The World Needs Less Software

My favourite programs are those I've written alone, for myself.  My favourite programs otherwise are
programming tools, particularly GNU Emacs and implementations of my favourite programming languages.
I occasionally scorn the fact that, over the last few years, I use programs I despise even more than
those that I like, primarily the WWW browser, and I reflect on their qualities.  A related matter is
noticing which programs I find most useful and their purposes.  I find the WWW browser to be forced,
for increasingly many parts of that WWW take measures to use the already-pathetic HTTP in name only,
and some of the programs I find to be most useful are workarounds for software that harms its users.

Two of the better programs I regularly use nowadays are youtube-dl, now yt-dlp, and Nitter; both are
programs which exist solely to remove artificial restrictions from monopolies or cartels.  I use not
Nitter directly, but instances others host, and I must run the current yt-dlp to bypass restrictions
enforced by websites; in both cases, there's a business reason for trying to change reality in vain.

Corporations wish to lie constantly, and the so-called ``intellectual property'' no longer satisfies
their lust for control and power; they wish to enforce a meaningless distinction between downloading
and streaming, where the one true difference between them is in the domain of the client who chooses
to save or throw away the data obtained.  Malicious clients can easily enforce the false distinction
no differently than any other, but a proper client can merely ignore such nonsense.  Kind souls have
already solved many problems for me, by wading through the JavaScript cesspits I've encountered when
trying to save something that was already sent to my computer.  Twitter is less harmful, and perhaps
less fundamentally evil in this minor respect, alongside less useful; the so-called ``social media''
hardly matters sans audience, and yet I see interesting people still using Twitter sans good reason.

In any case, Nitter and yt-dlp are both useful programs that shouldn't exist; both programs serve to
work around issues caused by other software, and I notice this to be the reason most software has to
exist; shitty software usually begets more shitty software, no differently than shitty people.  It's
easy to see a future where anything useful becomes impossible without destroying what is, and such a
future may be the present already.  Standards are violated specifically to cause interoperability to
fail, software is made specifically to work around issues better solved by excising diseased organs,
and restrictions are placed by anyone who makes money using them onto anyone powerless against them.

It's clear to me most programmers and their masters would be killed, if politicians understood them.
.