The Downward Spiral of Technology(creativedestruction.club)
creativedestruction.club
The Downward Spiral of Technology
https://www.creativedestruction.club/p/the-downward-spiral-of-technology
116 comments
> I’m not sure if it is a matter of perspective or what. But I definitely wouldn’t look back at 90’s internet too nostalgically. It was legitimately hard to find things. People made these quirky collections of websites because that was the only way to find interesting stuff. I didn’t know about websites until I heard about them IRL.
I think it's more complicated that "easier is better" assumption. The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.
It's kind of like a lot of technology, by solving one "problem" it makes worse ones. People might have complained about needing to walk everywhere before cars were invented, but once they got cars they stopped walking and started getting fat.
There's probably a sweet spot where both "less solution" and "more solution" are in fact worse.
I think it's more complicated that "easier is better" assumption. The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.
It's kind of like a lot of technology, by solving one "problem" it makes worse ones. People might have complained about needing to walk everywhere before cars were invented, but once they got cars they stopped walking and started getting fat.
There's probably a sweet spot where both "less solution" and "more solution" are in fact worse.
Part of what made the 90s internet exciting was the sense, whenever I found a useful site, that I too could make such a site. I could probably get v1 going in an afternoon, and it would be (partly) fun.
I guess I could also make a 2020s content site, full of ads and signup clickthroughs, but I don't want to.
Movies made this transition around the 1940s. It went from "if you could put on a play, you could rent some cameras and lights and make a popular movie" to "you need a 9-digit production budget and 3 years."
I salute indie video game developers, who continue to resist this trend, making good 6-digit titles that are often more enjoyable than 9-digit titles.
I guess I could also make a 2020s content site, full of ads and signup clickthroughs, but I don't want to.
Movies made this transition around the 1940s. It went from "if you could put on a play, you could rent some cameras and lights and make a popular movie" to "you need a 9-digit production budget and 3 years."
I salute indie video game developers, who continue to resist this trend, making good 6-digit titles that are often more enjoyable than 9-digit titles.
That's the difference between a golden age and a silver age.
The golden age has wide open frontiers, low barriers to entry, and low hanging fruit.
The silver age is more closed off but also achieves greater sophistication.
The golden age has wide open frontiers, low barriers to entry, and low hanging fruit.
The silver age is more closed off but also achieves greater sophistication.
> The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.
The 90's internet was sort of like pawing through the piles of records at a thrift store. When you found something amazing, it felt really, really good.
I rarely have those moments these days, but the sweet spot definitely felt like 2000-2010. Facebook was a great way to keep up with people and didn't have too many ads. There was enough "old, weird internet" going on.
The 90's internet was sort of like pawing through the piles of records at a thrift store. When you found something amazing, it felt really, really good.
I rarely have those moments these days, but the sweet spot definitely felt like 2000-2010. Facebook was a great way to keep up with people and didn't have too many ads. There was enough "old, weird internet" going on.
> I think it's more complicated that "easier is better" assumption. The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.
I think "easier is better" is flawed for a slightly different reason -- the early personal computing era and the early internet had a lot of creativity and a lot of people doing things on their own terms precisely because getting there required a learning curve.
Once you learn how a fundamental technology works, you can adapt it, modify it, put it to your purposes, and truly own it in ways that open a world of possibility to you that go far beyond whatever short-term use cases the original designers had in mind.
There's a reason why so many people doing interesting things with tech today are the ones who learned BASIC on their C64s or wrote HTML by hand to create their first GeoCities websites. People who got into technology when you had to read the manual tend to grok tech in a way that those who started off with overpolished consumer-appliances don't get exposed to without going to great lengths to deliberately seek it out.
I think "easier is better" is flawed for a slightly different reason -- the early personal computing era and the early internet had a lot of creativity and a lot of people doing things on their own terms precisely because getting there required a learning curve.
Once you learn how a fundamental technology works, you can adapt it, modify it, put it to your purposes, and truly own it in ways that open a world of possibility to you that go far beyond whatever short-term use cases the original designers had in mind.
There's a reason why so many people doing interesting things with tech today are the ones who learned BASIC on their C64s or wrote HTML by hand to create their first GeoCities websites. People who got into technology when you had to read the manual tend to grok tech in a way that those who started off with overpolished consumer-appliances don't get exposed to without going to great lengths to deliberately seek it out.
I think the point though is that we're heading to where we're no better off than we were in the 90's as modern "search" returns results that are somehow even less than no results at all.
Those curated lists are looking better and better.
Those curated lists are looking better and better.
Fuck - from an average coder perspective, try getting a working linux DNS server for home lab use in 2005 without having to waste a weekend or two on it.
LAMP servers were heralded as the best thing since sliced bread because of how it all just "worked."
And then add in maintenance and all the other sucky sucks of having competing binaries screw everything up.
Now, when it worked, it felt more accomplished than spinning up a `docker run...` or `argocd app create...`
However, I enjoy doing the cool shit on top of this stack now rather than waste my life figuring out why my apache process can't properly invoke php code.
LAMP servers were heralded as the best thing since sliced bread because of how it all just "worked."
And then add in maintenance and all the other sucky sucks of having competing binaries screw everything up.
Now, when it worked, it felt more accomplished than spinning up a `docker run...` or `argocd app create...`
However, I enjoy doing the cool shit on top of this stack now rather than waste my life figuring out why my apache process can't properly invoke php code.
> Fuck - from an average coder perspective, try getting a working linux DNS server for home lab use in 2005 without having to waste a weekend or two on it
I never found myself able to waste time on these sort of projects, because all of the time I spent on them invariably turned out to be a fruitful investment instead.
I never found myself able to waste time on these sort of projects, because all of the time I spent on them invariably turned out to be a fruitful investment instead.
Yes, I agree about the decades blurring together. A lot of "the Sixties" happened in the early- to mid-1970s, and the 2010s didn't seem to start until about 2015 (and are ongoing today).
However, there was definitely a distinct 1990s Internet, and I remember using it in the actual 1990s. A big part of it was just the newness of the whole thing. That was still happening in like 2001 and 2002, but by the middle of the 2000s the Internet was not new anymore and large numbers of people had home broadband.
However, there was definitely a distinct 1990s Internet, and I remember using it in the actual 1990s. A big part of it was just the newness of the whole thing. That was still happening in like 2001 and 2002, but by the middle of the 2000s the Internet was not new anymore and large numbers of people had home broadband.
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I agree the 90s internet experience wasn't something really worth pining for. It's easy to forget that broadband wasn't, in most cases, consistently broad enough yet (and server response latency was often pretty poor), the software tech stack was still too immature and much of the presentation was still designed around dial-up constraints. While the experience of discovering exponentially more genuinely interesting content on forums and personal blogs was revelatory compared to Usenet, there's even more good content available today, it's just frustratingly buried in vast mountains of click-bait crap auto-generated to deceptively look like authentic content.
I think "peak web" was somewhere around 2010 to 2012 and even as late as 2015. I'm still able to mostly put together a fairly useful and minimally annoying daily experience but it does require increasingly more work to sustain. This includes finding, integrating, and, in some cases, writing userscripts and browser add-ons to variously fix and/or de-crapify the web. uBlock Origin (with lots of my own filter rules to hide various crap elements) is just the beginning. Just checking my Firefox ViolentMonkey and Stylus scripts, there are now four scripts just to fix Google (along with a layered set of my own regex-scripted redirects in the Redirector add-on which manipulate Google Search's URL parameters fix a bunch of things and enforce useful defaults).
* YouTube: The AdashimaaTube Stylus script makes YT usable and useful again (has >700k users)
* Reddit: OldReddit plus the essential Reddit Enhancement Suite along with defaulting the homepage to a carefully curated MultiReddit list of small, special-interest niche subs.
* For the rest of the web I have about 30 add-ons in Firefox (and that's after recently culling my add-on list down to what I consider the bare essentials). About a third of them fix things related to websites, a third address issues with Firefox itself, and a third add features to Firefox or specific sites (Amazon: (item price history, fix default sort), Steam Store: comparative pricing, Twitter: fix Twitter layout & defaults, Netflix: add Metacritic, IMDB and Rotten Tom. review scores, etc).
* Although it remains the 'least-bad' browser for user choice, privacy and personalization, the current product management of Firefox seems intent on destroying even this last refuge. I can't even use FF without the amazing Lepton userchrome that extensively fixes all the insane things FF's run-amuck designers keep doing to fuck up its interface. Essential: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix. On top of that I have my own extensive fixes, adaptations and personalizations in UserChrome.css and User.JS. Lepton and my own scripts require an emergency intervention to maintain at least once every three months because they keep getting broken by new Firefox versions. Just the maintenance is getting bad enough that I'm about to switch to the latest long-term version of FF. Frankly, the changes, improvements and 'modernizations' FF has been making the last couple years seem about 90/10 irrelevant/useful. The community at FirefoxCSS is a godsend for crowd-sourcing how to keep fixing, patching and maintaining UserChrome (www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/).
* Lastly, since we're talking about tech overall, it's the same clusterfuck on Windows 10 and Android. Yes, I know Linux is better in many ways but it's a personal preference thing for me. Unlike the other non-linux option, Mac/iOS, at least Windows can still be variously "fixed" and otherwise made usable with sufficient effort and diligent hackery. Tools like Ditto (a sharable macro + multi-clipboard), 7TT, Start10, Groupy, AutoHideMouseCursor, Textify, AlwaysMouseWheel, ShareX, PowerToys, WinAeroTweaker, WinGetUI, a dozen free utility apps from NirSoft and the absolutely essential "Everything" (an incredible, lightning fast whole-system search). Together, these along with an extensive personal AHK script and a few dozen registry customizations (which I now have scripted for new installs) allow Windows 10 to be pretty okay. (Note: I'm not forgetting all the similar work I've had to do to hack, fix, de-ad-ify and de-crapify my television, Android-ish streaming sticks and nearly everything else marketed with the word "Smart". I'm just too tired to enumerate all of that too.)
Obviously, this amount of literal per-user work being required to actually experience a reasonable form of the "Better Future" we thought we were building is ridiculous. My whole life I've always believed in the ability of technology to broadly improve our lives. While this belief has proven (mostly) true, I never imagined we'd have to endure these kinds of trivial yet maddening functionality and usability regressions in routine daily activities. It's like a malevolent fairy tale genii granted our wishes for useful AI and routine spaceflight yet perversely doomed us to walk around with sandpaper in our underwear! Maybe I'm too idealistic but I just refuse to give-in, give-up and accept that our technological future is destined to be worse than the past - especially in such mundane ways - and for such trivially stupid reasons.
I think "peak web" was somewhere around 2010 to 2012 and even as late as 2015. I'm still able to mostly put together a fairly useful and minimally annoying daily experience but it does require increasingly more work to sustain. This includes finding, integrating, and, in some cases, writing userscripts and browser add-ons to variously fix and/or de-crapify the web. uBlock Origin (with lots of my own filter rules to hide various crap elements) is just the beginning. Just checking my Firefox ViolentMonkey and Stylus scripts, there are now four scripts just to fix Google (along with a layered set of my own regex-scripted redirects in the Redirector add-on which manipulate Google Search's URL parameters fix a bunch of things and enforce useful defaults).
* YouTube: The AdashimaaTube Stylus script makes YT usable and useful again (has >700k users)
* Reddit: OldReddit plus the essential Reddit Enhancement Suite along with defaulting the homepage to a carefully curated MultiReddit list of small, special-interest niche subs.
* For the rest of the web I have about 30 add-ons in Firefox (and that's after recently culling my add-on list down to what I consider the bare essentials). About a third of them fix things related to websites, a third address issues with Firefox itself, and a third add features to Firefox or specific sites (Amazon: (item price history, fix default sort), Steam Store: comparative pricing, Twitter: fix Twitter layout & defaults, Netflix: add Metacritic, IMDB and Rotten Tom. review scores, etc).
* Although it remains the 'least-bad' browser for user choice, privacy and personalization, the current product management of Firefox seems intent on destroying even this last refuge. I can't even use FF without the amazing Lepton userchrome that extensively fixes all the insane things FF's run-amuck designers keep doing to fuck up its interface. Essential: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix. On top of that I have my own extensive fixes, adaptations and personalizations in UserChrome.css and User.JS. Lepton and my own scripts require an emergency intervention to maintain at least once every three months because they keep getting broken by new Firefox versions. Just the maintenance is getting bad enough that I'm about to switch to the latest long-term version of FF. Frankly, the changes, improvements and 'modernizations' FF has been making the last couple years seem about 90/10 irrelevant/useful. The community at FirefoxCSS is a godsend for crowd-sourcing how to keep fixing, patching and maintaining UserChrome (www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/).
* Lastly, since we're talking about tech overall, it's the same clusterfuck on Windows 10 and Android. Yes, I know Linux is better in many ways but it's a personal preference thing for me. Unlike the other non-linux option, Mac/iOS, at least Windows can still be variously "fixed" and otherwise made usable with sufficient effort and diligent hackery. Tools like Ditto (a sharable macro + multi-clipboard), 7TT, Start10, Groupy, AutoHideMouseCursor, Textify, AlwaysMouseWheel, ShareX, PowerToys, WinAeroTweaker, WinGetUI, a dozen free utility apps from NirSoft and the absolutely essential "Everything" (an incredible, lightning fast whole-system search). Together, these along with an extensive personal AHK script and a few dozen registry customizations (which I now have scripted for new installs) allow Windows 10 to be pretty okay. (Note: I'm not forgetting all the similar work I've had to do to hack, fix, de-ad-ify and de-crapify my television, Android-ish streaming sticks and nearly everything else marketed with the word "Smart". I'm just too tired to enumerate all of that too.)
Obviously, this amount of literal per-user work being required to actually experience a reasonable form of the "Better Future" we thought we were building is ridiculous. My whole life I've always believed in the ability of technology to broadly improve our lives. While this belief has proven (mostly) true, I never imagined we'd have to endure these kinds of trivial yet maddening functionality and usability regressions in routine daily activities. It's like a malevolent fairy tale genii granted our wishes for useful AI and routine spaceflight yet perversely doomed us to walk around with sandpaper in our underwear! Maybe I'm too idealistic but I just refuse to give-in, give-up and accept that our technological future is destined to be worse than the past - especially in such mundane ways - and for such trivially stupid reasons.
Would you be willing to share any of these configurations?
I've largely curated my own UBO rules/handful of TamperMonkey scripts over the years; seems you've gone above and beyond. Sounds like an admirable effort.
I've largely curated my own UBO rules/handful of TamperMonkey scripts over the years; seems you've gone above and beyond. Sounds like an admirable effort.
I went to read Ted Gioia’s original piece to try to figure out why he thought his new computer was a downgrade, but he doesn’t say. There was a period in the 90s where Windows machines were increasingly cheap and loaded with crapware, but otherwise my computers continue to get better and better. I agree Google and social media has gotten worse, but I don’t see a larger trend here. I’ll happily trade any of 90s (or 2010 for that matter) cars, computers, phones, cameras, dentist visits, TVs, video games, etc. etc. for the author’s new “downgrade.”
Some things are being taken too far, imo. I think all controls being moved to touch screens in cars make them objectively worse. A touch screen requires the driver take their eyes off the road, while knobs, buttons, and switches can all be done by feel. I hope we eventually see things return to a more logical balance.
Phone size is another one. I get it, people want their phone to be their only device, and that makes them want a big screen to do more stuff... but for me, a phone should be sized to a human hand. If I can't do everything with one hand, or they need to add software features to compensate for the size of the hardware, it's a failure. I do wonder how much price comes into play. If someone is only going to have one device, because that's all they can afford, it's going to be a phone.
In both of these cases, the technology seems to forget about the humans that need to use these things.
From a repairably point of view, older devices are easier to understand and built to be repairable, where modern devices are cheap and complex (or proprietary), which leads to more waste. This can also be considered worse. That complexity can make for a better product during its serviceable life, but that life may be much shorter. So we have to weigh the improvement of the product against the cost of replacement. Not only the cost in terms of money, but also cost in terms of the environmental impact.
Sometimes it is worth taking a step back to make sure we are taking a thoughtful approach to technology and improvement, to make sure it makes sense and we're not just doing it because we can. I think some people, especially in silicon valley, forget how normal people live and are too wrapped up in technology for technology's sake.
Phone size is another one. I get it, people want their phone to be their only device, and that makes them want a big screen to do more stuff... but for me, a phone should be sized to a human hand. If I can't do everything with one hand, or they need to add software features to compensate for the size of the hardware, it's a failure. I do wonder how much price comes into play. If someone is only going to have one device, because that's all they can afford, it's going to be a phone.
In both of these cases, the technology seems to forget about the humans that need to use these things.
From a repairably point of view, older devices are easier to understand and built to be repairable, where modern devices are cheap and complex (or proprietary), which leads to more waste. This can also be considered worse. That complexity can make for a better product during its serviceable life, but that life may be much shorter. So we have to weigh the improvement of the product against the cost of replacement. Not only the cost in terms of money, but also cost in terms of the environmental impact.
Sometimes it is worth taking a step back to make sure we are taking a thoughtful approach to technology and improvement, to make sure it makes sense and we're not just doing it because we can. I think some people, especially in silicon valley, forget how normal people live and are too wrapped up in technology for technology's sake.
For me, finally leaving my Amiga 3000 behind in the second half of the 90's for a Windows PC felt like stepping from a happy utopia back into the grim Dark Ages when it comes to productivity and being able to customize my workspace to my needs.
But PC was where the games and frantic hardware progress happened (3D accelerators! Doom! Quake!), even if the 'productivity software' which ran on that hardware mostly sucked (every UI application was siloed away instead of cooperating - which unfortunately hasn't changed much).
But PC was where the games and frantic hardware progress happened (3D accelerators! Doom! Quake!), even if the 'productivity software' which ran on that hardware mostly sucked (every UI application was siloed away instead of cooperating - which unfortunately hasn't changed much).
Yeah, lots of people moved from Apple/Amiga/Atari to PC at that time, as those ecosystems struggled. But the PC manufacturers, without any competition, took advantage of that to produce crap. It took Apple’s resurgence to turn that around. (Switched from Amiga myself in early 90s)
I was curious about that as well. He probably doesn't tell because there would be instant arguing. To be fair though, hardware development feels like it has slowed down while the parts are becoming more expensive.
I have a thing where I wait to upgrade my workstation until performance of newer hardware has 2x'ed on most workloads. I had to wait quite long this time. My trusty 1080 Ti was not 2x'ed until fairly recently, and that came at a hefty price and much increased power draw. It feels like a lot of low hanging fruits have already been picked.
I have a thing where I wait to upgrade my workstation until performance of newer hardware has 2x'ed on most workloads. I had to wait quite long this time. My trusty 1080 Ti was not 2x'ed until fairly recently, and that came at a hefty price and much increased power draw. It feels like a lot of low hanging fruits have already been picked.
I just got back into PC building after taking years off using Macs. Put together a "mid range" gaming system and put a 4 year old RX 5700 XT in it, which is similar to (probably a little slower than) your 1080 Ti, and it's shocking how good GPUs are today vs. graphics cards 10 and 20 years ago. Like mind blowing. This GPU which has long since been leapfrogged chews through every game I like to play and delivers 1440p/144Hz. Really incredible compared to trying to sustain 30FPS Quake 1 back in 1999.
If his new computer runs Windows 11, I'd consider it a downgrade too.
All my computers run Linux now, so only the hardware gains are salient. :p
All my computers run Linux now, so only the hardware gains are salient. :p
Until you try the touchpad that is :/ Linux works well on the desktop with a mouse, but I didn't have a great Linux experience on any laptop I owned in the last two decades.
I'm delighted with the touchpad on my new Framework. By far my best experience and I've been running Linux as my daily driver on laptops from Sony, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, & Purism for over two decades.
As a "boomer", I agree, the good old days weren't all that great. People of my age group are afraid to get out of their comfort zone, it's my belief that's why our political situation is so full of turmoil. Yes, there are some problems with some of today's tech, I'm not crazy about my cars spying on me, but I do love the infotainment system and GPS.
What about dentists is so much better now??
Digital Xrays save time, pain and radiation
Electronic health records
Cordless instruments save pain for the hygienist / dentist and angst of moving around a cord
Cavitrons reduce hygiene pain and do a better job of removing calculus
Invisiline gives a significant part of the population an option of not having metal mouth
Then there's better techniques, materials and various other things. Dental offices have changed quite a bit in the last 25 years.
Electronic health records
Cordless instruments save pain for the hygienist / dentist and angst of moving around a cord
Cavitrons reduce hygiene pain and do a better job of removing calculus
Invisiline gives a significant part of the population an option of not having metal mouth
Then there's better techniques, materials and various other things. Dental offices have changed quite a bit in the last 25 years.
^These are the things I was thinking of. I haven’t had any serious work (knock on wood) in years, so I can’t comment on anesthesia
X-Rays are trivial now. Doses are lower and results are instant. Dentists can easily send x-rays to each other, making visiting a specialist easier.
Cosmetic treatments like Invisalign use (really cool!) 3d mapping techniques to create a treatment plan and track progress.
Fluoride treatments are now more effective (the brush on fluoride vs the tray that you's soak your teeth in for a few minutes).
Cosmetic treatments like Invisalign use (really cool!) 3d mapping techniques to create a treatment plan and track progress.
Fluoride treatments are now more effective (the brush on fluoride vs the tray that you's soak your teeth in for a few minutes).
> X-Rays are trivial now.
The most important part is what the handheld ones are used through the procedure so the doc can see and correct their action in the process and you don't even need to get up.
The most important part is what the handheld ones are used through the procedure so the doc can see and correct their action in the process and you don't even need to get up.
Pain management is far superior today, thankfully.
Might be referring to the notion that nowadays dentists are more generous with anesthesia. E.g. it used to be normal to pull out wisdom teeth without general anesthesia.
Also their diagnostic tools have gotten a lot better (recent x-rays are insanely detailed).
When I was in high school (late 90s) I remember getting cavities filled without any numbing at all. I just had to deal with it. Maybe it was a bad dentist, because I know that stuff existed then, but I wasn't assertive enough at that age to call out the dentist. These days they numb me up and I don't feel anything, but I still tense up a lot out of habit from when I was younger.
They also used to take impressions at the dentist where they'd fill your mouth with some kind of goop in trays. Now they have cameras they can just move around your mouth and it stitches a model together.
They also used to take impressions at the dentist where they'd fill your mouth with some kind of goop in trays. Now they have cameras they can just move around your mouth and it stitches a model together.
I had that done within the past 5 years. The dentist said the decay was very superficial and asked if I wanted the local anesthetic. I figured the mere fact that he was asking meant it was surely not necessary, so I said no. It was not painful.
Is it really normal to use general anesthesia for that somewhere? Sounds quite risky.
It's only normal in America, as is the tradition of being overmedicated for just about any minor discomfort.
I opted for my wisdom teeth to be taken out with local and don't regret it. The worst part is the recovery anyway, not the 20 minutes in the chair.
I opted for my wisdom teeth to be taken out with local and don't regret it. The worst part is the recovery anyway, not the 20 minutes in the chair.
Root Canal treatment has gotten objectively better. I have got about 10 of those over last 18 years. The first one was spread across three weeks, 6-7 sittings. Compare that to the latest one I had a few months ago. One week, three sittings. And significantly less painful.
You may be an outlier. nearly 20 years ago, my root canal was 2 sittings. In 2012, I had a mistranslation and the temporary work ended up lasting ten years. (I got it fixed up in 2022)
(I am guessing that if you have 10 root canals, you've gotten the short end of the stick genetically or through childhood.)
(I am guessing that if you have 10 root canals, you've gotten the short end of the stick genetically or through childhood.)
In addition to the things others have mentioned, the introduction of ultrasonic tools for cleaning teeth (probably alongside some of the other innovations) has dropped at least my average time for a regular cleaning from about 45 minutes to about 20.
My personal pet peeve: Budget phones have barely budged over the last seven years. Look at the Moto G series in comparison: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?&idPhone1=8103&idPhone... 8core arm big.little, 1080p IPS, 15MP front, GPS, LTE. Am I talking about 2016 or 2023?
All that's changed is that the screen glass has gotten worse.
Also, I checked a few months ago and as far as I can tell it isn't possible any longer to get a Thinkpad T series with a 4K monitor. edit: Though they seem to have fixed that at least.
All that's changed is that the screen glass has gotten worse.
Also, I checked a few months ago and as far as I can tell it isn't possible any longer to get a Thinkpad T series with a 4K monitor. edit: Though they seem to have fixed that at least.
At some point in the adoption curve (cars, computers, stereos, cameras all come to mind) that’s what happens in the budget range. Manufacturers use technological advances to reduce the cost rather than improve the product because customers who want to stay on the cutting edge migrate to the high-end. Think consumer digicams around 2005 or the 90s laptops I mentioned (or cheap 70s cars if you’re that old).
If the screen glass thing is really an issue, possibly look into one of the industrial type phones. Cannot recommend, because I do not own one, yet they at least look like they're meant to not break on worksites. https://www.catphones.com/en-us/cat-s62-pro-smartphone/ Plus, thermal camera.
Honestly, that's actually a bit of an issue somehow. I kind of want to recommend something I've seen and thought was cool, yet the ad spam has gotten so bad lately everywhere, it now reeks of recommend-a-bot's constantly. Which is at least vaguely in theme with the article.
Honestly, that's actually a bit of an issue somehow. I kind of want to recommend something I've seen and thought was cool, yet the ad spam has gotten so bad lately everywhere, it now reeks of recommend-a-bot's constantly. Which is at least vaguely in theme with the article.
A few counterpoints:
* If going by the article, price has decreased from €130 to €95, a significant reduction even if not accounting for inflation.
* RAM has doubled from 2GB to 4GB.
* Per-core CPU performance has presumably increased considerably.
* If going by the article, price has decreased from €130 to €95, a significant reduction even if not accounting for inflation.
* RAM has doubled from 2GB to 4GB.
* Per-core CPU performance has presumably increased considerably.
Counter-counters:
- GSM price check is extremely random and can basically be ignored. Afaict, the price is stable with inflation.
- Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore.
- Checking on cpubenchmark.com, A53 vs A55 is like a 20% increase. The A75 is admittedly a nice step up.
- GSM price check is extremely random and can basically be ignored. Afaict, the price is stable with inflation.
- Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore.
- Checking on cpubenchmark.com, A53 vs A55 is like a 20% increase. The A75 is admittedly a nice step up.
> - Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore.
RAM has been slowing down a lot in the last ~10 years.
I had 16GB ram in my ThinkPad X220 ten years ago and the W520 could already get 32GB ram. Laptops with 128GB ram have been around for at least five years (workstation-class laptop).
Why are computers still being shipped with 8GB ram (or less)?
Why is 32GB a premium and not the bare minimum? A whole class of performance issues could be entirely avoided just by having enough ram.
RAM has been slowing down a lot in the last ~10 years.
I had 16GB ram in my ThinkPad X220 ten years ago and the W520 could already get 32GB ram. Laptops with 128GB ram have been around for at least five years (workstation-class laptop).
Why are computers still being shipped with 8GB ram (or less)?
Why is 32GB a premium and not the bare minimum? A whole class of performance issues could be entirely avoided just by having enough ram.
I agree that 8 GB of RAM seems weird these days. However, I bought an MB Air in 2022 with only 8 GB, and I can shed some light. My thought process was that I'm going to use this machine for just a very limited number of things and this would not become my daily driver. Therefore, I saw myself as buying merely a "smartphone with a larger screen," which is a category where I typically just buy the least expensive and lightest weight choice. The 8 GB has proven to be entirely adequate for my use case.
> Why is 32GB a premium and not the bare minimum? A whole class of performance issues could be entirely avoided just by having enough ram
Yeah, throw more hardware at it!
Yeah, throw more hardware at it!
I get your point and you’re largely right.
But some software is largely unfixable (I’m thinking of mainstream software like windows and software commonly used) and more hardware is one of the least executed solutions actually
But some software is largely unfixable (I’m thinking of mainstream software like windows and software commonly used) and more hardware is one of the least executed solutions actually
It’s a bit slower to upgrade so there isn’t as much delight to counter the negative. In the 90s you had to constantly upgrade. A 1995 computer wasn’t going to work in 2004s environment. But a 2015 computer still is largely functional now. No machine learning or fancy games, but it can still surf the web.
This is because CPU’s haven’t gotten any faster in almost 20 years because of the problem of heat dissipation, so all that can be done to make computers feel more powerful is to get better at writing parallelizable software… which is just a very hard problem for humans to tackle. Also, the latency to/from main memory is the main bottleneck now for all jobs whether or not they are parallelizable. And it is very hard to get insight into how you can organize things at a high level to optimize for low-level memory usage… humans aren’t good at that either. The problem is that now gains in the experience of using computers have to come from humans getting better at writing software in light of hardware constraints. You can’t get a whole lot these days from throwing new hardware at the problem.
I don't get how you claim CPUs are the same as 20 years ago? Maybe the clock speed is the same, but they are demonstrably denser. Lithography continues to improve as extreme costs, so wins are eaked out. The numbers don't seem to change much, but that is because we are approaching a limit of what a transistor can do with current approaches, and alternative approaches are literally millennia of engineering hours behind. Intel and x86(_64) has had a hold for two decades, but GPUs and AArch64 are making inroads addressing memory bandwidth issues.
I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware). A top-of-the-line processor today is maybe 3x more capable than one from a decade ago. And that doesn’t help with the real bottleneck of accessing memory, especially main memory, which is bound by the laws of physics. The CPU can’t do anything until it has the data, no matter how fast it is.
Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware.
Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant…
My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.
Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware.
Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant…
My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.
CPU performance isn't making 2x leaps as quickly as it did in the 80s and 90s, but you're vastly understating the performance and power efficiency improvements that have been made over the last decade.
This is only partly true. Yes, we hit the heat wall, and what you say was true for a few years, but there have been a lot of other efficiency improvements. A single core of 3-3.5 GHz M chip is vastly faster than a 4GHz Pentium 4, even not accounting for bandwidth (which is also vastly faster).
In general as people get older they become able to see things that are getting worse, since they have a wider frame of reference, and have a hard time seeing things that are getting better, because they imagine the past was better than it was. The result, in many cases, is an articulation of a very nuanced explanation for why the present sucks, but often to me I read it as just a self-rationalization. The truth is, a lot of stuff is amazing now that was far worse in the past.
A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past.
I generally see tech as a large ecosystem which is in fact progressively improving, with minor setbacks that often do echo the same setbacks in the past. The error is to pattern match too strongly on these setback patterns as though they contain some kind of timeless wisdom. If there's any industry where past performance isn't indicative of future results, it's technology. (Which is and of itself, is a process of knowledge discovery at its core.) My general approach to thinking about this is I grow older is to guard against the kind of cynicism I see in so many of my peers. Yes, it means I will be wrong on things where the cynic turns out to be right. But given the pull of cynicism, I suspect more likely I will remain cynical in many places I shouldn't be anyway, so I'd rather focus on being right in the places where the cynic is wrong by forcing myself to remain optimistic and give the young the benefit of the doubt.
This also has the added benefit of making the process of working on things more fun in general - not just because it leads to actually making stuff (cynicism demotivates this) and it also leads to being surrounded by peers who are optimistic and interested in continuing to make stuff (being surrounded by cynics is generally miserable, and breeds cynicism.) A few years ago, I found myself in a broad peer group of technologists who were deep into the abyss of cynicism, and made a conscious decision to just sever myself from these networks because this kind of negativity was becoming my dominant mode of thinking about technology. I've done some of my best work since then and much of it has probably come about due to the fact that I dove into it due to the counterfactual level of optimism I had due to this one decision.
A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past.
I generally see tech as a large ecosystem which is in fact progressively improving, with minor setbacks that often do echo the same setbacks in the past. The error is to pattern match too strongly on these setback patterns as though they contain some kind of timeless wisdom. If there's any industry where past performance isn't indicative of future results, it's technology. (Which is and of itself, is a process of knowledge discovery at its core.) My general approach to thinking about this is I grow older is to guard against the kind of cynicism I see in so many of my peers. Yes, it means I will be wrong on things where the cynic turns out to be right. But given the pull of cynicism, I suspect more likely I will remain cynical in many places I shouldn't be anyway, so I'd rather focus on being right in the places where the cynic is wrong by forcing myself to remain optimistic and give the young the benefit of the doubt.
This also has the added benefit of making the process of working on things more fun in general - not just because it leads to actually making stuff (cynicism demotivates this) and it also leads to being surrounded by peers who are optimistic and interested in continuing to make stuff (being surrounded by cynics is generally miserable, and breeds cynicism.) A few years ago, I found myself in a broad peer group of technologists who were deep into the abyss of cynicism, and made a conscious decision to just sever myself from these networks because this kind of negativity was becoming my dominant mode of thinking about technology. I've done some of my best work since then and much of it has probably come about due to the fact that I dove into it due to the counterfactual level of optimism I had due to this one decision.
> A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past.
Indeed, much of the progress in technology today is coming from revisiting stuff that didn't work out in the past but has since become viable (much of modern ML, for example).
Conversely, it seems like the actually novel stuff coming out today "doesn't work" out-of-the-box at a much higher rate than when new stuff was introduced in past decades. I'm seeing pervasive problems with new technology for use cases that "just worked" consistently with the incumbent tech right from the outset in the '90s or earlier.
There has been some progress in consumerizing interfaces, but this has been accompanied by drastic regression in functional consistency and long-term reliability under the hood. And while UIs that only expose designers' preconceived use cases might be a bit more straightforward for end-users, accessibility to the underlying functionality of technology as technology has vastly regressed.
It feels like Sturgeon's law has gone from 90% to 99% over the past 10-15 years or so.
Indeed, much of the progress in technology today is coming from revisiting stuff that didn't work out in the past but has since become viable (much of modern ML, for example).
Conversely, it seems like the actually novel stuff coming out today "doesn't work" out-of-the-box at a much higher rate than when new stuff was introduced in past decades. I'm seeing pervasive problems with new technology for use cases that "just worked" consistently with the incumbent tech right from the outset in the '90s or earlier.
There has been some progress in consumerizing interfaces, but this has been accompanied by drastic regression in functional consistency and long-term reliability under the hood. And while UIs that only expose designers' preconceived use cases might be a bit more straightforward for end-users, accessibility to the underlying functionality of technology as technology has vastly regressed.
It feels like Sturgeon's law has gone from 90% to 99% over the past 10-15 years or so.
I was thinking about this the other day, from the frame of reference of a middle-upper class person 30-40 years ago. At their time, tech was at its peak. Life was the greatest it could possibly be! And yet with so many problems, conflicts, economic difficulties, and ordinary life stressors.
We feel the same today as they felt then. We just have better toys and different problems. Some problems might be more existential (e.g. climate change), but day-to-day is it so different? In material terms yes, in personal terms not so much.
The human condition is far slower to change than the world it inhabits.
We feel the same today as they felt then. We just have better toys and different problems. Some problems might be more existential (e.g. climate change), but day-to-day is it so different? In material terms yes, in personal terms not so much.
The human condition is far slower to change than the world it inhabits.
I think we spend a lot more time now, on average, struggling through higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy. I think this will accelerate: much of the struggles of my children will be primarily about self-actualization and finding meaning in life. Parents today are worrying abou 'the last war' in many ways, like how are they going to afford college or pay the mortgage, when the real challenge for children in a world of AGI will be purpose and meaning - something parents have largely not had to think too hard about comparatively, since much meaning in life can come from the succeeding over the struggle to simply get by.
> Some problems might be more existential (e.g. climate change)
30-40 years ago it was worse given the real possibility of nuclear war.
30-40 years ago it was worse given the real possibility of nuclear war.
because they imagine the past was better than it was
Old people romanticize the past.
Young people romanticize the future.
Old people romanticize the past.
Young people romanticize the future.
> Young people romanticize the future.
I have the impression that young people currently are much more pessimistic about the future than the 'old-fart-me' ever was (except for that time in the 80's when an all out nuclear war just seemed right around the corner for a while).
I have the impression that young people currently are much more pessimistic about the future than the 'old-fart-me' ever was (except for that time in the 80's when an all out nuclear war just seemed right around the corner for a while).
> Young people romanticize the future.
Does not seem to be the zeitgeist of online discourse (presumably, in places that a sufficiently representative portion of young people express thoughts).
Does not seem to be the zeitgeist of online discourse (presumably, in places that a sufficiently representative portion of young people express thoughts).
Yes, with the caveats that young people also romanticize the past, and old people also romanticize the future.
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A lot of it is what you pay attention to. It's easy to get pinned to trends that looked optimistic when you were young. Those trends may falter and fail, but they're blades of grass in a field.
An excellent summary/distillation of all that's wrong with tech today.
The post is chock full of good supporting arguments of the decline — loaded with links to other posts that reinforce the same notion.
I sometimes wonder if I'm just getting old, perhaps becoming a Luddite, and I just am unable to get it. But then a post like this comes along and reaffirms what I already knew.
If it "rings true" for you it's because we're feeling it.
The post is chock full of good supporting arguments of the decline — loaded with links to other posts that reinforce the same notion.
I sometimes wonder if I'm just getting old, perhaps becoming a Luddite, and I just am unable to get it. But then a post like this comes along and reaffirms what I already knew.
If it "rings true" for you it's because we're feeling it.
I agree, great article.
Its not that you're a luddite - its simply that the internet went from an exuberant, wild representation of reality, to a constrained, extractive. corporate 'shop front'. All facilitated by government, which likes the data corporations provide it. And on luddites, apparently they liked tech (as do I) if it were to help them but objected to knowledge extraction and exploitative labour policies that became known the industrial revolution. There are distinct similarities to AI.
I'm sure we'll keep using the internet, but its gone from a place where real value can be found, to some corporate crap. Its equivalent to me, to walking through (pre-Amazon) busy shopping centers as a youth - something you have to do rather than because of the joy you will find there. Its a simulation of the human experience.
And this is fine. IMO the real deal has always been one's own lived experience. This is where the value is. The question has always been how to maximise that, even if we were distracted and entertained for a while.
Its not that you're a luddite - its simply that the internet went from an exuberant, wild representation of reality, to a constrained, extractive. corporate 'shop front'. All facilitated by government, which likes the data corporations provide it. And on luddites, apparently they liked tech (as do I) if it were to help them but objected to knowledge extraction and exploitative labour policies that became known the industrial revolution. There are distinct similarities to AI.
I'm sure we'll keep using the internet, but its gone from a place where real value can be found, to some corporate crap. Its equivalent to me, to walking through (pre-Amazon) busy shopping centers as a youth - something you have to do rather than because of the joy you will find there. Its a simulation of the human experience.
And this is fine. IMO the real deal has always been one's own lived experience. This is where the value is. The question has always been how to maximise that, even if we were distracted and entertained for a while.
Good point. And to that point, the shittier the internet becomes, the more it pushes me away.
The throughline of the blog seems to be that the public at large have uncovered that tech (the industry) isn't about tech (the cool stuff we build) anymore, it's just a vehicle for marketers.
I suppose there's a cynical question to follow up: was tech ever about tech? If so, when/how did that change? If not, how did the public get fooled for so long?
I suppose there's a cynical question to follow up: was tech ever about tech? If so, when/how did that change? If not, how did the public get fooled for so long?
As people age, they experience the difference between:
- the future-that-is, and
- the future-that-could-have-been, or the future they imagined based on their collective experience as a younger person.
Computers completely shifted the potential of the future past the realm of imagination. I was born in the late 80s, and watched the trajectory of technology with anticipation. My father, a programmer, was heavily into technology - and he could not imagine what I imagined. He couldn't imagine basic things in the 90s, like widely available terabyte hard drives in the future, or what they would be used for. I knew they were coming, because quality video files were just too large. When PDAs came out, I patiently waited years for a version with mobile internet (smartphones). These are the things I thought were "obvious" progressions, and they happened.
But I also imagined that technology would work as a system. It doesn't. Everything is fractured and isolated.
- the future-that-is, and
- the future-that-could-have-been, or the future they imagined based on their collective experience as a younger person.
Computers completely shifted the potential of the future past the realm of imagination. I was born in the late 80s, and watched the trajectory of technology with anticipation. My father, a programmer, was heavily into technology - and he could not imagine what I imagined. He couldn't imagine basic things in the 90s, like widely available terabyte hard drives in the future, or what they would be used for. I knew they were coming, because quality video files were just too large. When PDAs came out, I patiently waited years for a version with mobile internet (smartphones). These are the things I thought were "obvious" progressions, and they happened.
But I also imagined that technology would work as a system. It doesn't. Everything is fractured and isolated.
Company cultures can get worse over time. Why couldn't that happen globally?
In the past there was always a larger, younger generation coming up that would have enough people to make things better even if locally things got worse.
But that's not true anymore. We're already seeing this in places, such as the loss in expertise in certain areas such as nuclear powerplant design, diminished ability to cost-effectively build public works projects, the looming problem of skills shortage for all of these "near-shored" industries, and the inability to keep up with housing demand because there simply aren't enough people in the construction industry.
I didn't agree with some of the examples in the article, but I do think it's true that the declining population that's coming will lead to a lot of orphaned infrastructure and lost know-how.
In the past there was always a larger, younger generation coming up that would have enough people to make things better even if locally things got worse.
But that's not true anymore. We're already seeing this in places, such as the loss in expertise in certain areas such as nuclear powerplant design, diminished ability to cost-effectively build public works projects, the looming problem of skills shortage for all of these "near-shored" industries, and the inability to keep up with housing demand because there simply aren't enough people in the construction industry.
I didn't agree with some of the examples in the article, but I do think it's true that the declining population that's coming will lead to a lot of orphaned infrastructure and lost know-how.
The population decline is not dramatic enough for that.
The population decline is massive in many regions and also compounded by decades of the trend. You also have to account for that the decline in young people is larger than the total population decline, since old people live longer.
So if in the past a normal year would have a 20% population increase from births and 15% decline from deaths, totalling a 5% increase, today you'll maybe have a 10% increase from births and 10% decline from deaths, which looks like a standstill, but is actually a -50% decline.
So if in the past a normal year would have a 20% population increase from births and 15% decline from deaths, totalling a 5% increase, today you'll maybe have a 10% increase from births and 10% decline from deaths, which looks like a standstill, but is actually a -50% decline.
We also got a lot better at other things in the same timeframe. There's now a much larger volume of software that, on average, work better, which wouldn't have been possible with the number of software folks back in the day. Yes I know, Javascript frameworks, bloat, etc. In general my computers are much more reliable than before.
We've invented entire tech-based industries while old ones are fading away. It's not clear that it's actually a decline, especially since the economy has shown steady exponential growth over the past couple of centuries.
We've invented entire tech-based industries while old ones are fading away. It's not clear that it's actually a decline, especially since the economy has shown steady exponential growth over the past couple of centuries.
> I recently bought an expensive new computer. And after a few weeks, I went back to my old computer—it ran better than the new model.
I'm curious what the specs of the old and new desktop computer were, and how many years old the old one was.
I upgraded my desktop PC after 5 years, from a decent Core i7 CPU of back then to a Zen 4 based CPU now, and it's 3x faster for single threaded things (if I measure walltime of things like javascript minification), and has 2x more cores/threads on top of that.
Maybe they mean the OS feels slower or something instead? Or made a very uninformed buying decision.
I'm curious what the specs of the old and new desktop computer were, and how many years old the old one was.
I upgraded my desktop PC after 5 years, from a decent Core i7 CPU of back then to a Zen 4 based CPU now, and it's 3x faster for single threaded things (if I measure walltime of things like javascript minification), and has 2x more cores/threads on top of that.
Maybe they mean the OS feels slower or something instead? Or made a very uninformed buying decision.
The internet existed in material form before the internet. All the early internet did was make physical locations available non-physically, at first.
Once the connection was made (networked) all else unfolded because of now (digital space). What replaced much of the 'connected world' before the internet remained - telephones, newspapers, photography, wires, etc. The advantage over all else wasn't just connectivity; it was a reduction in the time allotted in transmitting that information.
From there we realized that we created access to the non-material world whilst remaining firmly planted in reality - transferring much of that material connection into digital connection.
What followed isn't fundamentally abstract at all - 1975-1985, '85-'95, '95-'03, '03-'09, '09-'17 and our current period, are all iterations of the same technology being recreated in faster, larger, more accessible ways.
However, we humans haven't changed. We haven't evolved in the same time line that technology has. Not that we could or should, but rather we're evolving at a much slower rate that we push technology and in my humble opinion exacerbates the rigid dualities of life changing technologies.
We must embrace new ideology in our philosophic approach to technology if we intend to mature new technologies as part of our own evolution.
That is, if we truly care about how technology like the internet can and has changed human life.
Once the connection was made (networked) all else unfolded because of now (digital space). What replaced much of the 'connected world' before the internet remained - telephones, newspapers, photography, wires, etc. The advantage over all else wasn't just connectivity; it was a reduction in the time allotted in transmitting that information.
From there we realized that we created access to the non-material world whilst remaining firmly planted in reality - transferring much of that material connection into digital connection.
What followed isn't fundamentally abstract at all - 1975-1985, '85-'95, '95-'03, '03-'09, '09-'17 and our current period, are all iterations of the same technology being recreated in faster, larger, more accessible ways.
However, we humans haven't changed. We haven't evolved in the same time line that technology has. Not that we could or should, but rather we're evolving at a much slower rate that we push technology and in my humble opinion exacerbates the rigid dualities of life changing technologies.
We must embrace new ideology in our philosophic approach to technology if we intend to mature new technologies as part of our own evolution.
That is, if we truly care about how technology like the internet can and has changed human life.
I remember back in the late 1990s, I heard a lot of people pining for the earlier days before the "eternal September" when the Internet wasn't full of clueless people ruining everything for everyone else and turning the Internet into a place of low quality.
It's hard for me to take grumbles like this seriously when I've heard the same thing so many times before. Back in the "good old days", there were plenty of loud people complaining how bad it was compared to times before.
I personally think that although it is a lot more commercialized, the Internet is way better now.
It's hard for me to take grumbles like this seriously when I've heard the same thing so many times before. Back in the "good old days", there were plenty of loud people complaining how bad it was compared to times before.
I personally think that although it is a lot more commercialized, the Internet is way better now.
This is a bad take. The author takes a tiny sliver of tech which is internet and within that picks cutting edge products (except for Google) and rants.
They should talk to more people outside of their bubble, especially in developing countries. Just about everything around tech has improved incomparably over last 15 or so years.
Take health care for example. Cataract surgery is literally a 15 minute out orient procedure thanks to terrific laser surgery. Who would have imagined that something as complex as that could be achieved in our lifetime? I picked just one example, I’m sure there are many many more.
They should talk to more people outside of their bubble, especially in developing countries. Just about everything around tech has improved incomparably over last 15 or so years.
Take health care for example. Cataract surgery is literally a 15 minute out orient procedure thanks to terrific laser surgery. Who would have imagined that something as complex as that could be achieved in our lifetime? I picked just one example, I’m sure there are many many more.
It mixes good criticism with nostalgia to a past that never was.
Don't idolize past successful business people... they are the same in every generation.
Don't confuse good communities that you may or may not have been part of in the past with the technologies they used. You can find awesome people in a facebook group or a discord channel today, and you most definitely could have found nice or awful people in a builtin board way back when.
If something is shit don't use it. If apple or google are shit don't use them. Google killed Yahoo because it became shit, the next search engine will kill google because it became shit and so on.
Don't idolize past successful business people... they are the same in every generation.
Don't confuse good communities that you may or may not have been part of in the past with the technologies they used. You can find awesome people in a facebook group or a discord channel today, and you most definitely could have found nice or awful people in a builtin board way back when.
If something is shit don't use it. If apple or google are shit don't use them. Google killed Yahoo because it became shit, the next search engine will kill google because it became shit and so on.
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It's refreshing to see a story like this make it to the top page on hackernews
I don't think counting "let me google that for you" as a point to ease of use of the internet is legit.
I always saw it manifest as another version of RTFM. Meaning stop being lazy/do your own work.
I always saw it manifest as another version of RTFM. Meaning stop being lazy/do your own work.
It was both. Yes it was "stop being a lazy slob" but also carried with it the connotation of "we literally have a tool that will let you learn about literally anything you want to know by typing your exact question into the freaking box". In fact I said those words many times.
It's no longer true - we don't have that tool. We have the ghost of that tool overrun by advertisers and other scumbags, which rarely answers the question correctly, and almost never at a depth beyond what can be surmised merely by observing enough to ask the question.
It's no longer true - we don't have that tool. We have the ghost of that tool overrun by advertisers and other scumbags, which rarely answers the question correctly, and almost never at a depth beyond what can be surmised merely by observing enough to ask the question.
> It's no longer true - we don't have that tool. We have the ghost of that tool overrun by advertisers and other scumbags, which rarely answers the question correctly, and almost never at a depth beyond what can be surmised merely by observing enough to ask the question.
And also offers an interesting parallel to RTFM: when was the last time you got a decent manual with a product?
And also offers an interesting parallel to RTFM: when was the last time you got a decent manual with a product?
The mistake this article makes is it doesn't consider things outside of their perspective.
Before i go into more detail many of the things they think have degraded and gotten worse i never even touched, facebook, twitter, crypto currencies to me they weren't good ideas that degraded. They were defective, degenerate yet mostly inevitable ideas doomed to excite and provide glimpses of amazing utility but will overall degrade and manipulate society as a whole. They didnt get worse they just became fully utilized.
but when talking about what i consider legit products: 1. The difference may make something improved to one person but worse for someone else - i find most times the older os's faster with windows and android. part of that reason is the include graphical transitions and animations when doing things. turning them off makes them feel fast like the older versions. there are more features, hardware support, ect one person may dislike not need those new features or animations but most do like them 2. Adapting to changing circumstances - When google started out no body knew or maybe even had a strong reason to manipulate google results. Google itself might be significantly better but the internet and people using it has changed its not the Tech that degraded its the people using and manipulating it creating new challenges that were never faced before. 3. In the past it may have worked better for you but now it is more sustainable/better for everyone - in a extreme example during the dot com boom i could make money ($20-$30) just by having a ad bar at the bottom of my screen for a few hours a day(even when i wasnt on it). But the only way it worked was because a bunch of idiot investors were loosing a ton of money. Has advertising got worse? to me sure but in reality they just went to a reasonable business model as much as i would prefer to get paid good money for having ad's on my screen.
All that being said are there companies who make tech worse just for greed and profit absolutely, but its not a black and white situation and there is a lot more factors than people usually realize.
one of my "it got worse" but not really experiences is with phones when phones were analog for my normal use case of making local phone calls when there were just land lines calls, were always clear no latency issues and extremely rarely had issues. now with digital and voip there can be delay's and choppiness and audio cutting in and out and really low quality audio and i sometimes complain about how it used to just work. but really i can now call anywhere in the world for free, have cheap and easy to setup phones with amazing features not depend on one phone company and can easily switch between. so ya in the most common calling situation its worse but overall its so so much better.
but when talking about what i consider legit products: 1. The difference may make something improved to one person but worse for someone else - i find most times the older os's faster with windows and android. part of that reason is the include graphical transitions and animations when doing things. turning them off makes them feel fast like the older versions. there are more features, hardware support, ect one person may dislike not need those new features or animations but most do like them 2. Adapting to changing circumstances - When google started out no body knew or maybe even had a strong reason to manipulate google results. Google itself might be significantly better but the internet and people using it has changed its not the Tech that degraded its the people using and manipulating it creating new challenges that were never faced before. 3. In the past it may have worked better for you but now it is more sustainable/better for everyone - in a extreme example during the dot com boom i could make money ($20-$30) just by having a ad bar at the bottom of my screen for a few hours a day(even when i wasnt on it). But the only way it worked was because a bunch of idiot investors were loosing a ton of money. Has advertising got worse? to me sure but in reality they just went to a reasonable business model as much as i would prefer to get paid good money for having ad's on my screen.
All that being said are there companies who make tech worse just for greed and profit absolutely, but its not a black and white situation and there is a lot more factors than people usually realize.
one of my "it got worse" but not really experiences is with phones when phones were analog for my normal use case of making local phone calls when there were just land lines calls, were always clear no latency issues and extremely rarely had issues. now with digital and voip there can be delay's and choppiness and audio cutting in and out and really low quality audio and i sometimes complain about how it used to just work. but really i can now call anywhere in the world for free, have cheap and easy to setup phones with amazing features not depend on one phone company and can easily switch between. so ya in the most common calling situation its worse but overall its so so much better.
Can I provide another viewpoint here? I have a mobile handset and yeah, it’s pretty cool because I can use it anywhere, even though the durability and the speed and the reliability and the price are all questionable.
What’s on my desk at work? A polycom integrated with zoom. It’s absolutely awful. It lags. The quality is terrible. The interface is bad. Why isn’t there a landline in my desk at work? Well, because the technology improved.
What’s on my desk at work? A polycom integrated with zoom. It’s absolutely awful. It lags. The quality is terrible. The interface is bad. Why isn’t there a landline in my desk at work? Well, because the technology improved.
ugh ya i hate that. and to me the worst part is maybe there is someone who would put up with that so they dont need a computer for zoom, but no where on the spec sheet or description of the product is there a way to know how responsive it is or how good the interface is. Sometimes by the time there is enough reviews to know what its like before you buy they have the next version and supposedly its faster but you dont know until its too late.
Have to disagree. Tech is not getting worse, period.
>"It’s been a minute since we’ve seen anything new from tech that has truly improved most people’s existence."
That's not much to do with the tech getting worse and everything to do with how the tech is being applied.
Search sucks! Why? The focus is on profit. Someone connected a thermometer and found that the users are basically stupid, so why bother anything that requires effort.
Amazon bad, bad, bad. But nothing to do with bad tech, it's all in how it's being applied.
Yes, he does make the same point, even to profit being the driver. But the overriding message here is tech is shit, and that's not so. People are.
>"It’s been a minute since we’ve seen anything new from tech that has truly improved most people’s existence."
That's not much to do with the tech getting worse and everything to do with how the tech is being applied.
Search sucks! Why? The focus is on profit. Someone connected a thermometer and found that the users are basically stupid, so why bother anything that requires effort.
Amazon bad, bad, bad. But nothing to do with bad tech, it's all in how it's being applied.
Yes, he does make the same point, even to profit being the driver. But the overriding message here is tech is shit, and that's not so. People are.
Looks like a 1995 time magazine article. Author is the meta.
Another take on enshitification.
Like the idea of 'useful' tools for 'useless' people.
It is little bit more nuanced than just greed is making things crappy.
Like the idea of 'useful' tools for 'useless' people.
It is little bit more nuanced than just greed is making things crappy.
The real problem is users just aren't optimistic enough to swallow these dogshit downgrades with enthusiasm. /s
Edit: Very good article, though. There are some core assumptions that are part of the belief system of many people (especially technology enthusiasts and software engineers) that need a serious rethink, because they're just not true (or more insidiously, just not true anymore).
Edit: Very good article, though. There are some core assumptions that are part of the belief system of many people (especially technology enthusiasts and software engineers) that need a serious rethink, because they're just not true (or more insidiously, just not true anymore).
Then you just consider those to be a bad investment and finish it.
Everyone out of the economy yesterday please
I am tired of people that complain and don't offer a way concrete forward.
This is why the free software movement failed and why the fediverse will obviously fail.
This is why the free software movement failed and why the fediverse will obviously fail.
> This is why the free software movement failed
Did it though? I see people caring more and more about privacy, and eventually it might even be mainstream. Big tech is becoming so awful that even casual users are noticing and asking questions, and we now have laws to give users freedom and protection.
Give it time, electricity was still scarce once. You wouldn't say it failed back then.
Everything I use is free software. It didn't fail, it delivers exactly what was promised.
Did it though? I see people caring more and more about privacy, and eventually it might even be mainstream. Big tech is becoming so awful that even casual users are noticing and asking questions, and we now have laws to give users freedom and protection.
Give it time, electricity was still scarce once. You wouldn't say it failed back then.
Everything I use is free software. It didn't fail, it delivers exactly what was promised.
For more context on what I mean please see this recent comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094074
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094074
How do you figure that the free software movement failed? I definitely see a loss of interest these days, but the accomplishments of the last 30 years are enormous.
I am referring to "Stallman Compliant" software/hardware.
Almost no one besides a small group of fanatics. Used free software.
Why isn't there a smartphone that Richard Stallman can use?
The reason is because no one built such a phone. People where instead complaining about it.
But no one actually thought of a real solution. Besides the fanatical "throw away your phone" that is very impractical for most people today.
Almost no one besides a small group of fanatics. Used free software.
Why isn't there a smartphone that Richard Stallman can use?
The reason is because no one built such a phone. People where instead complaining about it.
But no one actually thought of a real solution. Besides the fanatical "throw away your phone" that is very impractical for most people today.
Stallman complained about surveillance by mobile phone. No phone that is actually usable as a phone (i.e. connects to the phone network) can be surveillance-free.
The SIM card that requires remote downloadable and executable code to run on the phone is a non-removable surveillance risk of any mobile phone. If you separate the phone part form the tablet part, then the phone will need 2 CPUs with 2 OSs and double the power use, double the battery, almost double the size.
Then, there is automated surveillance from the cell towers and data nodes (MITM, listening, speech recognition, auto-transcription, keyword analysis, etc.).
The SIM card that requires remote downloadable and executable code to run on the phone is a non-removable surveillance risk of any mobile phone. If you separate the phone part form the tablet part, then the phone will need 2 CPUs with 2 OSs and double the power use, double the battery, almost double the size.
Then, there is automated surveillance from the cell towers and data nodes (MITM, listening, speech recognition, auto-transcription, keyword analysis, etc.).
My point is that this entire stack of telecommunications needs to be rebuilt.
Not just phones.
It's very doable. It's just that no one is interested.
Not just phones.
It's very doable. It's just that no one is interested.
> Why isn't there a smartphone that Richard Stallman can use?
> The reason is because no one built such a phone. People where instead complaining about it.
Librem and PinePhone exist as Linux phones, then there is GrapheneOS if you want to stay with Android. You can install spyware on it yes, but you don't have to. These are not things you just create over a weekend so there are rough edges yes, but they exist.
The problem you're describing is more about demand. Since it is niche corporations are still stuck in the old ways. For example I can't ID myself online without Google Play Services and it disgusts me, government institutions need to get better at supporting a bigger eco-system.
People don't care enough to jump through hoops, but that doesn't mean that the solutions don't exist or aren't being worked on.
> The reason is because no one built such a phone. People where instead complaining about it.
Librem and PinePhone exist as Linux phones, then there is GrapheneOS if you want to stay with Android. You can install spyware on it yes, but you don't have to. These are not things you just create over a weekend so there are rough edges yes, but they exist.
The problem you're describing is more about demand. Since it is niche corporations are still stuck in the old ways. For example I can't ID myself online without Google Play Services and it disgusts me, government institutions need to get better at supporting a bigger eco-system.
People don't care enough to jump through hoops, but that doesn't mean that the solutions don't exist or aren't being worked on.
>Librem and PinePhone exist as Linux phones, then there is GrapheneOS if you want to stay with Android
These are very lazy solutions to the problems technology has today. We need a complete overhaul. Rewrite Operating Systems that satisfy these agendas.
There are very many people that care. They just don't have good solutions yet.
These are very lazy solutions to the problems technology has today. We need a complete overhaul. Rewrite Operating Systems that satisfy these agendas.
There are very many people that care. They just don't have good solutions yet.
> These are very lazy solutions to the problems technology has today. We need a complete overhaul. Rewrite Operating Systems that satisfy these agendas.
Elaborate please, you can install any distribution you want on the Linux solutions. Have you used one? What are your gripes exactly? Would Stallman (your example) have the same?
They are completely fine for my use except banking/identifying myself online. I can use web for banks but not for the 2FA solutions banks in my country use. Graphene however can if I turn on a Google profile. It's not perfect but it works.
Elaborate please, you can install any distribution you want on the Linux solutions. Have you used one? What are your gripes exactly? Would Stallman (your example) have the same?
They are completely fine for my use except banking/identifying myself online. I can use web for banks but not for the 2FA solutions banks in my country use. Graphene however can if I turn on a Google profile. It's not perfect but it works.
Unfortunately I don't have enough time to fully list all the problems we have with modern computer/smartphone technology, But they are just too many.
It's not just the about having Linux.
There are all kinds of problems around. But here are my main concerns.
- The lack of an easy way to know what all programs on your phone are exactly doing;
- Sensible application permissions. (I just want to share 1 photo but somehow the application has access to my entire disk/folder?)
Projects like Grapheme seem to just lock down the software completely and make it unusable for all kinds of use cases
It's not just the about having Linux.
There are all kinds of problems around. But here are my main concerns.
- The lack of an easy way to know what all programs on your phone are exactly doing;
- Sensible application permissions. (I just want to share 1 photo but somehow the application has access to my entire disk/folder?)
Projects like Grapheme seem to just lock down the software completely and make it unusable for all kinds of use cases
You claim that you want solutions for:
> - The lack of an easy way to know what all programs on your phone are exactly doing;
> - Sensible application permissions. (I just want to share 1 photo but somehow the application has access to my entire disk/folder?)
Yet when Graphene (and Flatpak etc) locks everything down and makes dangerous permissions opt-in it's also a problem:
> Projects like Grapheme seem to just lock down the software completely and make it unusable for all kinds of use cases
If you want per file permissions that can also be implemented with tools that exist today. For the photo example I usually just copy the image rather than uploading from disk, clipboard access however is another security issue.
What would a solution you can accept look like? I agree a fresh OS would be nice but there are solutions to every problem you mention. Even old hardware without binaries are possible for the truly paranoid. It's not perfect but you have to be pragmatic.
I think I've made my point that free software didn't really fail. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but neither was electricity in the 1800s or even today. Did electricity fail?
> - The lack of an easy way to know what all programs on your phone are exactly doing;
> - Sensible application permissions. (I just want to share 1 photo but somehow the application has access to my entire disk/folder?)
Yet when Graphene (and Flatpak etc) locks everything down and makes dangerous permissions opt-in it's also a problem:
> Projects like Grapheme seem to just lock down the software completely and make it unusable for all kinds of use cases
If you want per file permissions that can also be implemented with tools that exist today. For the photo example I usually just copy the image rather than uploading from disk, clipboard access however is another security issue.
What would a solution you can accept look like? I agree a fresh OS would be nice but there are solutions to every problem you mention. Even old hardware without binaries are possible for the truly paranoid. It's not perfect but you have to be pragmatic.
I think I've made my point that free software didn't really fail. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but neither was electricity in the 1800s or even today. Did electricity fail?
> I think I've made my point that free software didn't really fail
Yes it didn't fail completely. (It was exaggerating to some point)
The solutions do exist. But they are scattered & un-integrated into a well oiled out of the box solution that are accessible.
What I am just saying is that we need an intellectual cross breed between Steve Jobs & Stallman.
That will know how to marry the principles of free software with general consumer satisfaction (UX et al).
The free software movement does have some achievements.
I would however call it a success if it it was used by the majority as a default and not just a small group of fanatics.
Yes it didn't fail completely. (It was exaggerating to some point)
The solutions do exist. But they are scattered & un-integrated into a well oiled out of the box solution that are accessible.
What I am just saying is that we need an intellectual cross breed between Steve Jobs & Stallman.
That will know how to marry the principles of free software with general consumer satisfaction (UX et al).
The free software movement does have some achievements.
I would however call it a success if it it was used by the majority as a default and not just a small group of fanatics.
I think we're getting there. It took us centuries to get from the first car to a self-driving one. With RISC-V devices coming one after another combined with the minimal locked down immutable OS space I'm optimistic. A completely free and open source phone with off the shelf parts and a software stack you can compile yourself is around the corner.
Don't call us fanatics, we're the early adopters shaping the UX you're too busy complaining about to help improve. :)
Don't call us fanatics, we're the early adopters shaping the UX you're too busy complaining about to help improve. :)
Having known people who correspond with Stallman, he would likely reply to this comment with a rant about how you should call it "GNU/Linux" rather than just "Linux", then proceed to ignore the remainder of your points.
> then proceed to ignore the remainder of your points
As opposed to you, right? :)
As opposed to you, right? :)
Let me turn that around on you; so what is the way forward?
Minimize the use of digital technology in all its forms. Focus on meaningful, in-person relationships. Ignore the 24 hour news cycle and participate in local policy and governance. Buy less stuff, focus on developing the quality, effectiveness, and integration of the stuff you already have. Never, ever work to forward big companies’ goals of infiltrating society with their technology.
Build new
- Social networks
- Hardware
- Internet UI portals*
That are cannot be abused by corporations.
* The web is rotten to the core. No amount of regulation or activism can fix it at this point. We need something else.
- Social networks
- Hardware
- Internet UI portals*
That are cannot be abused by corporations.
* The web is rotten to the core. No amount of regulation or activism can fix it at this point. We need something else.
System change was mentioned at the end of the article. Moving past Capitalism will be the way forward.
That's an easy thing to say, but not useful as a way to move forward. What does that new system look like? How does the transition happen? If going with one of the traditional replacements for Capitalism based in some kind of Marxism, why should anyone believe it will work this time, when it has failed every other time? The typical, "we'll do it right this time," isn't going to cut it. Simply eliminating Capitalism doesn't put a society on the fast track to peace and prosperity, it simply changes how the few end up with power and control.
Until the author actually moves to a Communist country. It's safe to suggest that this "system change" is unrealistic.
Decades tend to smear forward a bit, I think. I wonder if people are remembering, like, 200X-201X internet when they think of the 90’s? Google was really good before SEO fully figured it out (or maybe somebody really good at SEO in 200X was actually probably clever enough that you wanted to go to their site anyway).