13 ms·

It is amazing how much we regress as software gets bloated with feature creep. Modern web apps are so much more inferior in certain areas when speed, immediacy

It is amazing how much we regress as software gets bloated with feature creep. Modern web apps are so much more inferior in certain areas when speed, immediacy and efficiency is required. They do have their upsides but more often than not, it is just a mess. I recently logged into my medical insurance website and the fucking thing ajaxing all day and I have no idea what part of the page is waiting to load. I don't have a speedy internet connection. I actually prefer the page to refresh than some small segment of it reload without any indication. Sometimes spinners are fixed in place to indicate "loading" but it is just a frustrating thing to look at. I've used IBM AS400 and a bunch of factory management software - it is an absolute pleasure to use. Yet, most operators on the factory floor complain "We are just stuck with this old archaic system". Every single day. I feel like one of these days some asshole consultant company is going to convince our upper management for a web-based MRP. Large percentage of people do not appreciate old pieces of software. They look at the aesthetics of it and write it off. I really think an average joe off the streets can be completely bedazzled by a modern React app with animations and frivolous bells and whistles that takes 5 seconds to load. Joe does not know the difference between aesthetics and functionlism. Jill on the other hand is a linux aficionado and goes out of her way to make things hard. Spends ages perfecting her vim config file, and looks down on anyone that doesn't use Arch Linux and some form of a window manager. Perhaps there is a sweet spot between Joe and Jill's philosophy towards useful, easy to learn and efficient software that doesn't require an obsessive linux nerd to use. Like WordPerfect 6.2. The world is really a sad place. :-(

wenc 6y ago
I'm not sure it's such a bleak world. If anything, CLIs are thriving on Macs and Linux boxes (in the cloud). Few people of my generation (70s/80s) would have ever predicted a whole new generation of hipster programmers and web designers today who think nothing of dropping to bash and ssh'ing and running npm. Or using vim and REPLs. We thought the whole world would go full GUI by the early late 90s (and it has, yet the console has continued to dominate). Kids these days are more comfortable with the command-line than a whole generation of Windows programmers before them. As for AS/400, I can't say I've interacted with it too much apart from a few brief occasions interfacing with DB2 on AS/400 and it was less than elegant (involved lots of emulation). We had a hard time building anything on top of it. The interoperability of AS/400 with non-IBM systems didn't seem to be that great, even though the system itself was rock-solid and ran mission-critical workloads extremely reliably. I do miss the warm glow of a Turbo Vision IDE (I wrote my first real TUI application on Borland Paradox 4.0) and how quickly one could zip around and get stuff done.
- artificialLimbs 6y ago
  Hesaid anecdata, but our company (that I recently joined) has been using AS/400 (now named IBM i, I believe) for 20 years and has had less than 6 hours of downtime. As I understand it, one would definitely need training/study to interface with it.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    These days, IBM i is specifically the operating system (so OS/400 successor), which is one of the operating systems (besides AIX and Linux) that run on IBM Power hardware.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  You're right about AS/400 - it is a giant pain for developers in our company. But for the user, it is amazing. I agree with the rest of the take but you seem to be coming from a developer's standpoint and I am talking about the user side. Developers back then also had access to terminal and knew how to use it. It's just that the entire software industry has grown. When I was 10 years old, we had to write a turtle program in DOS. Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads.
  - tlarkworthy 6y ago
    Some know the /command interface to Minecraft.
    - patwolf 6y ago
      My child is in awe when he sees me use the Minecraft CLI. He was excited to start kindergarten specifically to learn to read and write enough to use the CLI. I'm hoping that will eventually be his entree into programming. It does give me some hope that future generations will still use computers and not just tablets.
      - MayeulC 6y ago
konjin 6y ago
Everyone knows that you should run openbsd on a modded t420, with coreboot and only use emacs for graphical work. Sent from eww.
- trenchgun 6y ago
  Isn't openbsd slow as hell?
Fej 6y ago
The beauty of the web as we know it has nothing to do with its efficiency. For applications, it is, as you wrote, inferior in speed, as well as many other attributes (memory usage, CPU usage, plenty of others). That is not the point. The point is that web apps are distributed instantly to users, on demand, anywhere, extremely cheaply, with no middlemen necessary. (The web is not the only technology with these traits, but in practice it is the only widespread one.) Back before the web was prominent, software had to be distributed via physical media, usually floppies and later CDs. This inherently limited the reach and complexity of software - physical media is expensive, especially floppies - so it required either the mailing of software by the creator(s) to users, who would have to pay a fee, or a substantial investment by a publisher, which again incurs a (larger) cost to the end user. Almost any widespread software would require a middleman (publisher) and the end user having to go to a store to purchase it. Allowing anyone to create and distribute software in a format simple enough to be used easily by anyone has democratized this system. With more programmers who might not practice the craft professionally, and a desire for speedy development, higher-level languages and frameworks sprung up to fill the knowledge gap and enable even easier development. That's not to say that we should not appreciate older software - as you wrote, the aesthetics ought not belie the challenge and art of software which had to fit into tight spaces, and the constraints required usually forced developers to place function over form. It's a different, not necessarily better or worse, software development paradigm, and older software can be as impressive as or even more so than newer software. But we shouldn't write off the new things either, even if they're worse in areas. (I don't think all of it looks completely ugly, either: Windows 3.1, for example, exhibits a number of traits of modern flat design - single colors, mostly a lack of shadows, many simple icons and interface elements. Windows 1.0 even used the hamburger menu icon. What's old is new again.)
- justin66 6y ago
  So much BS above. > Back before the web was prominent, software had to be distributed via physical media, usually floppies and later CDs. This is blatantly false. Home users could digitally obtain software via online services or BBSes, businesses with minis or mainframes could obtain software from their vendor or reseller via modem, and universities could trade software via ftp. All these sources could (and did) cross-pollinate.
deleted 6y ago
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aww_dang 6y ago
There's still room for lightweight, functional webapps. Some of us still cringe at additional dependencies and frameworks.
ampdepolymerase 6y ago
It is easy to make things fast if you cut out 90% of the UI trimmings. No drop shadows, no shaders. No fancy data synchronization and subtle animations on every click and tap. Everything Winform style bog standard UI. And it will be blazing fast. But nobody wants ugly cross platform apps, so here we are.
jacquesm 6y ago
Function over form any day. Unfortunately, we are where we are, we have the cycles to waste on useless eye candy with as a result that we are now cycles short in order to deliver a good user experience. Somewhere, somehow, user experience and design became conflated. The resulting mess is an incredible hodge-podge of technologies, protocols and hardware all trying to pretend it is something that it is not: software running on your local machine. Running older software on modern hardware is a great way of seeing what we've lost along the way.
- tempodox 6y ago
  > ...somehow, user experience and design became conflated. Also, taking “design” to mean “how it looks” instead of “how it works”.
- linguae 6y ago
  Exactly. This is why I love the classic Mac OS ecosystem. Yes, the classic Mac OS lacked preemptive multitasking and protected memory, which led to system instability that hampered the user experience. However, most applications written for the classic Mac OS strictly adhered to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and the result was GUI applications that were easy to use, had consistent conventions, and did not look bad at all. The classic Mac OS might not look as fancy as modern desktops, but its usability is unparalleled even compared to modern macOS. It's always pleasant booting up one of my classic Macs, whether I'm running System 7.5 or Mac OS 8.1 or Mac OS 9, and using programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 or ClarisWorks. These environments are quite simple compared to the desktops and applications of today, yet they are so complete. Microsoft Word 5.1 and Microsoft Excel 4 on my Power Macintosh 7200 are more comfortable for me to use than LibreOffice on my 2013 Mac Pro. There is a lot that software developers could learn from the classic Mac OS and Apple's UI guidelines of the era.
golergka 6y ago
I moved from classic Vim, quick and snappy, to VSCode, which behaves exactly like a "bloated web-app" and often is so slow I can feel as it's catching up to my typing. It's a trade-off. With VSCode, I got an editor which mostly just works. Which is maintained actively, major bugs fixed, which doesn't require me to maintain and version it's configuration, experimenting with different options and plugin combinations. Which has much lower learning threshold on plugin development, and a much friendlier development environment - JS for both the editor and plugins is just so much more convenient than VimScript and C. Yes, Vim is much faster and more minimalistic, and after learning it, I install vim-emulation plugins into every editor I use (including VSCode). But being fast is not the only thing an editor can be.
agumonkey 6y ago
The complaints are to be interpreted as problems in workplace I believe. My last job people complained about printers being shitty.. they were fine. Jam would happen, bugs at times but really low error rate and proper function. The complaints were mostly due to extremely depressing work environment. When work becomes too much a drag people seek scapegoat (organic or digital)
3dbrows 6y ago
> It is amazing how much we regress as software gets bloated with feature creep. Yes. This week I set up a new Windows 10 laptop for an elderly gentleman, who wanted to continue to play the classic Solitaire game. I eventually found the edition that shipped with Windows 3.0 and installed that. I then tried some of the standard Microsoft free games you get now and had a poor experience: Horribly slow to load. Advertisements in your face constantly. Demands that you "sign in" to Xbox Live. Not having internet connectivity is treated as weird. Noisy user interface; multiple clicks to start a game. Compare this with the old-fashioned games e.g. Solitaire, Minesweeper: Loads instantly, ready to play. No advertisements, connectivity requirements, or user data harvesting. Even the simple graphics add an aesthetic all of their own, but that of course is a subjective opinion. I agree with you.
- ragnese 6y ago
  I live in a nearly perpetual state of outrage over the need to sign in and be tracked for things that have absolutely no reason to require an internet connection. I'm even more outraged when I see popular video games that are clearly targeting children to become addicted and buy in-game currency to progress (or worse- not do anything at all like Fortnite skins). I played fucking The Legend of Zelda on my Nintendo and it was great. What ever happened to creating a product and selling that product once? If it doesn't suck we might buy the next product(s) you make.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    I am no fan of IAP-laden games but there’s a lot of stuff skins with no obvious game effect do in a multiplayer game. * status games - I have this old/hard to get/expensive skin and you do not. * social games - me and my buddies all dress identically/similarly. Gang colors, the All-Shrek Squad, GTA’s roving gangs of purple/green alien gangs... * role play games - does dressing up like Superman make you want to play the game differently than dressing up like Little Bo Peep, or like Freddy Krueger? This has very little effect on a single player game (though I know I sure do spend a while making my character look cool in games with character creation and visible equipment) but “choosing your visual style” is an important part of social signaling. And of course selling this stuff to the captive audience in your popular game is a pretty nice way to keep a small army of artists busy cranking out stuff, so you don’t have to worry about firing them while the next big project is in the planning stages. Or to just have a giant cash cow of a gentle IAP funnel with a few bits of whale bait here and there.
ubermonkey 6y ago
>Modern web apps are so much more inferior in certain areas when speed, immediacy and efficiency is required. This is a weird thing to suggest. It's now possible to run a complete productivity suite in an office. Web mail is WAY more usable now than it was in 2005. Dynamic web apps made this kind of thing possible. I absolutely do not want to regress back to the time when every web app change required a submit; I mean, come ON. At the same time, it's assailably true that most apps - web, native, phone, or otherwise - are crap. But don't confuse bad developer choices with a bad platform, and don't let nostalgia convince you that everything was better in $some_prior_era.
- ktal90 6y ago
  Not to mention that this entire discussion is taking place on a web app...
jerf 6y ago
Some of the problem with web UIs is poor discoverability of shortcuts. With some modest effort, you can create a web UI that is as easy to use for an expert as a mainframe form. It won't be exactly the same as a mainframe form (you could do that, but we're out of "modest effort" here), but it would be as easy to use. But there's no good story on how to discover the expert interface. For one thing, nobody even experts there to be an expert mode, so there's a vicious cycle in which it is never developed -> never used -> never developed etc. But all the capabilities are there to turn a "down" cursor into going to the next form element down, or having CTRL- shortcuts for popular fields, etc. A nontrivial part of the problem is just that people don't even think about expert-mode users, let alone start trying to program for them. People see a web page and they are in a mindset of novice-mode UI, both developers and users. A Web 1.0 interface with Javascript expert-mode shortcuts, and some selective pre-loading of things like form screens could probably just about match a mainframe UI on its own turf, then be able to extend it with modern touches. And while applying All The CSS could possibly slow it down again, the results could still be at least a bit prettier than a mainframe form.
ivolimmen 6y ago
Feature creap and bloadware: completely agree. At my job I am currently trying to mitigate XSS issues because the web application that is in place uses jquery. It is a security risk by default. Rewriting the entire application would be the only secure solution but it is too costly. If it was an old fashioned desktop application we would not be in this mess... Web applications are really hard to get and keep them secure.
anigbrowl 6y ago
Joe does not know the difference between aesthetics and functionlism. Jill on the other hand is a linux aficionado and goes out of her way to make things hard. Though I'm not a big gamer, one thing I like about game software is the combination of interesting interfaces and speed.
mikorym 6y ago
> The world is really a sad place. :-( I'm not a personal trainer, or motivational speaker, but brighten up. As a mathematician, everything since the 1960s has to me been this cycle, and I think the key way to approach this is from the perspective of knowledge. Don't look at software or data, but look at fundamental science, and you'll have less of this sort of burn out. I read papers from 1950, and I pretend that I could have a coffee with the author later that day, and savour the fact that you can't take people's discoveries away from them, even if history or humanity has.

wenc 6y ago

I'm not sure it's such a bleak world. If anything, CLIs are thriving on Macs and Linux boxes (in the cloud). Few people of my generation (70s/80s) would have ever predicted a whole new generation of hipster programmers and web designers today who think nothing of dropping to bash and ssh'ing and running npm. Or using vim and REPLs. We thought the whole world would go full GUI by the early late 90s (and it has, yet the console has continued to dominate). Kids these days are more comfortable with the command-line than a whole generation of Windows programmers before them. As for AS/400, I can't say I've interacted with it too much apart from a few brief occasions interfacing with DB2 on AS/400 and it was less than elegant (involved lots of emulation). We had a hard time building anything on top of it. The interoperability of AS/400 with non-IBM systems didn't seem to be that great, even though the system itself was rock-solid and ran mission-critical workloads extremely reliably. I do miss the warm glow of a Turbo Vision IDE (I wrote my first real TUI application on Borland Paradox 4.0) and how quickly one could zip around and get stuff done.

artificialLimbs 6y ago
Hesaid anecdata, but our company (that I recently joined) has been using AS/400 (now named IBM i, I believe) for 20 years and has had less than 6 hours of downtime. As I understand it, one would definitely need training/study to interface with it.
- ghaff 6y ago
  These days, IBM i is specifically the operating system (so OS/400 successor), which is one of the operating systems (besides AIX and Linux) that run on IBM Power hardware.
systemvoltage 6y ago
You're right about AS/400 - it is a giant pain for developers in our company. But for the user, it is amazing. I agree with the rest of the take but you seem to be coming from a developer's standpoint and I am talking about the user side. Developers back then also had access to terminal and knew how to use it. It's just that the entire software industry has grown. When I was 10 years old, we had to write a turtle program in DOS. Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads.
- tlarkworthy 6y ago
  Some know the /command interface to Minecraft.
  - patwolf 6y ago
    My child is in awe when he sees me use the Minecraft CLI. He was excited to start kindergarten specifically to learn to read and write enough to use the CLI. I'm hoping that will eventually be his entree into programming. It does give me some hope that future generations will still use computers and not just tablets.
    - MayeulC 6y ago

konjin 6y ago

Everyone knows that you should run openbsd on a modded t420, with coreboot and only use emacs for graphical work. Sent from eww.

trenchgun 6y ago
Isn't openbsd slow as hell?

Fej 6y ago

The beauty of the web as we know it has nothing to do with its efficiency. For applications, it is, as you wrote, inferior in speed, as well as many other attributes (memory usage, CPU usage, plenty of others). That is not the point. The point is that web apps are distributed instantly to users, on demand, anywhere, extremely cheaply, with no middlemen necessary. (The web is not the only technology with these traits, but in practice it is the only widespread one.) Back before the web was prominent, software had to be distributed via physical media, usually floppies and later CDs. This inherently limited the reach and complexity of software - physical media is expensive, especially floppies - so it required either the mailing of software by the creator(s) to users, who would have to pay a fee, or a substantial investment by a publisher, which again incurs a (larger) cost to the end user. Almost any widespread software would require a middleman (publisher) and the end user having to go to a store to purchase it. Allowing anyone to create and distribute software in a format simple enough to be used easily by anyone has democratized this system. With more programmers who might not practice the craft professionally, and a desire for speedy development, higher-level languages and frameworks sprung up to fill the knowledge gap and enable even easier development. That's not to say that we should not appreciate older software - as you wrote, the aesthetics ought not belie the challenge and art of software which had to fit into tight spaces, and the constraints required usually forced developers to place function over form. It's a different, not necessarily better or worse, software development paradigm, and older software can be as impressive as or even more so than newer software. But we shouldn't write off the new things either, even if they're worse in areas. (I don't think all of it looks completely ugly, either: Windows 3.1, for example, exhibits a number of traits of modern flat design - single colors, mostly a lack of shadows, many simple icons and interface elements. Windows 1.0 even used the hamburger menu icon. What's old is new again.)

justin66 6y ago
So much BS above. > Back before the web was prominent, software had to be distributed via physical media, usually floppies and later CDs. This is blatantly false. Home users could digitally obtain software via online services or BBSes, businesses with minis or mainframes could obtain software from their vendor or reseller via modem, and universities could trade software via ftp. All these sources could (and did) cross-pollinate.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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aww_dang 6y ago

There's still room for lightweight, functional webapps. Some of us still cringe at additional dependencies and frameworks.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago

It is easy to make things fast if you cut out 90% of the UI trimmings. No drop shadows, no shaders. No fancy data synchronization and subtle animations on every click and tap. Everything Winform style bog standard UI. And it will be blazing fast. But nobody wants ugly cross platform apps, so here we are.

jacquesm 6y ago

Function over form any day. Unfortunately, we are where we are, we have the cycles to waste on useless eye candy with as a result that we are now cycles short in order to deliver a good user experience. Somewhere, somehow, user experience and design became conflated. The resulting mess is an incredible hodge-podge of technologies, protocols and hardware all trying to pretend it is something that it is not: software running on your local machine. Running older software on modern hardware is a great way of seeing what we've lost along the way.

tempodox 6y ago
> ...somehow, user experience and design became conflated. Also, taking “design” to mean “how it looks” instead of “how it works”.
linguae 6y ago
Exactly. This is why I love the classic Mac OS ecosystem. Yes, the classic Mac OS lacked preemptive multitasking and protected memory, which led to system instability that hampered the user experience. However, most applications written for the classic Mac OS strictly adhered to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and the result was GUI applications that were easy to use, had consistent conventions, and did not look bad at all. The classic Mac OS might not look as fancy as modern desktops, but its usability is unparalleled even compared to modern macOS. It's always pleasant booting up one of my classic Macs, whether I'm running System 7.5 or Mac OS 8.1 or Mac OS 9, and using programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 or ClarisWorks. These environments are quite simple compared to the desktops and applications of today, yet they are so complete. Microsoft Word 5.1 and Microsoft Excel 4 on my Power Macintosh 7200 are more comfortable for me to use than LibreOffice on my 2013 Mac Pro. There is a lot that software developers could learn from the classic Mac OS and Apple's UI guidelines of the era.

golergka 6y ago

I moved from classic Vim, quick and snappy, to VSCode, which behaves exactly like a "bloated web-app" and often is so slow I can feel as it's catching up to my typing. It's a trade-off. With VSCode, I got an editor which mostly just works. Which is maintained actively, major bugs fixed, which doesn't require me to maintain and version it's configuration, experimenting with different options and plugin combinations. Which has much lower learning threshold on plugin development, and a much friendlier development environment - JS for both the editor and plugins is just so much more convenient than VimScript and C. Yes, Vim is much faster and more minimalistic, and after learning it, I install vim-emulation plugins into every editor I use (including VSCode). But being fast is not the only thing an editor can be.

agumonkey 6y ago

The complaints are to be interpreted as problems in workplace I believe. My last job people complained about printers being shitty.. they were fine. Jam would happen, bugs at times but really low error rate and proper function. The complaints were mostly due to extremely depressing work environment. When work becomes too much a drag people seek scapegoat (organic or digital)

3dbrows 6y ago

> It is amazing how much we regress as software gets bloated with feature creep. Yes. This week I set up a new Windows 10 laptop for an elderly gentleman, who wanted to continue to play the classic Solitaire game. I eventually found the edition that shipped with Windows 3.0 and installed that. I then tried some of the standard Microsoft free games you get now and had a poor experience: Horribly slow to load. Advertisements in your face constantly. Demands that you "sign in" to Xbox Live. Not having internet connectivity is treated as weird. Noisy user interface; multiple clicks to start a game. Compare this with the old-fashioned games e.g. Solitaire, Minesweeper: Loads instantly, ready to play. No advertisements, connectivity requirements, or user data harvesting. Even the simple graphics add an aesthetic all of their own, but that of course is a subjective opinion. I agree with you.

ragnese 6y ago
I live in a nearly perpetual state of outrage over the need to sign in and be tracked for things that have absolutely no reason to require an internet connection. I'm even more outraged when I see popular video games that are clearly targeting children to become addicted and buy in-game currency to progress (or worse- not do anything at all like Fortnite skins). I played fucking The Legend of Zelda on my Nintendo and it was great. What ever happened to creating a product and selling that product once? If it doesn't suck we might buy the next product(s) you make.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  I am no fan of IAP-laden games but there’s a lot of stuff skins with no obvious game effect do in a multiplayer game. * status games - I have this old/hard to get/expensive skin and you do not. * social games - me and my buddies all dress identically/similarly. Gang colors, the All-Shrek Squad, GTA’s roving gangs of purple/green alien gangs... * role play games - does dressing up like Superman make you want to play the game differently than dressing up like Little Bo Peep, or like Freddy Krueger? This has very little effect on a single player game (though I know I sure do spend a while making my character look cool in games with character creation and visible equipment) but “choosing your visual style” is an important part of social signaling. And of course selling this stuff to the captive audience in your popular game is a pretty nice way to keep a small army of artists busy cranking out stuff, so you don’t have to worry about firing them while the next big project is in the planning stages. Or to just have a giant cash cow of a gentle IAP funnel with a few bits of whale bait here and there.

ubermonkey 6y ago

>Modern web apps are so much more inferior in certain areas when speed, immediacy and efficiency is required. This is a weird thing to suggest. It's now possible to run a complete productivity suite in an office. Web mail is WAY more usable now than it was in 2005. Dynamic web apps made this kind of thing possible. I absolutely do not want to regress back to the time when every web app change required a submit; I mean, come ON. At the same time, it's assailably true that most apps - web, native, phone, or otherwise - are crap. But don't confuse bad developer choices with a bad platform, and don't let nostalgia convince you that everything was better in $some_prior_era.

ktal90 6y ago
Not to mention that this entire discussion is taking place on a web app...

jerf 6y ago

Some of the problem with web UIs is poor discoverability of shortcuts. With some modest effort, you can create a web UI that is as easy to use for an expert as a mainframe form. It won't be exactly the same as a mainframe form (you could do that, but we're out of "modest effort" here), but it would be as easy to use. But there's no good story on how to discover the expert interface. For one thing, nobody even experts there to be an expert mode, so there's a vicious cycle in which it is never developed -> never used -> never developed etc. But all the capabilities are there to turn a "down" cursor into going to the next form element down, or having CTRL- shortcuts for popular fields, etc. A nontrivial part of the problem is just that people don't even think about expert-mode users, let alone start trying to program for them. People see a web page and they are in a mindset of novice-mode UI, both developers and users. A Web 1.0 interface with Javascript expert-mode shortcuts, and some selective pre-loading of things like form screens could probably just about match a mainframe UI on its own turf, then be able to extend it with modern touches. And while applying All The CSS could possibly slow it down again, the results could still be at least a bit prettier than a mainframe form.

ivolimmen 6y ago

Feature creap and bloadware: completely agree. At my job I am currently trying to mitigate XSS issues because the web application that is in place uses jquery. It is a security risk by default. Rewriting the entire application would be the only secure solution but it is too costly. If it was an old fashioned desktop application we would not be in this mess... Web applications are really hard to get and keep them secure.

anigbrowl 6y ago

Joe does not know the difference between aesthetics and functionlism. Jill on the other hand is a linux aficionado and goes out of her way to make things hard. Though I'm not a big gamer, one thing I like about game software is the combination of interesting interfaces and speed.

mikorym 6y ago

> The world is really a sad place. :-( I'm not a personal trainer, or motivational speaker, but brighten up. As a mathematician, everything since the 1960s has to me been this cycle, and I think the key way to approach this is from the perspective of knowledge. Don't look at software or data, but look at fundamental science, and you'll have less of this sort of burn out. I read papers from 1950, and I pretend that I could have a coffee with the author later that day, and savour the fact that you can't take people's discoveries away from them, even if history or humanity has.