2 ms·

Aside from all of the planned obsolescence that others are talking about in the comments (which rightfully deserves discussion), i can't help but to feel like t

Aside from all of the planned obsolescence that others are talking about in the comments (which rightfully deserves discussion), i can't help but to feel like this hardly works for information and communication technology devices - smartphones, tablets, laptops/netbooks, desktop computers, consoles etc. The industry as a whole has this odd desire to always push for better hardware and newer things, to the point where Windows 11 refused to support older AMD processors and whatnot. At the same time, Android 8.1 (the OS on one of my older phones) has been abandoned and thus makes the device not an entirely viable backup phone; unless i'm okay with running insecure software, or want to install custom ROMs that will break things, especially in the case of a non-mainstream vendor. To me, it feels like we should stop forcing progress before its time has come, which we currently do with better hardware that is used in suboptimal ways and tossing aside everything that can't keep up, as opposed to actually investing decades to write better software. Right now, my desktop PC has a 1st gen Ryzen 3 1200. If it were not for the OS, the browser and almost every piece of software and even game that i want to play becoming more bloated, i could safely use it for a decade with no issues, Wirth's law be damned. In my servers i have 200GEs that are similarly old and yet, are fully sufficient for my homelab needs, but eventually you won't be able to buy any old new stock for reasonable prices, because AMD will be off chasing whatever new skew or technology they need to remain competitive. Even Firefox, the browser that was supposed to be "the good one" (e.g. default in most Linux distros, less controversial than Chrome/Chromium) got noticeably worse sometime around the Quantum upgrade in regards to its RAM usage, even when you limit its content process count to just 1. Similarly, it feels like most IDEs nowadays are also somewhat heavyweight - why can't i have exceedingly boring looking software that has a lot of the smart autocomplete that i'd expect, yet doesn't slow the whole machine down when things need to be re-rendered because of a non-native UI toolkit? Just look at how snappy Lazarus is: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ And yet, i cannot feasibly do webdev or many projects with it, because no hype means no new tools, no ecosystem support and so on, so i'm essentially dragged along to use whatever the modern tech choices are, like JetBrains products which are admittedly otherwise great and allow me to work with almost every popular tech stack, yet still eat lots of RAM. I guess this is less of a rant and more of a question to the people here: how do you fight back against this supposed progress, that somehow manages to couple security updates and feature updates with otherwise unnecessary bells, whistles and unreasonable amount of browser tech and whitespace in most software? How do you fight back against your hand being forced to create e-waste? Do you use Alpine, Debian (LXDE, LXQt or even XFCE) or another lightweight Linux distro (or even something of the BSD variety) as a daily driver and live with the fact that some software and most of gaming will often be a no-go (about 30/120 games that i have on Steam are even supported on Linux)? Do you do complicated setups with Windows VMs and GPU passthrough and relative mouse movement modes or something? Maybe you try to cut down your Windows installs as much as possible, removing bloat regularly, attempting to match Microsoft's ability to put it in, in combination with dual booting? Or do you just have a dedicated machine or two that (hopefully) aren't connected to the network and run EOL software (i've personally seen folks doing that with Windows XP), thus freeing you from updates that do things that you don't want? Or is there a really nice solution that i'm not aware of?

BirAdam 5y ago
I have had similar feelings, and these were made worse when I realized that my XT is actually still perfectly fit for most things people need to do (read some text or send some text on the web, word processing, spreadsheets, email). It can even do these things graphically and with low res photos via Windows 3. This means that for most people, new computers were not truly necessary. Obviously, for any large photos or for video that has even a decent quality, an XT is not enough. This particular problem generates hundreds of millions of tons of e-waste every single year. The constant churn strips resources during production, and it pollutes during production and disposal as most of this waste is just tossed to the third world and never truly dealt with. A major driving force behind all of this churn is actually financial. The global financial system is run by a debt based currency. More of this currency is created constantly due to fractional reserve lending, and due to government spending (all government spending in the current system creates money, and the government bonds are treated as an asset by central governments against which still more money is lent and thus created in fractional reserve systems, US dollars are then used by foreign banks as an asset to create still more money). With constant inflation, money must go somewhere. If money is sat on it loses value, thus all investment class assets see ever higher climbing valuations and any dip is temporary even though it shouldn’t be. Companies can therefore get billion dollar valuations without even having revenue (in a rational world the value of such a company is zero or even negative), and they can run off of investment despite losing money year over year. When some of these companies finally go bankrupt it’s only a momentary down turn for a given index of stocks, and nothing else really happens. This is also why, despite the 2008 crash, the housing market is still bananas and over valued. Money must go somewhere and as investors get wary of stocks they drive funds into housing. People buy properties without even seeing them because they know that land at least has some value and inflation is getting stupid… they need to put their money _somewhere_. When people have no real method of holding value and are also too poor to invest, they are incentivized to spend. If some bank actually offered interest on savings that was higher than inflation, people might save. As it is, the poor have no recourse. Spend it is. By spending, businesses get a signal to produce. The production will keep increasing in speed until either the global financial system collapses or until too many jobs are eliminated by automation. The companies using such automation to produce will then be driven into bankruptcy (not enough buyers to pay the bills), people will again gain employment (because the automated companies are no more), and the cycle will repeat. The only way to put a stop to recklessness like this is to have money _cost something_. Either governments must be responsible and have low debt to earnings (think Singapore), or countries must have hard currencies where more is only produced when the value is high enough to warrant very expensive mining operations. Such economic conditions allow for savings and more gradual paces of innovation and development where things actually get tested, go through QA, and so on (as opposed to millions of laptops being shipped with keyboards that are broken by bread crumbs or software that is so bad it allows root access if you knock on the door properly). As it is, companies cannot do those things lest they miss revenue targets and lose whatever the inflation rate is in real terms year over year. As for dealing with it? I just accept that I will have lower performance starting year 2 of ownership of any new device, and on-going until it is finally not truly usable in the modern world.

BirAdam 5y ago

I have had similar feelings, and these were made worse when I realized that my XT is actually still perfectly fit for most things people need to do (read some text or send some text on the web, word processing, spreadsheets, email). It can even do these things graphically and with low res photos via Windows 3. This means that for most people, new computers were not truly necessary. Obviously, for any large photos or for video that has even a decent quality, an XT is not enough. This particular problem generates hundreds of millions of tons of e-waste every single year. The constant churn strips resources during production, and it pollutes during production and disposal as most of this waste is just tossed to the third world and never truly dealt with. A major driving force behind all of this churn is actually financial. The global financial system is run by a debt based currency. More of this currency is created constantly due to fractional reserve lending, and due to government spending (all government spending in the current system creates money, and the government bonds are treated as an asset by central governments against which still more money is lent and thus created in fractional reserve systems, US dollars are then used by foreign banks as an asset to create still more money). With constant inflation, money must go somewhere. If money is sat on it loses value, thus all investment class assets see ever higher climbing valuations and any dip is temporary even though it shouldn’t be. Companies can therefore get billion dollar valuations without even having revenue (in a rational world the value of such a company is zero or even negative), and they can run off of investment despite losing money year over year. When some of these companies finally go bankrupt it’s only a momentary down turn for a given index of stocks, and nothing else really happens. This is also why, despite the 2008 crash, the housing market is still bananas and over valued. Money must go somewhere and as investors get wary of stocks they drive funds into housing. People buy properties without even seeing them because they know that land at least has some value and inflation is getting stupid… they need to put their money _somewhere_. When people have no real method of holding value and are also too poor to invest, they are incentivized to spend. If some bank actually offered interest on savings that was higher than inflation, people might save. As it is, the poor have no recourse. Spend it is. By spending, businesses get a signal to produce. The production will keep increasing in speed until either the global financial system collapses or until too many jobs are eliminated by automation. The companies using such automation to produce will then be driven into bankruptcy (not enough buyers to pay the bills), people will again gain employment (because the automated companies are no more), and the cycle will repeat. The only way to put a stop to recklessness like this is to have money _cost something_. Either governments must be responsible and have low debt to earnings (think Singapore), or countries must have hard currencies where more is only produced when the value is high enough to warrant very expensive mining operations. Such economic conditions allow for savings and more gradual paces of innovation and development where things actually get tested, go through QA, and so on (as opposed to millions of laptops being shipped with keyboards that are broken by bread crumbs or software that is so bad it allows root access if you knock on the door properly). As it is, companies cannot do those things lest they miss revenue targets and lose whatever the inflation rate is in real terms year over year. As for dealing with it? I just accept that I will have lower performance starting year 2 of ownership of any new device, and on-going until it is finally not truly usable in the modern world.