Comment by brookst a day ago
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.
> 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.
On my personal 2017-vintage i5-7200U, GIMP opens in under 5 seconds. On the computer I had for my last job, a 2023-ish i7, about 30 seconds. The problem was the shitheap of corporate security software that bogged down the zillion file access operations during application startup, not the app itself.
GIMP takes ~2s to start on my 2016 Linux laptop.
(Though I do think it takes significantly longer to start on my 2024 MBP…)
>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.
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.