Comment by zkmon 6 months ago
Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
> To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.
The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."
Apps take 10 seconds to load? Which apps, on what system?
My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds.
This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think to, not because I have to. I run half a dozen browsers and hundreds of tabs and play YouTube while waiting for a remote machine to deploy to an immutable temp instance that gets destroyed after every test cycle.
I speak to my AIs and I can live and work anywhere on this planet that legally allows me.
There are problems in our world and on our machines and in our governments but apps don’t take 10 seconds to load.
Except ServiceNow. I’ll give you that one.
>To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped
Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.
I don’t know what period your referencing but software quality wasn’t exactly amazing back in the day. It did mandate a higher degree of validation before release due to the distribution nature (physical media as opposed to a download) but even then some remarkably dumb bugs made it out the door
Software quality has massively improved across every dimension. Memory constraints are basically non-existent for most people. Software is more reliable, discoverable and portable than at any time in history. The idea that reinstalling your OS is more common today than 30 years ago is just obviously not true. We are currently living through a golden age of software.
I had found often not only adding too much bloat and stuff but also often lacks stuff which is actually useful. (I wrote programs the way that I do, in order to try to avoid the problems; it is not perfect but in some ways it helps.)
> It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
Is it? I think there's a common tendency to "stop exploring" cultural artifacts very deeply as we age, but not everyone shares this trait. Some people continue to value novelty in those areas well into old age.
For my part, treasured artifacts of my youth don't impede my ability to appreciate new things. And indeed, I think many videogames I loved dearly have aged poorly.
I don't think nostalgia is the only factor here. If it were, then no young people would be interested in old computers, which I have found not to be the case.
I don't know. I'm glad I no longer have a tower which makes so much noise with its fads and that big ugly screens from my younger years. I far more prefer my current settings. Well, I didn't have so much noise with my very first computer, an Amstrad 6128, but I don't really miss "run paper" that much either.
And to me the best desktop experience in term of software has been gnome 3 after it had time to hone its jump forward from its previous major release. So, not the newest hot thing out there, but not my first crush.
Regarding forward, augmented reality on glasses seems to have great potentials, but I don't have much hope foe the default systems they will come with. A future where most people wear those stuff filled with signal tailored by the ad industry and whatever governments is just not letting much room escaping the obvious various dystopian scenarios.
And what if this isn't nostalgia, but rather a feeling in people that correlates with external pressure?
U.S. debt in the 1950s was well below $1T, in the 1990s it was something around $3T, now it's $36T.
I seriously doubt nostalgia for old computers correlates to perceptions of U.S. debt.
Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.
I'm not talking about old computers themselves, but rather something that's mistakenly taken as nostalgia.
Things in the 90s were more straightforward because supply chains and business processes were much shorter and less complex. What people interpret as nostalgia might actually reflect a recognition that systems/products genuinely were more efficient before they became increasingly layered with intermediaries and dependencies.
An illustration of these dependencies and layers is debt - the mounting complexity parallels the mounting debt levels.
In other words, I believe at some point there will be a social study explaining that what was mistakenly taken as nostalgia in previous generations is not the same feeling in post-90s generations, simply because the world started collapsing faster and some major economic indicators are objective proof of this - actual accelerating decline rather than just romanticizing the past.
The US debt is, for the most part, a symbol of how large our economy is instead of a representation of how deliriously in debt we are in.
It explicitly excludes the values of the assets that we hold in security of the debt, and is frequently trotted out to remind the little people how terribly large all of the problems in the world are and how hopeless it would be for any of us to try to solve them.
But!
No where in the world is the adage about, "If you owe the bank $100,000 you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $100,000,000 the bank has a problem" more evident than in the US National debt.
America could pay off this debt at any time, but doing so would cause our economy to massively deflate and cause a lot of harm and unhappiness for people all over the world, including Americans.
Not telling us these things gives America a way to inflict fear and control on its populace with no measurable downsides.
Games are now infinitely more complex -- I can run an improved version of Ultima VII (1992) on a device that fits in my pocket, while the original wouldn't have run on this (it required a 486 and even the latest possible Tandy systems maxed out at the 386), and that's not even getting into stuff like Factorio or Satisfactory.
That's my point -- the onward march of technology means that not only can I continue playing U7, the work of passionate fans has made it so that I can play an improved version (higher perceptual frame rate, higher resolution, better and more consistent sound, etc) that takes advantage of the improved hardware on a device I bring with me everywhere.
Simply because games these days are exactly designed to extract dopamine from people, and in the 90s they were mostly driven by pain.
Objectively speaking, computers back in the 90's were not capable of organizing the information that a single human being would be interested in, let alone the information of a community or state or country or the world.
I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
Asceticism doesn't generate revenue. That's why striving capital needs a population that consumes more, and fat in technologies is not an exception.
Software in the '90s was mostly driven by altruism, software in '20s starts with an A-round.
The first funding round for a startup. "Series A", "Series B", etc.
(… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)
Perhaps you can learn more about this from executing the following command:
echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=44286820" | cut -d'/' -f3
Modern technology has made it a lot easier to build video games or entertainment (music, movies, etc) affordably and in a reasonable amount of time. The diversity of entertainment out there for you to experience cheaply is incredible compared to the 90s or 00s, even if we lost some stuff like Flash along the way.
Nearly 19000 games were released on Steam in 2024. A lot of the most interesting stuff that came out simply wouldn't have existed 10 or 20 years ago. I think it's great that those things can exist now and potentially find an audience.
This is a silly question.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
This.
The same drive for betterment that made our species “kill such beautiful minimalism” was the one that lifted billions out of subsistence farming and 50% infant death rate, and will be the one to escape the destruction of planet earth by sun’s evolution. You cannot have one without the other.
There is societal improvement and then there is the huge amount of ego driven waste and externalized harm. Ideally, theoretically, we could have a lot of the former without a lot of the latter. In practice this ratio seems to be getting worse. Me-first attitudes are way up, profit is misunderstood as merit.
I don't think OP is asking whether we should give up looking for advances in astrophysics. OP is asking "why did we add all of these freaking popups and theme tweaks? They're distracting me from using my computer to make advances in astrophysics!"
I'd say try Linux.
Moving in that direction, even recursive infinities won't bring someone anywhere near satisfaction, contentment and delight.
Curiosity and desire can be focused on minimalism and elegance of the smallest most essential cores of whatever is at stake.
I think business competition has killed the minimality. Because minimality doesn't sell as a quality. Competitor would throw more power and more features into the market. It is not driven by the need for such power or features. Consumer is forced to move to a bloated product as minimal products are removed or made extinct due to incompatible ecosystem.
Because high-speed internet became omnipresent. The act of making a software release stopped having a cost associated with it, like having to print CDs and ship them to stores. Software transitioned from meaningful releases, each of which needed to be as bug-free as possible and had to be sold to users as a genuine meaningful upgrade, to this pathetic eternal beta we now have.
Also because everyone seems too scared to practice adversarial interoperability.
Also because SoCs are now a thing which allows unhackable secure boot and other DRM-like functionality that prevents people from modifying their own devices to act in their own interest, or, as is the case with Android devices, allows it but punishes the user for having gained full access to their own device.
It's funny how you want minimalism yet another commenter commented about an experimental OS needing to have a modern UI to be relevant. Just can't win.
On Linux you can customize your UI to achieve any look you want.
- A Windows 3.1 window manager theme
- The Windows 3.1 fonts with font hinting/antialiasing disabled
- Windows 3.1 icons
- A matching cursor theme
- Lower your display resolution
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers.
It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.