Everything Fucking Sucks

No, I’m not being dramatic. At least I hope so.

For the last few odd years everything has started to suck more and more. Be software becoming more buggy, the many ups and downs of the global economy, AI, Gaming, etc etc. The following is more of a venting piece more than anything. Let’s start with software.

Kill All Web Developers

The Enshittification of applications straight up pisses me off. Most modern software is just a browser in disguise. The WhatsApp desktop client was a native Windows application before Meta decided to turn it into a shitty Electron app so they can keep parity between the browser and desktop version. Good shit, now it idles at 2GB of memory usage.

Apps like TikTok have mastered the art of the ‘Dark Pattern.’ Once you’re in, you can’t escape. A black hole of our own creation, how nice. Infinite scroll, autoplay, notification manipulation. These platforms are engineered to be addictive, not useful. They’re not even pretending to respect your time or agency anymore. The goal is maximum engagement, maximum ad revenue, and if that means algorithmically serving you whatever keeps you scrolling longest, conspiracy theories, rage bait, AI slop, so be it. Want to break out of that cycle? Tough luck, your family & friends only use these apps to communicate. Want to get them on Signal? Haha, they’ll look at you weird and send you an Instagram reel over WhatsApp 5 seconds later.

This is also very apparent in the world of Linux right now. GNOME being the biggest offender here. First, forcing Wayland-only, second, GDM’s hard dependency on systemd, and lastly, just being an awful, uninspired clone of macOS’s desktop. The entire GNOME stack has been on a constant downward spiral ever since GNOME 3 was introduced in the early 2010s. What the fuck were they thinking? Ah yes, let’s emulate macOS, the desktop environment made specifically for people who are scared of normal PCs! What could go wrong? Oh, I don’t know, EVERYTHING? With the introduction of libadwaita, it has basically become IMPOSSIBLE to customize GNOME without installing a bunch of extra extensions. Want to change the color of your file explorer? Fuck you! We, the GNOME Foundation, dictate how your desktop has to look, and if you don’t like that, well, fuck you again! I’m very glad that KDE is starting to become the standard DE across many Linux distros now. What a fucking disaster.

Let’s not forget Microslop slopping all over the place. Windows is unusable now. Enough has been said about Copilot and Recall, so I want to highlight something else that pisses me off: UWP. Recently, I’ve tried getting FH3 running on my Windows install. First off, FH3 is no longer sold ANYWHERE besides key resellers, and I’m not paying 60 euros for a game that’s turning 10 this year. Well, that’s all fine and good, I already own the game. But on disk. So, I go ahead and check my library in the Xbox app. Of course, I couldn’t find it. Great. I can’t even install a game that I already own? Why wasn’t the license that came with the disk transfered to my account? Whatever, let’s acquire the game very legally. After waiting an hour and fiddling around with some sketchy .bat script, nothing. Game launches just fine, but gets stuck on the “Press [button] to continue” screen. Good shit. Amazing. Even then, the servers for the game are down, making it impossible to fully complete or experience everything the game used to offer, which is especially sad as FH3 is perhaps the best title in the franchise. Alas, I had to move on, so I wiped the game from my hard drive. I’m surprised that Stop Killing Games only happened after Ubisoft killed off The Crew. It should’ve started when FH3 was pulled from digital stores and its servers were sunset. Fuck you Microsoft.

JUST 5 GORBILLIONTRILLION MORE DOLLARS AND 5 GOOGLEPLEX LITERS OF WATER AND WE’LL HAVE AGI BRO TRUST ME WE JUST NEED MORE FUNDING BRO AGI IS AROUND THE CORNER

The conversation around AI has also been done to death and I’m just beating on a dead-yet-immortal horse at this point. How can it be dead and immortal at the same time? Well, dead in the sense that everyone has voiced their opinion on AI, immortal in the sense that it’s not gonna fucking go away.

With that subtitle you might think I’m the #1 AI hater in the world, but I’m not. Running models locally? Fine. Using AI to help with tedious shit? Sure. That’s not exactly what’s happening though. What’s happening is Google Search is now 40% AI-generated SEO spam, customer service is being replaced with chatbots that repeat the same answer no matter what you ask, and Adobe is forcing ‘AI’ into Photoshop and jacking up subscription prices, all while artists are watching their work get scraped to train the thing that’s supposed to replace them. And every CEO on Earth is salivating over the idea of firing people and replacing them with a language model that costs $0.02 per thousand words. The technology itself? Whatever. The way it’s being deployed? Mass human exploitation on a scale never seen before.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects, that being tech CEOs, are doing the same song and dance over and over again. ‘AI will unlock human potential! AI will cure cancer! AI will solve climate change!’ I’m sure it will. After technology has become unaffordable for the everyday man, after it has gobbled up all available resources on this fucking planet, after countries have been wiped from the map because of rising sea level. It’ll be too late by then, but that doesn’t matter, we have AGI now! Sure, your job’s gone and your city’s underwater, but at least ChatGPT can write your resume for you, after you tell it to remove the em-dashes.

You Can (Not) Vote Your Way Out

I live in Germany. You know, the country that’s learned from its past? Well, not really, let’s be honest. The far-right doubled their vote share and became the second-largest party in the Bundestag. The AfD, a party that Germany’s own domestic intelligence agency has classified as right-wing extremist, pulled 20.8% of the vote. They won every single state in former DDR. They are tripling their support in the West. And the response from the “centrists”? Friedrich Merz, who all of 19% of Germans actually like, is now chancellor. His solution to the AfD problem? Move right, adopt their talking points on migration, cut deals with them while pretending there’s a “firewall.”

So, what about the election results? Record-breaking turnout: 82.5%, the highest since reunification. People showed up and voted like never before. And what did it get us? Another coalition between the CDU and SPD, the same centrist parties that have been trading power forever at this point, now governing together because they’ve run out of other options. The Greens? Dead in the gutter. The FDP wiped from the map completely (not that anyone will miss them). And the AfD? They’re sitting in the Bundestag with 151 seats, patiently awaiting the next election when they’ll probably do even better.

The worst part? This was to be the “vote to save democracy” election. Early election, snap vote, all hands on deck to stop the far-right. Did it work? Fuck no. Because voting harder doesn’t fix a system that’s fundamentally broken, where mainstream parties and out-of-touch politicians would rather capitulate to fascists than address why people are angry in the first place. The economy’s been in recession for two years, living costs are through the roof, and the centrist answer is “trust us, we’ll form another grand coalition and maybe this time it’ll work.”

Sure. I’m sure it will.

Your Job Application Has Been Declined

Picture this: You’re fresh out of school with a shiny new CS degree in your sweaty palms. You were told the job market is desperately looking for people, so, you send your first application. Declined. You try again. Declined. Fifty applications later, you’re working at McDonald’s to pay rent. Then, all of a sudden, you finally land an interview. The salary? 40k for a job requiring a degree and ‘passion for innovation.’

Now picture this: You skipped college like everyone told you to. ‘Learn a trade! Plumbers make bank!’ You’re three years into your apprenticeship, make 18 bucks an hour. Your knees are already fucked and the technician above you has been doing this for 30 years and he’s making 28 an hour. Your back will give out before you can afford to retire.

Either way, you’re fucked. And now you’re supposed to buy a house on that? Start a family? The same people who bought their first home at 23 on a single income are calling you lazy for not having it figured out by 30.

So, what remains?

Not much. The platforms are getting worse, the climate is getting hotter, and the people in charge are either incompetent or actively malicious. But maybe there’s a flicker of something in the resistance to it all.

I could rave on about Nietzsche or Camus here, about finding meaning in the absurd or whatever, but that feels disingenuous. Resistance here isn’t philosophical, it’s practical. Small acts of refusal that add up type-shit.

Install Linux, use Signal, pirate everything to bypass overpriced subscriptions. Go out and vote, organize, share knowledge freely, without discrimination. Be passionate, be compassionate. Maybe things get better, maybe they don’t. But I’d rather fail trying than succeed at pretending everything’s fine.