_borland
IoT. I have no interest in home appliances with fancy screen, internet connectivity, apps, and any of that other nonsense.

I’m also pretty skeptical of the whole smart home market. A lot of it seems like technology in search of a problem… and it also seems very buggy.


👤 setnone
That would be smart devices: TVs, fridges, teapots, watches, phones

👤 stop50
Ai for anything but translations

👤 escapecharacter
This is an odd take that might seem privileged, but: sales or coupons. Digital or physical.

If a company is offering a discount, sale, coupon, etc., they've done the math and determined the reduction in revenue to them is offset by your increased likelihood to purchase, or share in your mind. (Algorithmic) discounts are a technology in the sense that they're part of modern data science-driven consumerism. Just like going to a casino, the house is always going to win. So, I offer no mind share to these. I've bought many games from Steam sales I don't play, for an innocuous example.

I'm not going to throw out a coupon if it's thrust into my hand (e.g. Wonderville, a gaming bar I love in Brooklyn hands out wooden drink tickets and one is in my wallet.)


👤 ifh-hn
Anything "smart". Can't avoid TVs unfortunately.

Electric vehicles. I don't have a problem with the concept but similar to the above, you can be held hostage with a change in software. And the second hand market is a joke.

Nearly all web frameworks, especially for app development.

All social media, cryptocurrency, and most tech pushed by big tech to general consumers.


👤 d3Xt3r
- Proprietary messaging apps like WhatsApps, Facebook Messenger etc. I think it's ridiculous that some people/countries are practically held hostage by them.

- Electron/Javascript based apps

- Chromium (Blink) and Webkit based browsers

- GTK4/libadwaita

- node.js

- And well, less of on refusal to adopt, but more like a refusal to acknowledge their value: bloated/modern web frameworks like React. I honestly can't think of a single useful website that absolutely cannot work without a bloated framework, that I'd actually need in my daily life, which couldn't have been achieved by a regular old-school website or a native app. Like literally, there's not a single actually useful website that I visit regularly, that I can look at and go "oh, this site (or the service they offer) absolutely cannot work without a modern bloated JS framework".


👤 pcardoso
Short videos, stories, etc. I refuse getting addicted to them. Terrifying watching everyone around me consuming the stuff like we are in a crack house.

👤 alloyrivet
The useless empty talk technique of capital rendering

👤 pete1302
- Shorts/Reels (do I need to give a reason for this)(I happily "choose" a good 30 min+ fails/funny/wins compilation and watch it rather than playing with a slot machine). - Instagram (I am not a photographer/artist, then why should I convey everything to my friends in Audiovisual way?)(even Facebook was better).

👤 austin-cheney
React - Let’s be honest about this. The primary purpose of React is not building things or rapid prototyping. Its primary purpose is to open employment to people who are otherwise less experienced or less qualified. I got tired of working with less qualified people, because less qualified people tend to be less capable of problem solving, less capable of rapid innovation, and more entitled.

Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) - It’s a massive pain in the ass. CDP is a backdoor into a web browser by opening a web server in a browser tab and providing an extensive API to remote access a web page as a third party. It’s very powerful but… WTF, so much ceremony. As someone who wants to write test automation on sites/pages I am authorized to test I would prefer to just open a web socket connection and go in through the front door. It’s so much more simple, but you don’t get an API to access all the dev tools panels.


👤 card_zero
Linux. I think it's necessary to abandon Windows, but to quote from a Q&A on distrowatch:

> Linux distributions try to provide everything you need in one central collection (called a repository). Windows and macOS users are accustomed to browsing the web, looking for applications, clicking a download link, and running an installer. With Linux we skip all of that. We can open the software centre (or "app store") and find just about anything we need.

Well, I hate that. We were accustomed to downloading some indie dev's binary, but now every platform has an app store, and this is apparently Linux's fault for starting the trend. I don't like package managers, I don't like auto-updates (I'll update next year maybe, is how I want it). I don't like installations and dependencies. In my dream world there could be, like, five or even six standard libraries, and they're all backward-compatible and you keep them up to date manually. I don't like file permissions, Sudo, and the multi-user paradigm. (It's just my computer and permissions shouldn't be a question.) I don't like the folder structure (/usr/, /bin/, /usr/bin/, /etc/). I don't like that there's a home folder: everywhere on my computer should be my home folder.

I'm investigating flatpaks to see if they can soothe my griping. But the first thing I see when I visit flathub is "Flathub is the app store for Linux". That's unpleasant. Who runs it, why? (Who runs any repo, and why?) The site lags. You can apparently set up your own flatpak repo, but isn't it allowed to just provide users with a flatpak file of your own program for download from your site? Just as if it was a more or less portable binary that you could unzip into whatever folder, and run it with high probability of it working, like how things used to be on Windows and Classic Mac. If flatpaks can do that, maybe I'll welcome Linux (back) into my life. Or maybe I want to use ReactOS really so I can pretend it's still the year 2000.


👤 jm4rch
Bluetooth. Ewww.

👤 ValtteriL
- smart watches / rings

- shorts / TikTok

- Instagram / X / Facebook etc.

- the Apple ecosystem

- TV

- tablets


👤 muzani
React Native. I do most of the mobile technologies but something about RN rubs me the wrong way.

1) Whenever we do an analysis of which codebase to use for a new project, RN gets cut off early for multiple reasons. What's the advantage? KMP allows native-level control. Flutter/Dart was built from the ground up for mobile and multiplatform.

2) Whenever I ask someone who went with React Native, the answer tends to follow along the lines of, "I don't want to learn another language"/"It's the easiest"/"It's made by FAANG." There's some defensiveness, like "React Native can do squircles!" There's a lack of awareness of other platforms, "I can see my results immediately when modifying code with RN!"

More questioning pushes me further away. It's like the only advantage is it lets web people make apps.

3) All the darlings of RN seem to have dropped it slowly - Airbnb, Meta. I'm not a big fan of PWA apps either but at least Meta uses them to good effect.

4) Related to (2), but nearly all the RN jobs seem to pay less, and treat mobile as a cost center than profit center.

Happy to be convinced otherwise. It's on the list, but it feels like low ROI.


👤 sevensor
Self quantification. Sleep trackers, fitness trackers, bathroom scales. I am deeply uninterested in gamifying my body, and I resent attempts to do so for profit.

👤 jmstfv
I've been running small SaaS businesses since 2019 with varying degrees of success (currently running a profitable one).

I never really got into JS front-end frameworks. The sheer complexity, and the idea of maintaining essentially 2 apps as a solo dev, never really appealed to me. The furthest I got into JS world was tinkering with Rails' Stimulus framework.

https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/


👤 pickleglitch
Voice control. Give me a keyboard and a mouse or track pad any day. I can't even articulate a reason, I just don't like it.

👤 AnimalMuppet
Using my phone to read the web.