15 ms·

I am increasingly feeling that computers just aren't "for" me anymore. Maybe they never were, and sheer novelty combined with youthful neuroplasticity helped me

I am increasingly feeling that computers just aren't "for" me anymore. Maybe they never were, and sheer novelty combined with youthful neuroplasticity helped me push through. (I am willing to chalk-up a significant amount of my dissatisfaction to being an "oldster".) Using computers is significantly less enjoyable for me now than it used to me. Updates being installed without my consent, telemetry and surveillance being forced upon me, loss of functionality when features I use aren't popular enough to warrant continued inclusion in products, and software developers who are actively hostile toward allowing "power users" configuration options all detract from the enjoyment I used to have.

ur-whale 6y ago
Time to switch to Linux and regain your lost freedom.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  Yes seriously. I wanted more control in the mid 1990s and happily made the jump. Now you can buy machines with Linux /preinstalled/ and /supported/. 99.9% of what you use the computer for is online and websites work great on Linux. Seriously, it's one of the best times in my life to have a computer in my control. I've never had to make fewer sacrifices to run what I like than today. Even the phone scene is starting to look like it's going to be opening up in the next few years.
echelon 6y ago
It's not you, nor is it your age. We've given up on protecting our freedoms, and our devices aren't really our own anymore. And you have people like the die hard Apple apologists / enablers that think it's fine you can't build stuff for iPhone without going through Apple. We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia. You won't be able to run software on your laptops or desktops, and everything will be tracked. The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking. Silos like Facebook rank content that isn't hosted internally lower, so the open web has atrophied. And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps. I don't hate computers. I hate the grifters and gaslighters that have taken the good parts away and told us our way of thinking is the problem.
- andmarios 6y ago
  I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win. Sure, they may not be as important as the things you mention, but when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun, is very telling of the situation.
  - Guvante 6y ago
    > I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win. They are also free to play and usually not in a minor way. Some of the latest Gacha games have a dozen hours of storyline (or more) before starting the infinite grind. > when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun People have hated games forever so that isn't much of a barometer. Not commenting on whether P2W is more problematic but people have been listing forever the things that got in the way of their fun.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    On that topic, if you're looking for games that don't form such abusive relationship with their players, 'StavrosK is maintaining a list of "no-bullshit games" for both mobile platforms: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/.
    - andmarios 6y ago
      Was looking for something like this. Thanks so much!
- blub 6y ago
  Why do you feel the need to pick on Apple when: a) their updates require consent b) their telemetry is less invasive than Google's or Microsoft's and at least they explain what they're collecting in most of their apps and allow one to turn off some things c) they do offer power user options such as allowing kexts like the one from Little Snitch. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917 https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917 d) generally add functionality ?
kleer001 6y ago
> loss of functionality when features I use aren't popular enough to warrant continued inclusion in products Jeus Fcking Ch*ist THIS. Especially with trivial things like a lite-mode vs this strange fad of dark-mode by default. Dark mode was created to save energy in CRTs. And anyways it gives some people headaches, like me.
- Koenvh 6y ago
  Is it really trivial to support both dark and light interfaces though? It may be for command line interfaces, but for anything with a GUI and custom colours it means creating every element twice. Things like shadow work on light interfaces, but not on dark.
  - Asooka 6y ago
    It used to be trivial, because the OS had a configurable palette for GUI elements, which every single program followed, because it used the standard platform GUI toolkit. So going dark or light mode for the entire desktop was as trivial as choosing it from a drop-down menu. Or you could have it pink or green or a horrible mishmash of colour that made you go crosseyed. You could even change font sizes so if you had trouble seeing, like maybe you had cataracts, you could have huge letters on highly contrasting background.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      This has never been true if your computer ran "creative" software. Video editing, music creation tools almost never used "the standard platform GUI toolkit" (even Apple has/had their own internal kit used for apps like Logic). It also stopped being true (or became less true) when cross-platform development became important to some developers and some users, meaning that deeply integrating your application with whatever system a particular platform had was less important than making sure it ran reasonably consistently across platforms.
      - smallstepforman 6y ago
falcolas 6y ago
> Using computers is significantly less enjoyable for me now than it used to me. I'm with you on this. And not just because of the reasons you listed. Everything surrounding computers has become so focused on making money that it really, really bothers me. There isn't a single thing on my computer anymore that hasn't been optimized to the n'th degree either to weasel more money out of me (F' you, Apple TV, Apple Music), or built in a way which optimized as much money out of the process as possible (F' you, Mozilla, every single one of you Electron apps out there). We've become so utterly focused on money and optimizations that the fun and value has been sucked right out of the software - both front and back.
- badarticle0 6y ago
  Maybe you were a kid then, but selling home PCs back in the 80s and 90s was derided by adults as a cash grab. They were business tools! Omgurd! You’re just trying to get kids addicted to media! It’s pretty fascinating being older and watching these arguments repeat themselves. In case you haven’t noticed, political life is all about ownership. You’re sold disposable garbage on a cadence by people that own the machines that make it. Your agency was sold to suppliers. Computing as a system of doing has matured.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I don't know. I spend a lot less money on software compared to twenty years ago. So much of what I use is available for free or a nominal amount. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?
  - falcolas 6y ago
    FWIW, never. Not in my ~25 years of programming. GCC, Perl, and Python meant never purchasing a compiler. And purchasing, well, it's the lesser of evils these days. Purchasing at least gave you vitually cart blanche access to software on your computer with time limits imposed only by processing architectures. Now, in contrast, everything is moving towards subscriptions. 1Password. Microsoft Office. Photoshop. Sublime Text (professional). Apple Music (or Spotify, et.al.). Apple TV (or Netflix, et.al.). Novlr (a word processor). All expect me to shell out anything from $1 to upwards of $50 a month in perpetuity for the right to borrow their software. And that's not even mentioning microtransactions, for things like alternate brushes in PS.
badarticle0 6y ago
Congrats, you’ve come to understand a free commodities market doesn’t curate itself to one generation forever. It’s hardware that does the real work. The software fetish of tricking a limited machine into variety is now full of variety by default as the hardware is much less limited. No matter the language it’s physics. Unix is still there. You’re acting entitled to have others sell only what you want. Just like an old person. Let’s bring back pagan gods and horse and buggy, too, eh? There’s freedoms being trampled somewhere because those aren’t being fetishized at scale. It’s the arithmetic of a society.
- likeclockwork 6y ago
  Did... you just imply monotheism represents progress?
nextos 6y ago
I share this feeling, and I've found some relief by reducing the complexity of my configuration by an order of magnitude. I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm). My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine. I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me? I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart. NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  You could (sort of) reduce it to two, at least in terms of interfaces by using vterm in emacs [https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm] rather than xterm.
loopz 6y ago
Which is why I run Mint.
offtop5 6y ago
If you really need to , install Arch Linux and set it up yourself. In my younger days I had the patience to install Ubuntu over and over again. In my 30s I simply no longer have the heart for it. My M1 mac just works out the box and I can spend more time working on my games and music. I still enjoy building PCs from time to time, but even then I just install Windows and move on with my day
- zoid_ 6y ago
  I recently moved back to Arch Linux after spending the last few years using a hackintosh full time. There shouldn't be any reason to need to keep installing an OS; if you're competent, you should be able to correct any issues. For many peoples workflows including my own, Windows would pose a far greater headache to get to a productive state. macOS works great, up to the point where you want to enjoy freedom to use your computer as you see fit, certainly less hassle for development (in general) than Windows though imo :)
lambda_obrien 6y ago
Same, I'm about to quit computers and just go all in on my child and live at home with my family.
zarkov99 6y ago
You are not wrong, buy it is an easy fix, just install Linux and take back your computer! You might loose a little comfort initially but that will soon come back.
- tremon 6y ago
  Personally, I've also removed Linux from my hardware because there's too much black magic going on with dbus/logind (quick question: what's the permission model used for seat management and where do I configure it?). I've gone back to running OpenBSD/FreeBSD on the hardware and relegating Linux to VMs only, with all the hardware pains that used to plague Linux 15 years ago. But at least my OS is predictable and reliable again, and doesn't patronize me.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    I think the days of understanding your stack top to bottom are gone, unfortunately, but at least with Linux I am not being spied on, bullied into installing updates I do not want, prevented from installing things I do want, and in general being treated as cattle.
  - account42 6y ago
    Linux doesn't require you to use dbus/logind though so it seems weird to throw out the kernel (including the HW support you mentioned) just to move to a different userspace.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
It's not you. The computing industry is actively trying to hide the computer. Naturally, people who love computers are left out. I found this article on Stallman's website and it was enlightening for me: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ > This approach leads to some great products on screen and IRL, but alienates as well. > Robotics doesn’t give us a chance to fall in love with the computer if it is not anthropomorphic. Experience design prevents from thinking and valuing computers as computers, and interfaces as interfaces. > It makes us helpless. We lose an ability to narrate ourselves and — going to a more pragmatic level — we are not able to use personal computers anymore. > For government agencies, the destruction of hardware is a routine procedure. From their perspective, the case of deletion is thoroughly dealt with when the media holding the data is physically gone. They are smart enough to not trust the “empty trash” function. > Of course the destruction made no sense in this case, since copies of the files in question were located elsewhere, but it is a great symbol for what is left for users to do, what is the last power users have over their systems: They can only access them on the hardware level, destroy them. > Since there is less and less certainty of what you are doing with your computer on the level of software, you’ll tend to destroy your hard drive voluntarily every time you want to really delete something. > Every victory of experience design: a new product “telling the story,” or an interface meeting the “exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother” widens the gap in between a person and a personal computer. > The morning after “experience design:” interface-less, desposible hardware, personal hard disc shredders, primitive customization via mechanical means, rewiring, reassembling, making holes into hard disks, in order to to delete, to logout, to “view offline.”
ekianjo 6y ago
> Updates being installed without my consent, telemetry and surveillance being forced upon me, Maybe you need to change OS.
gorgoiler 6y ago
This isn’t a solution but it might bring you some cheer: buy yourself a few[1] of these: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-express/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-expre... They have a killer feature: infrared send and receive. Making a network of weird flashy lights is all the joy of computing without any of the “this feels like my job” crap[8]. Press a button and the device appears as a USB drive. You build your project at https://makecode.adafruit.com/ https://makecode.adafruit.com/ into a firmware file ending in .UF2 and upload it the device. [1] ...and some battery packs, cable ties, USB A to micro B leads if you don’t have twelve billion already. [8] You might be tempted by the third party firmware/UF2 called “Circuit Python”, which lets you then code on the device directly in a cutdown version of Python3. For me, that felt too much like my day job :)
stjohnswarts 6y ago
You can have fun with computers without the internet. A computer is just a tool, you choose how it affects you. You can kill someone with a hammer or use it to build a home, it's all in how you use the tool.
enriquto 6y ago
> Updates being installed without my consent, This is not true. You explicitly consented to it by voluntarily installing software that has this (horrific) feature.
- doubleunplussed 6y ago
  Let's just say this consent isn't exactly enthusiastic and ongoing.
- account42 6y ago
  I feel like more laws should be like the GDPR and recognize that consent is only really given when you have the option to not give it without the loss of functionality.
aparsons 6y ago
From one elder statesmen to another- it’s not us. The industry as a whole has lost a lot of the excitement and novelty it evoked in the 80s, early 90s and (after a somewhat down period in the mid 90s) the late 90s to mid 2000s. In a way, Pangaea has split. Massively profitable giants have emerged as the foundations of the industry have hardened. The industry is mature, but the amount of truly exciting work has dwindled. Microsoft at it’s peak never felt as well-entrenched as today’s tech giants. I briefly came out of retirement a few years ago to work on a blockchain-related company, which presented an energy akin to the Macintosh or Java, but ultimately it was clear that the industry as a whole has shifted priorities by so much - beyond the point of no return- for better or for worse.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
You hit the nail on the head saying that some computers are not "for you" anymore. When I am on Windows or Mac, both of which I loved for a long time, and still do in certain versions, I feel like I never know what's coming next. One moment you like me, next time you don't. One day you want to be the quiet nerdy kid who's always got my back, that's really nice. But the next day you want to please everyone, rearrange all my shit, and gossip about me to all your MLM friends. One moment you want to be predictable, dependable, usable. Then the next day you want to interrupt my work while you do your hair. And I get it, you're trying to figure yourself out, you've got bills to pay, that's totally fine. However, I just won't be able to spend as much time with you anymore, because I'm trying to get some work done. It's not you, it's me. Maybe we can still hang out sometimes? I'll make some space for you in a VM.
hoppla 6y ago
What I want from an OS, is if I do nothing, nothing should happen. Listening on network interfaces, you can see how your OS is integrating itself to the Borg collective.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
You should try Linux. The small price you pay by having to hold just a little more symbols in your head gives you an OS outside of reach of normal people and all these "improvements" pushed onto normal people by the executives and large corps.

ur-whale 6y ago

Time to switch to Linux and regain your lost freedom.

lallysingh 6y ago
Yes seriously. I wanted more control in the mid 1990s and happily made the jump. Now you can buy machines with Linux /preinstalled/ and /supported/. 99.9% of what you use the computer for is online and websites work great on Linux. Seriously, it's one of the best times in my life to have a computer in my control. I've never had to make fewer sacrifices to run what I like than today. Even the phone scene is starting to look like it's going to be opening up in the next few years.

echelon 6y ago

It's not you, nor is it your age. We've given up on protecting our freedoms, and our devices aren't really our own anymore. And you have people like the die hard Apple apologists / enablers that think it's fine you can't build stuff for iPhone without going through Apple. We're about to enter a trusted computing dystopia. You won't be able to run software on your laptops or desktops, and everything will be tracked. The web was the perfect platform and would have been utopia. Google sunk their claws in and neutered the browser, removing the concept of the URL, forced media companies to use AMP, and crippled ad/tracker blocking. Silos like Facebook rank content that isn't hosted internally lower, so the open web has atrophied. And iPhone has a shitty browser so it can favor apps. I don't hate computers. I hate the grifters and gaslighters that have taken the good parts away and told us our way of thinking is the problem.

andmarios 6y ago
I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win. Sure, they may not be as important as the things you mention, but when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun, is very telling of the situation.
- Guvante 6y ago
  > I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win. They are also free to play and usually not in a minor way. Some of the latest Gacha games have a dozen hours of storyline (or more) before starting the infinite grind. > when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun People have hated games forever so that isn't much of a barometer. Not commenting on whether P2W is more problematic but people have been listing forever the things that got in the way of their fun.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  On that topic, if you're looking for games that don't form such abusive relationship with their players, 'StavrosK is maintaining a list of "no-bullshit games" for both mobile platforms: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/.
  - andmarios 6y ago
    Was looking for something like this. Thanks so much!
blub 6y ago
Why do you feel the need to pick on Apple when: a) their updates require consent b) their telemetry is less invasive than Google's or Microsoft's and at least they explain what they're collecting in most of their apps and allow one to turn off some things c) they do offer power user options such as allowing kexts like the one from Little Snitch. https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917 https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917 d) generally add functionality ?

kleer001 6y ago

> loss of functionality when features I use aren't popular enough to warrant continued inclusion in products Jeus Fcking Ch*ist THIS. Especially with trivial things like a lite-mode vs this strange fad of dark-mode by default. Dark mode was created to save energy in CRTs. And anyways it gives some people headaches, like me.

Koenvh 6y ago
Is it really trivial to support both dark and light interfaces though? It may be for command line interfaces, but for anything with a GUI and custom colours it means creating every element twice. Things like shadow work on light interfaces, but not on dark.
- Asooka 6y ago
  It used to be trivial, because the OS had a configurable palette for GUI elements, which every single program followed, because it used the standard platform GUI toolkit. So going dark or light mode for the entire desktop was as trivial as choosing it from a drop-down menu. Or you could have it pink or green or a horrible mishmash of colour that made you go crosseyed. You could even change font sizes so if you had trouble seeing, like maybe you had cataracts, you could have huge letters on highly contrasting background.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    This has never been true if your computer ran "creative" software. Video editing, music creation tools almost never used "the standard platform GUI toolkit" (even Apple has/had their own internal kit used for apps like Logic). It also stopped being true (or became less true) when cross-platform development became important to some developers and some users, meaning that deeply integrating your application with whatever system a particular platform had was less important than making sure it ran reasonably consistently across platforms.
    - smallstepforman 6y ago

falcolas 6y ago

> Using computers is significantly less enjoyable for me now than it used to me. I'm with you on this. And not just because of the reasons you listed. Everything surrounding computers has become so focused on making money that it really, really bothers me. There isn't a single thing on my computer anymore that hasn't been optimized to the n'th degree either to weasel more money out of me (F' you, Apple TV, Apple Music), or built in a way which optimized as much money out of the process as possible (F' you, Mozilla, every single one of you Electron apps out there). We've become so utterly focused on money and optimizations that the fun and value has been sucked right out of the software - both front and back.

badarticle0 6y ago
Maybe you were a kid then, but selling home PCs back in the 80s and 90s was derided by adults as a cash grab. They were business tools! Omgurd! You’re just trying to get kids addicted to media! It’s pretty fascinating being older and watching these arguments repeat themselves. In case you haven’t noticed, political life is all about ownership. You’re sold disposable garbage on a cadence by people that own the machines that make it. Your agency was sold to suppliers. Computing as a system of doing has matured.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I don't know. I spend a lot less money on software compared to twenty years ago. So much of what I use is available for free or a nominal amount. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?
- falcolas 6y ago
  FWIW, never. Not in my ~25 years of programming. GCC, Perl, and Python meant never purchasing a compiler. And purchasing, well, it's the lesser of evils these days. Purchasing at least gave you vitually cart blanche access to software on your computer with time limits imposed only by processing architectures. Now, in contrast, everything is moving towards subscriptions. 1Password. Microsoft Office. Photoshop. Sublime Text (professional). Apple Music (or Spotify, et.al.). Apple TV (or Netflix, et.al.). Novlr (a word processor). All expect me to shell out anything from $1 to upwards of $50 a month in perpetuity for the right to borrow their software. And that's not even mentioning microtransactions, for things like alternate brushes in PS.

badarticle0 6y ago

Congrats, you’ve come to understand a free commodities market doesn’t curate itself to one generation forever. It’s hardware that does the real work. The software fetish of tricking a limited machine into variety is now full of variety by default as the hardware is much less limited. No matter the language it’s physics. Unix is still there. You’re acting entitled to have others sell only what you want. Just like an old person. Let’s bring back pagan gods and horse and buggy, too, eh? There’s freedoms being trampled somewhere because those aren’t being fetishized at scale. It’s the arithmetic of a society.

likeclockwork 6y ago
Did... you just imply monotheism represents progress?

nextos 6y ago

I share this feeling, and I've found some relief by reducing the complexity of my configuration by an order of magnitude. I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm). My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine. I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me? I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart. NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.

_emacsomancer_ 6y ago
You could (sort of) reduce it to two, at least in terms of interfaces by using vterm in emacs [https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm] rather than xterm.

loopz 6y ago

Which is why I run Mint.

offtop5 6y ago

If you really need to , install Arch Linux and set it up yourself. In my younger days I had the patience to install Ubuntu over and over again. In my 30s I simply no longer have the heart for it. My M1 mac just works out the box and I can spend more time working on my games and music. I still enjoy building PCs from time to time, but even then I just install Windows and move on with my day

zoid_ 6y ago
I recently moved back to Arch Linux after spending the last few years using a hackintosh full time. There shouldn't be any reason to need to keep installing an OS; if you're competent, you should be able to correct any issues. For many peoples workflows including my own, Windows would pose a far greater headache to get to a productive state. macOS works great, up to the point where you want to enjoy freedom to use your computer as you see fit, certainly less hassle for development (in general) than Windows though imo :)

lambda_obrien 6y ago

Same, I'm about to quit computers and just go all in on my child and live at home with my family.

zarkov99 6y ago

You are not wrong, buy it is an easy fix, just install Linux and take back your computer! You might loose a little comfort initially but that will soon come back.

tremon 6y ago
Personally, I've also removed Linux from my hardware because there's too much black magic going on with dbus/logind (quick question: what's the permission model used for seat management and where do I configure it?). I've gone back to running OpenBSD/FreeBSD on the hardware and relegating Linux to VMs only, with all the hardware pains that used to plague Linux 15 years ago. But at least my OS is predictable and reliable again, and doesn't patronize me.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  I think the days of understanding your stack top to bottom are gone, unfortunately, but at least with Linux I am not being spied on, bullied into installing updates I do not want, prevented from installing things I do want, and in general being treated as cattle.
- account42 6y ago
  Linux doesn't require you to use dbus/logind though so it seems weird to throw out the kernel (including the HW support you mentioned) just to move to a different userspace.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

It's not you. The computing industry is actively trying to hide the computer. Naturally, people who love computers are left out. I found this article on Stallman's website and it was enlightening for me: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ > This approach leads to some great products on screen and IRL, but alienates as well. > Robotics doesn’t give us a chance to fall in love with the computer if it is not anthropomorphic. Experience design prevents from thinking and valuing computers as computers, and interfaces as interfaces. > It makes us helpless. We lose an ability to narrate ourselves and — going to a more pragmatic level — we are not able to use personal computers anymore. > For government agencies, the destruction of hardware is a routine procedure. From their perspective, the case of deletion is thoroughly dealt with when the media holding the data is physically gone. They are smart enough to not trust the “empty trash” function. > Of course the destruction made no sense in this case, since copies of the files in question were located elsewhere, but it is a great symbol for what is left for users to do, what is the last power users have over their systems: They can only access them on the hardware level, destroy them. > Since there is less and less certainty of what you are doing with your computer on the level of software, you’ll tend to destroy your hard drive voluntarily every time you want to really delete something. > Every victory of experience design: a new product “telling the story,” or an interface meeting the “exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother” widens the gap in between a person and a personal computer. > The morning after “experience design:” interface-less, desposible hardware, personal hard disc shredders, primitive customization via mechanical means, rewiring, reassembling, making holes into hard disks, in order to to delete, to logout, to “view offline.”

ekianjo 6y ago

> Updates being installed without my consent, telemetry and surveillance being forced upon me, Maybe you need to change OS.

gorgoiler 6y ago

This isn’t a solution but it might bring you some cheer: buy yourself a few[1] of these: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-express/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-expre... They have a killer feature: infrared send and receive. Making a network of weird flashy lights is all the joy of computing without any of the “this feels like my job” crap[8]. Press a button and the device appears as a USB drive. You build your project at https://makecode.adafruit.com/ https://makecode.adafruit.com/ into a firmware file ending in .UF2 and upload it the device. [1] ...and some battery packs, cable ties, USB A to micro B leads if you don’t have twelve billion already. [8] You might be tempted by the third party firmware/UF2 called “Circuit Python”, which lets you then code on the device directly in a cutdown version of Python3. For me, that felt too much like my day job :)

stjohnswarts 6y ago

You can have fun with computers without the internet. A computer is just a tool, you choose how it affects you. You can kill someone with a hammer or use it to build a home, it's all in how you use the tool.

enriquto 6y ago

> Updates being installed without my consent, This is not true. You explicitly consented to it by voluntarily installing software that has this (horrific) feature.

doubleunplussed 6y ago
Let's just say this consent isn't exactly enthusiastic and ongoing.
account42 6y ago
I feel like more laws should be like the GDPR and recognize that consent is only really given when you have the option to not give it without the loss of functionality.

aparsons 6y ago

From one elder statesmen to another- it’s not us. The industry as a whole has lost a lot of the excitement and novelty it evoked in the 80s, early 90s and (after a somewhat down period in the mid 90s) the late 90s to mid 2000s. In a way, Pangaea has split. Massively profitable giants have emerged as the foundations of the industry have hardened. The industry is mature, but the amount of truly exciting work has dwindled. Microsoft at it’s peak never felt as well-entrenched as today’s tech giants. I briefly came out of retirement a few years ago to work on a blockchain-related company, which presented an energy akin to the Macintosh or Java, but ultimately it was clear that the industry as a whole has shifted priorities by so much - beyond the point of no return- for better or for worse.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

You hit the nail on the head saying that some computers are not "for you" anymore. When I am on Windows or Mac, both of which I loved for a long time, and still do in certain versions, I feel like I never know what's coming next. One moment you like me, next time you don't. One day you want to be the quiet nerdy kid who's always got my back, that's really nice. But the next day you want to please everyone, rearrange all my shit, and gossip about me to all your MLM friends. One moment you want to be predictable, dependable, usable. Then the next day you want to interrupt my work while you do your hair. And I get it, you're trying to figure yourself out, you've got bills to pay, that's totally fine. However, I just won't be able to spend as much time with you anymore, because I'm trying to get some work done. It's not you, it's me. Maybe we can still hang out sometimes? I'll make some space for you in a VM.

hoppla 6y ago

What I want from an OS, is if I do nothing, nothing should happen. Listening on network interfaces, you can see how your OS is integrating itself to the Borg collective.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

You should try Linux. The small price you pay by having to hold just a little more symbols in your head gives you an OS outside of reach of normal people and all these "improvements" pushed onto normal people by the executives and large corps.