I think many of us have noticed the trend that modern tech just… Doesn’t make things better. There’s little to be excited about, because anything even remotely innovative is going to be filled with tracking, ads, etc.
Let’s say you had a bored software engineer or 2 at your disposal and the goal was to improve something you do often, by creating an application or website that isn’t owned and enshittified by a megacorp looking to extract maximum short term value - what would your project be? Is it something you’d be willing to pay for, maybe with a free tier available?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m a software engineer and in the current hard-ass market, while I’m lucky enough to have a stable job, I know that experience alone isn’t cutting it anymore in the recruitment process. You need to be able to show side projects too. Plus I have an unemployed software engineer friend who also has no interesting projects to show. So if we make any money out of it, that’s awesome. If we don’t, it’s just something for our github accounts. Probably the latter.
PS: Yes, I know this is not a tech community - I want ideas from regular, non-techy people too.
PPS: This doesn’t have to be something in your personal life, it could also be something that would help you at work if you had it.
Exercise and nutrition. I easily fall into a pattern of self neglect. Having a program I can be accountable to, telling me what physio I should do, what to cook and when would be invaluable.
Apart from health related things, anything else are just gadgets that don’t really improve life IMHO.
Hmm, I’m not sure I agree. There’s plenty of tech that improves our lives, but anything that does is usually subtle stuff we don’t think about. It’s the “loud” tech that sucks. Things you notice using.
Example, if ever a friend needs money quickly (or I need to borrow money from a friend), it takes like a minute to log into the bank app and post a SEPA instant transfer. Maybe less. It’s amazingly convenient and available for every bank in my country.
Search engines aren’t as good as Google used to be, but I still find information very fast compared to when I didn’t have Internet access.
GPS is great. Remember when you had to use a paper map book and buy an update every year to stay up to date? I do. GPS wasn’t that common in my country in my childhood because it was expensive to buy a device.
All of these examples are good only if you think that we need to have access to everything as soon as possible. It can definitely be convenient at times, but it also feels like most of the time it actually ends up being forced on you, when in truth, life shouldn’t require that we get money straight away, nor that we have to follow the best possible itineary. Being able to take our time to do things is to me the thing that we are actually missing nowadays.
Dating.
it’s unfortunate that all the current solutions are absolute garbage.
Realign monetary incentives by making users pay for the quality of the match. If you want more of the good, pay for what you rate as good in the previous matches. Pay more the longer you stay together with a match.
The matching system was already almost perfect at OkCupid around ten years ago - copy that, and the well-aligned incentive should keep it developing instead of degrading, which is what Match Group did to it with their monthly subscription that incentivizes preventing long-term relationships.
Actually helping people turns out to not be so great for shareholder value
Yeah that sucks. No business wants to help its own customers never need it again.
My brother is an audiologist and hates doing a certain hearing test, because it’s boring. The way he describes it, he hands the patient a button and a pair of headphones, then goes into the next room.
He has a row of dials. He turns the first one until the patient pushes the button. He writes down how high the dial got, then turns it off and moves on to the next dial. Repeat for like 20 dials.
Then at the end, he has to draw a graph BY HAND, highlighting certain features.
There is precisely 0% chance that this requires a trained audiologist to do. Maybe to interpret, but not to collect data.
software is not making things better because its designed not to. All sorts of things would be way better if it was designed around making our lives easier. For example sites give an option for sort by price kinda cause they have to for legacy reason. Getting a sort by unit count. nope. ads overatking an item from showing you the time, or your timer, or the weather at that moment.
