I'm sure you could lower the GDP of a country by introducing specially crafted bugs into their supply chain. You could probably affect rates of reproduction, divorce rates.. so on

Here's an example. I want to copy some text from my browser and paste it into conversations. I copy the text. I app switch back to conversations. At first, the software keyboard is open. Then after about a half second, the keyboard closes. This is already causing a time delay. Now I can either paste into the input box at the bottom or tap it to open the keyboard up again. It's faster to do it while it's at the bottom.

1. I long press in the box. This opens the context menu to paste, but the context menu is overlaid by this shit notification that graphene OS adds to let you know that you have just pasted from the clipboard. Then I have to wait for this notification to disappear so I can see my context menu. So this is a bad option.

2. I tap the input box to open the keyboard which moves the input box upward. Now I can do the same thing and the notification about pacing into the clipboard will not cover my context menu. But now with this workflow, things are slow because I have to wait for the keyboard to close when I switch apps, then tap in the box and open it again. It's just a stupid waste of time that I have to do every time I switch windows.

This inherently wastes my time and contributes to stress. The time that I was forced to waste could've been used to find my long-sought-after wife, but nope.

It's also about the cumulative effect of a ton of little bugs like this. It's more the cumulative effect than any single bug. One issue is fine, two is acceptable, but three, four.. Eight?

Software is deliberately being designed to waste our time and kill us through lack of quality assurance.

I'm being honest, it gets me thinking about new concepts. Like how the CIA could try to cause people to have a psychological collapse or to push them over the edge and commit acts of violence through extremely bad user experience.

If you didn't use GrapheneOS, you wouldn't have this problem, though I'm sure there's a way to disable that pop-up.

Also this is just one of the limitations of using a touchscreen technology instead of utilizing buttons, it's not software designed against you, it's just the inefficiency of the touchscreen.

I think the CIA has more effective methods than introducing annoying bugs in your software. Especially if we're talking about reducing the birth rate. You just poison the men with xenoestrogens in the food supply, and subsidize female education.

>You just poison the men with xenoestrogens in the food supply, and subsidize female education.

What in gods name is a "xenoestrogen"? That sounds unnatural.

Estrogen that is exogenous to the body.

> What in gods name is a "xenoestrogen"? That sounds unnatural.

Molecules that have the same effect on the body as natural estrogen, despite being something else. Plastic is a xenoestrogen, and unfortunately it's everywhere. If you drink from a plastic bottle, or you spend a lot of time touching plastic surfaces, you probably have xenostrogens in your body.

It's especially harmful for babies and children, as it can interfere with their normal development. The effects on adults are less severe, but still pretty bad: lower testosterone, slower metabolism, depression, infertility...

Yes, for sure. Estrogen from sources outside the body are indeed too common in many products. That being said, I do not really think plastic is simply a form of estrogen and little else; other elements are at play in the composition of it. On top of that, too much testosterone, like too much estrogen, in both men and women, brings about its own set of problems as well.

xenoestrogens come up in the thread like a really weird random thing, why does this have to be about birth rates now? nah, just vibes. i guess people are doing that shit with xenoestrogen though.

like, okay sure plastic is a thing but still, didn't even need to bring it up until you did, and honestly kinda missed my point there tbh.

that's not a bug in the software, that's a real thing, xenoestrogens are natural hormones but in synthetic form. The term was coined to distinguish them from those produced by the body and used to explain how they disrupt biological processes, like birth rates. But the problem isn't that they're unnatural, it's that there are so many of them in common substances.

(edit: not relevant to this thread, but just to clarify: if you mean estrogen being in plastic, they aren't, they're usually added as stabilizers or plasticizers to the synthetic polymers, not chemically bound to the plastic itself.)

Social media probably is doing the biggest damage to productivity right now, but stupidly designed software is probably also high on the list somewhere.
Outside the software world the smartphone is likely the biggest productivity killer, if you want to be productive and stay sane you should turn it all off.
Xenoestrogens may be bad, but are actually not a significant factor here, the main reason people are not reproducing is because they chose not to reproduce for whatever reasons.

The synthetic hormones in xenoestrogens can bind to estrogen receptors and mimic natural hormones. It's a biological trick used to study how artificial forms of estrogen behave differently from those made by the body.

If software is deliberately designed poorly to mess with us, that's like having some of these chemicals showing up everywhere, even in products we didn't know had been contaminated.