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Old man yells at cloud
- ironmagma 4y agoWhere's the "objective" part here? It's not impossible to do -- start with a straightforward definition of "good" (we need an axiom) and then show the data that these things have drifted away from that direction.
- teen 4y agoThe first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can. The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there. The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse overall than old cars. Electric cars are amazing tech.
- cfeduke 4y agoThough games that couldn't be patched weren't as complex but still at least as fun or more fun than today's games. Obviously my opinion. The article is getting at that you cannot just pop in a cart and play a game - there's ceremony with today's games. And for what? It's not a better experience. Unless that's all one knows. Then maybe it's... just an experience, I guess. the rigamarole I had to go through so my son and I could play a Double Dragon title as a 2P simultaneous experience on my X-Box is the stuff of maximum frustration. Like, exhausting. I pine for the days of hitting the "select" button to choose "2 Player" in NES Contra's main menu and off we go, playing two player. Today, such a feat is amazing technology.
- goosedragons 4y agoIts not a Switch in the article. There's also this bad trend where publishers literally leave pieces of the game off the disc/cartridge and force you to download the rest. Not a patch, the actual game.
- adrr 4y agoIs it worse than the time when games came on multiple disks or cds and you had to switch during the game? How many cds did myst come on? Prior cds was floppies which you couldn't even install it on a HD because the floppies had copy protection on.
- goosedragons 4y agoYes it is worse. You have the entire game with a multi-disc game. Switching takes like 2 minutes max and can be done offline.
- brigade 4y agoThat "trend" isn't shipping incomplete builds, but rather that the engineering work to minimize delta update sizes simply isn't a priority for games with infrequent patches, and YouTubers can't tell the difference.
- goosedragons 4y agoUh no. I'm not talking about updates. I'm talking about the game medium literally not containing the entire game because the publisher is too fucking cheap to spring for extra discs or a bigger cart. Some examples include L.A Noire, Spyro Trilogy, GTA trilogy, Tony Hawk 1+2 on Switch, PC games like Doom 2016 or MGSV or CoD:MW II on Series X.
- brigade 4y agoLA Noire is an excellent example of my point - people just assumed the disc didn't have the game because the day-one patch was 3/4 of the installed size, but no, the delta update from the GM version on disc was just that bad.
- goosedragons 4y agoI'm talking L.A Noire ON SWITCH. Even the box tells you it needs an extra download to be usable. https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/354397-la-noire-switch-download-size-digital-physical https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/354397-la-noire-switch-d...
- quanticle 4y agoNo, I think that games that couldn't be patched were, at the very least, just as good and very likely a lot better than modern games. At the very least, the fact that the game couldn't be patched meant that companies invested in QA and testing. In those days, "going gold" or shipping the master ROM was a big deal, and so companies went out of their way to ensure that their product didn't have any huge showstopper bugs prior to launch. In theory, modern games, with patching could be even better. They could be just as well tested as older games, but also ship patches to fix the things that do slip through testing. But in practice nobody does that. Instead, game developers just compress the schedule, knowing full well that they can now ship games with totally breaking bugs that get addressed with multi-gigabyte "day one" patches.
- shadowgovt 4y agoSurvivorship bias. Games that couldn't be patched were better if they worked on your architecture. Otherwise you were just left out in the cold or you bought an entirely new PC to play them. Consoles were better because (after the Crash) the vendors guarded them jealously and put the developers through an absolute hell of quality control to confirm they shipped a working product on the cartridge. Of course, the consequence is that they had massive editorial power over the games that existed in their ecosystem.
- quanticle 4y agoYou're proving my point. You're saying that the quality controls imposed upon developers by the console manufacturers resulted in fewer, but higher quality games. I'm saying that's a good thing.
- mberning 4y agoMan vehicles are a big one. All of the infotainment crap, the 200 control computers, electronic wastegate turbos, etc. etc. are going to age so poorly. There is a reason why cars with mininal BS are fetching such a premium on the used market.
- kashkhan 4y agopeak toyota/lexus was around 2006. After that all downhill.
- bitexploder 4y ago4runner are still decent.
- Kon-Peki 4y agoThe current generation 4Runner went on sale in mid-2009. The engine was first introduced in 2002 and the transmission in 2005. It should be half the price, but people will apparently pay Toyota just about anything for it.
- bitexploder 4y agoRelative to the market it is still a good deal, especially if you actually off road and camp with it. There is a reason there are so many here in Colorado.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoProbably a better choice than a bronco for just a few more years as ford irons out the kinks
- bitexploder 4y agoReviews and personal experience with new Bronco (not sport) are overwhelmingly positive, though. No real issues. Let's see how the power plants hold up.
- lawgimenez 4y agoIt's hard to relate with these first world issues.
- kashkhan 4y agoi was in the "third" world last week and i had half gig symmetric fiber internet. Today i am in colorado with cable modem that can barely hit 60mbps on a good day and 4mpbs up.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoWhich country # were you in? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_Internet_connection_speeds#Fixed_broadband https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
- kashkhan 4y agobrasil #49
- mensetmanusman 4y ago“In truth, the evolution of vehicle technology has not been a good one over-all.” Safety-wise, nothing has scored higher than new EVs like the Tesla, so there is some progress. Infotainment-wise, that’s a different story…
- fastball 4y agoThe Tesla can play AAA video games as well. Not sure what else you want out of your infotainment system.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI don’t have a Tesla. Genuine question. Does anyone actually play video games on their car’s console? If you’re that desperate to play a video game while driving or as a passenger, can’t you use your phone?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- seb1204 4y agoThis was entertaining to read and I tend to agree with the author.
- NL807 4y agoRename the headline to: "Software has gotten objectively worse" Technology on the hardware front has long track record of getting better. But the software stack running on them has gotten worse. Writing good, optimal code is no longer economical. Move fast and break things. Marketing wants new features and done quickly. They want to monetise everything, and run things on subscription model. And they want to spy on you. VC funded tech is even worse.
- midoridensha 4y agoYeah, with all the money being in software (at least in western nations' job markets), it's honestly amazing the hardware keeps getting better and better. I guess we can thank the Asians for this, especially the Chinese.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shyn3 4y agoIf your internet is down you can't play your gamepass games offline. Exciting stuff.
- DoktorDelta 4y agoIf you set your Xbox settings to "Go Offline" on console or PC after you lose the connection, your Game Pass games will work for up to 30 days before an active internet connection is required
- fastball 4y agoBut Game Pass as an option didn't even exist before – more options is still net gain. However, if/when we get to the point where Game Pass is your only option, that will be a different story.
- shyn3 4y agoAs options grow flexibility for power users disappears is my challenge.
- habitue 4y agoThese are all examples of tradeoffs that have been made, and just collecting examples of the downsides of those tradeoffs without mentioning the upsides. Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and an "ok" button. Similarly, games have traded off fast startup time for richer textures and assets, and the ability to patch bugs.
- mfer 4y agoWe're really discussing user experience which has gotten worse. When trade-offs are being evaluated what are they in service of? I'm going to suggest it's something other than a great user experience.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago> but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface". Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.
- elcritch 4y agoI bought a new Mazda last year and it doesn't have a touch screen. Big selling point for me. Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.
- etempleton 4y agoI don’t mind touchscreens in cars, but there are just some controls that are used all the time and should be buttons. I think most car manufacturers are figuring out that right mix…except perhaps Tesla who is insistent on removing ever tactile button for a touchscreen or capacitive touch button.
- rektide 4y agoJFC why does "It Takes Two" require 19.13 GB of network to update, but only 10.00 GB of disk? This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection. Then it sat there for an hour, before I came back to Origin. And then... it told me I needed to update my game. Which went at like ~3 mbps average for another two hours, and hammered the shit out of my disk. Just ship the updated game! Stop making everyone go through every delta! Assholes!
- neffo 4y agoLikely, some of the download is replacing disk-installed content from the original game content.
- rnd0 4y ago>This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection. That sounds like my experience the last couple of times I've tried playing star trek online. Never actually got it to work, and wasted a lot of time downloading god knows what.
- gonzo41 4y agoIMO feature phones with music and texting > smart phones with everything and social media.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoMore accurate title: some aspects of technology have gotten objectively worse. E.g. for cars, the whole touchscreen thing instead of knobs for things like temperature control is worse, but on the other hand cars are safer than they used to be. Similarly, while yes there are some aspects of video games that have gotten worse, like needing to download a patch for an offline game, there's some stuff that's better: there's a veritable mountain of indie games out there with great content for a great price. WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation.
- adamdusty 4y agoHow many cars are actually like that? I only know a few people with newer (2020+) cars and all of them have physical controls as well as touch screen controls. They're all Asian cars so maybe that's why, but anecdotally I've never seen a car completely controlled by a touchscreen.
- dls2016 4y ago> WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation. I recall $60 NES games in Toys R Us and a quick google shows that to be correct (for the top tier games). That's $130 these days! And re: cars, they are so much more reliable and safe than previous decades.
- jonas21 4y agoIf you showed someone from 30 years ago a modern video game, a Tesla, or even TikTok, it would absolutely blow their mind. So the author comes up with some nitpicks and declares "technology has gotten objectively worse". I guess the title checks out.
- acdha 4y agoThe point is that this isn’t evenly distributed. A Tesla would be super impressive — but they’d also rightly point out that the giant dashboard TV distracts the driver, and moving the touchscreen controls randomly in patches is unsafe. That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- grishka 4y agoModern technology is nice when it works. Except it doesn't always work. Did old technology work flawlessly? No, it didn't. Memory protection in operating systems is relatively new and older computers came with dedicated reset buttons for a reason. But there was a point when it was balanced. Software was stable enough, built mostly by people who actually knew what they were doing, used the hardware more or less to the full extent, and was actually empowering users by being a useful tool, not doing everything to get some product manager a promotion.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- greatgib 4y agoI don't see exactly what will blow their mind about TikTok.
- crtasm 4y agoFilming then quickly sharing high quality video to a global audience, with a device that fits in your pocket?
- extr 4y agoHe had me until he started shitting on MS Office. I would disagree, I think O365 kind of crushes it value-wise. And yeah, they added the ribbon in 2007. The UI hardly changes year to year, and if you know Excel 2013 you will pick up Excel O365 pretty quickly, and you will actually be pretty psyched about some of the new features.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoSubscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years. So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.
- gtirloni 4y agoYes, you're not the target audience. That happens.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago> "...there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years." Uh, yes, there is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-student-2021/cfq7ttc0h8n8?activetab=pivot:overviewtab&atc=true https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoWow, I had no idea about this. Thank you. I wonder if it was buried or I just didn’t invest enough time looking for a non-subscription purchase.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 4y ago>But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR Isn't a subscription better then? Assuming the worst case of needing 3 months a year that would be 20.97 a year. Buying the home edition used to be $150. Office 365 will be cheaper until after 7 years and by then a new version of office would have been released.
- Viper512 4y agoVideo games. I just bought my kids a switch to hopefully feel that nes era gaming. It kind of hits on it. Pre-xbox was nice. The game was pretty solid state. The systems were 'dumb' and performed the function they were designed to do. There wasn't 10 control configurations, touch this and that. They were games. It's sad with the newer Mario's that if you die repeatedly it gives you a powerful at the start of the level.
- shadowgovt 4y agoWhy is that sad?
- AJRF 4y agoI tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked. - Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed. - Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken. - Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together! - Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later. - Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress. - Uninstall Civ 6 I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
- shadowgovt 4y agoHonestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself. The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to. ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.
- flumpcakes 4y agoI’ve had a horrible experience with that game. From extremely poor performance on an expensive graphics card, to the game just refusing to start without crashing.
- etempleton 4y agoI don’t agree with all of the example a here—I think software subscriptions work well in some instances and cars, besides a few outliers that have a terrible over reliance on touchscreens, are generally the best they have ever been—but social media and video games are worse in many ways. Social media companies, but Facebook in particular, have always operated out of fear of missing the next big trend and never stopped to be content with what they were. And that poisonous attitude took over social media. They are all complicated algorithm driven nightmares. Twitter’s ability to sort chronologically is a cold glass of water in hell. Video games aren’t completely bad. I think games are in some ways the best they have ever been, especially when it all comes together, but it is rare when it all comes together these days. All the big publishers put out broken, derivative games that require constant patching with giant downloads. It is especially bad on PC. Every big game is some level of broken for the first year. Part of that is probably a hangover from the pandemic, but I really hope something changes. It feels downright unprofessional the state some games release in.
- operatingthetan 4y agoThe thing that bugs me about video games these days is that they all seem like a bunch of work instead of the fun of discovery.
- abraxas 4y agoFor me it has felt like that since the early 2000s. I was born in the seventies. Is it an age thing? I can only get into a couple of games that were made after 2000. But I beat every cave on all 5 levels in Boulder Dash!
- agumonkey 4y agoI have troubles playing games with younger siblings. My brain never fully adjusted to ultrafast post ps3 games. Something about analog 3d aiming that is just not natural enough for my neurons, while they got fed on it and it's a second skin to them.
- drtz 4y agoRegarding video games > This is objectively a worse experience than I grew up with (and it costs a whole lot more too.) This is objectively wrong. Inflation-adjusted Nintendo console launch prices have been trending downward since the 80s. Games are cheaper too. I remember saving up to spend $40-$50 for NES games in the early 90s, which would be in the $100 range in today's dollars. That's significantly more expensive than the $60 first-party Switch games today.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThere was an era maybe 10-15 years ago where so many PC games were just these semi-automatic ports from the Xbox version, and they were just awful and lazy. That pretty much killed PC gaming for me. I remember it got so bad that Borderlands 2 specifically marketed on the fact that the PC version was not just a lazy port. They actually advertised that you could change the FOV.
- sakras 4y agoAh I still remember the good old days of TotalBiscuit, checking the options menu for an FOV slider for every game. I legitimately think that if it wasn’t for him, we’d still be in this rut of lazy ports. May he rest in peace.
- throw8383833jj 4y agoIt's so true: * I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!) * Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs. * the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
- superasn 4y agoI guess it's the glass half full or empty type situation 1. You can watch your favorite movie sitting on a bus stop 2. sure but i can listen to any song i like those that aren't on my playlist thanks to 4g instead of hearing annoying radio ads. i can frickin see the tyre pressure of each individual tyre fwiw. 3. yes but again i can watch anything i like as compared to having a tivo or even before that when you missed your favorite show at 9pm, you missed it forever.
- barbs 4y ago> I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!) Are you running an old version of iOS? I can run Netflix on my iPhone SE running iOS 15.7.1, which should be available for your iPhone 7+.
- MikusR 4y agoYou had youtube in your tv when you were a kid?
- newsclues 4y agoGoogle Search was better 10 years ago. Linux is better, OS X hasn't been as awesome as they focused on emojis and stuff, Windows seems to have improved in many ways but regressed in others. Car interfaces are going to hell with capacitive buttons and touch screens, instead of simple and reliable old tech that works. Services instead of owning games/apps.
- starky 4y agoThe extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing decisions and thus revenue, companies are now being held hostage to be constantly driving revenue number growth. This is easily done by implementing subscriptions or implementing hardware technologies with a limited lifetime. For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired. On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it. Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agohttps://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ The domain says it all.
- pketh 4y agoI agree but I also wonder how much of this is a failing or ceiling of capitalism? Where things can never be complete or perfected, where we have to invent new problems to sell new crap?
- masswerk 4y agoA key point of what is now old tech is/was multiple paths of operations. On the other hand we have what I'd call appification, where there is just a single path and anything else has to be weeded out, for the sake of simplicity and the benefit of the user. As it happens, as of today, Twitter (which provided quite a remarkable number of paths of operation), succumbed to appification and removed the option to retrieve search results ordered by recentness. (Because this is not how you operate it? You do want the most prominent ones, as by Twitter-weight, and nothing else.) As this has been rather crucial to how I operated Twitter, I guess, you have to count me out.
- lionsdan 4y agoSame for me, as of this evening, the 'Latest' tab is now gone (it was there this afternoon). This largely eliminates my preferred way to use Twitter. I suppose I was of little value to them as a not-logged-in user, so they have eliminated any value for me.
- theferalrobot 4y ago> Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one! Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only somewhat dramatized memory of things. I loved every second of that struggle which is maybe why remember it. This seems to be a case of seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It was sooo much harder to get a group of friends together to play some counter strike than it is today. It’s not even close.
- paxys 4y agoThis entire post is pretty much the definition of having rose tinted glasses when remembering the past. There was a lot of annoying shit back then too, you just choose to not retain those memories.
- theferalrobot 4y agoAm I misreading your post? I think that’s my whole point right?
- shmageggy 4y agoSomeone is agreeing with you... on the internet.
- theferalrobot 4y agoOh lol - I read it as a critique of my post (which confused me) not an agreement about the parent article
- subradios 4y agoThere's an element that all the silliness of the LAN party was technically necessary for the production, and as a grassroots thing the hardship added to the buyin and culture.
- zug_zug 4y agoRe: videogames - no. I had about 9 video-games for my NES. The majority were unplayable enough that I never beat them as a child (Zelda 2, Double-dragon 2, mario 1, mario 3, gauntlet). Zelda 2 would routinely delete all of my progress because there was a physical battery in the cartridge that was running out. I had to work all kinds of magic to get the system to even start (alcohol wipes, blowing, cramming stuff in there). None of the NES games had an acceptable multiplayer. If he had said N64 then maybe. Regardless, downloading a 1 gigabyte update to a game takes less time than driving to the store to buy a game, so I think the whole complaint is baseless. But this to me shows the author isn't being remotely objective in his evaluations. Re: car touchscreens - then buy a car without touchscreens. This is just a 4 completely unrelated complaints. Out of the 70,000 things that have changed in the last 30 years I could easily cherry-pick 4 that have gotten better and write an article about how everything has gotten objectively better.
- dweekly 4y agoWhen you've driven to the store to buy the game, pop it in, and immediately have to wait for a multi gigabyte download, the farce is made most apparent. You don't buy games at a store, you buy game coupons - the disc is just a proof of payment that is used to download the game, since the fact that it's on a disc is reasonable evidence that it's already out of date.
- zug_zug 4y agoI get it, there's one tiny aspect which is frustrating about some modern games. I don't like mandatory updates either. Bu if you're saying that one tiny inconvenience outweighs all the improvements since NES you're just lying to yourself and everyone around you. If I was a child I'd have waited 60 minutes PER BOOT to play a game with graphics, resolution, multiplayer of It Takes Two.
- agumonkey 4y agoThey weren't unplayable, they were hard. As a kid we routinely used to go far in the game with fun, as an adult I was shocked at how difficult they were and couldn't finish anything but we used to. Also some games had nice enough multiplayer modes that we spent all night on these with my cousin (bubble bobble, rc pro am). I wouldn't compare the 8bit era with the post ps3 era
- krony 4y agoGoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was peak “play video games with a group of friends”. Now, it seems like every game is single player per console. So if my son has buddies over, they all haul their own Xbox’s and monitors (or scrounge my old ones from the basement closet). It’s considerably more difficult. Even though the TV screens now are so much larger! Craziness. I solidly agree.
- asciimov 4y agoFor me playing at home with a group of friends peaked with Halo on Xbox and Smash on GameCube. Halo let you get 8 friends together on 2 tvs and 2 Xboxes with just an Ethernet cable, you could double those numbers with with a switch. Games still loaded relatively fast, and you didn’t have to spend hours waiting for downloads.
- NickC25 4y agoThere's something that sitting side-by-side with your teammate or opponent that modern online gaming completely misses. It's way more fun, and way more social.
- stephc_int13 4y agoIn my case, the whole Smartphone ecosystem has been a disappointment. I was an early adopter of PDAs and early smartphones, I used them constantly and wrote apps and games for those. Today I barely touch my old iPhone SE. I find the devices boring and bland, infinite scrolling seems to be the only thing to do. F2P ruined games, and most apps are crappy/cloud based/badly implemented web apps.
- CharlesW 4y ago> I was an early adopter of PDAs and early smartphones, I used them constantly and wrote apps and games for those. As background, I was one of the first to have a Kyocera QCP-6035. Now that we've established how cool I am, I confess that I do not understand how one can hold a modern smartphone in their hand and be wistful about those clumsy early years.
- flumpcakes 4y agoIt might be hardware too… or the software/firmware side: Recently I’ve had every DX12 game crash at start-up, time to RMA my expensive graphics card. I buy an Intel Arc A750 as a cheap stop-gap as my CPU has no iGPU. I completely wipe windows and start from scratch—I can now play DX12 games! Oh, no, they hang after about 1 hour of play time and brick the system. Hard reboot required. Also, if my PC sleeps/hibernates then on-wake I get a screen full of GPU mess for about 1 minute before the PC hard resets by itself. Literally impossible to sleep and wake my PC with a an Arc A750 plugged into it. The drivers (latest and greatest direct from Intel) also report my system does not support ReBAR- but it is enabled in my BIOS and reported working with other utilities like CPUZ. I honestly disappear, I’ve never had so many problems with computers as I have in the last 5+ years. I’d trade 10 year old graphics for 10 year old stability.
- CharlesW 4y ago> I’d trade 10 year old graphics for 10 year old stability. Would you trade 3-year-old graphics for 25-year-old stability? If so, my friend, console gaming is where it's at!
- yabones 4y agoEh, it's not much better. You want to play a game, but the game needs 80GB of updates before it will open. Oops, it dropped out 90% of the way there and needs to start over. It's better than GPU-driver-hell, but consoles aren't without their flaws
- fomine3 4y agoBuying very new Intel Arc is wrong choice
- root_axis 4y agoThis article disproves its own thesis. The article shows that technology has gotten objectively better, the problem is that better technology is a double edged sword, but cynics only like to acknowledge the negatives. This contradiction is perfectly embodied by the first example where the author bemoans 45 minutes to download 20 gigs over the internet (which is even a bit slow by today's standards). In the time of the n64 that the author alludes to you couldn't even download 20gb from local media to a hard disk in 45 minutes, not to mention there is no hard drive or media even available on the order of tens of gbs. This is objectively better technology, in fact, the technology is so unbelievably amazing that the author is actually impatient about waiting 45 minutes for what was literally a feat of grandiose fiction as imagined by the video game player of 1996. Of course, it's not lost on me that when you want to just sit down and play a game, it's frustrating that advancements in technology can also be used to create a barrier to your enjoyment, certainly this is not good and nobody likes it, but it doesn't then follow that the technology is objectively worse because of it. Also, there are others who actually like this, they'd be excited to know that they're getting the freshest experience with bug and content updates, there are many people who deliberately hold off playing new games so that they can wait for the first round of patches to fix major issues. All the other examples suffer from the same kind of contradiction, but I won't elucidate each one, the point is, technology has gotten objectively better. I should write an article, "Old Man Yells At Cloud: Ungrateful hedonists don't know how good they have it"
- acdha 4y ago> This article disproves its own thesis. I wouldn’t be so quick to be defensive here. While it’s true that networks and drives are faster, it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second and many modern games are much worse on that front compared to a Nintendo which was playable in about the same time it took a CRT monitor to boot up. A more thoughtful criticism would be thinking about how gaming companies could offer the things people want (high resolution imagery, for example) with more care for the user experience - e.g. downloading in the background or after someone’s done for the night, optimizing their file structures so a small change doesn’t force most of the assets to be retransferred, telling you whether an update fixes a critical bug or can be deferred, etc. If you simplt attack people for accurately criticizing something you like, you miss out on a chance for it to be even better.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoThe big problem is that there are so many points of failure that need to be kept up to date and they can fail at any time. That goes from backend systems to frontend systems. It's not too bad if there's a paid system's adim to deal with the failures but the plain everyday consumer deals with the points of failure too. I know as a consumer all I want is to watch a show not try to figure out a Rube Goldberg machine just to watch it. It sucks.
- berjin 4y agoTed had a point that the industrial revolution is a disaster for the human race. The thing is you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube when your economic competitors have access to all the same technology. It's a race to the bottom.
- User23 4y agoThe video gaming doesn't really ring true. When I was a kid when it was bedtime unless you left the (S)NES on with the TV off and nobody shut it off in the meantime, odds were good your progress was done. On the other hand with a Switch you just turn it off and when you turn it back on you're right where you were left. The quality of life increase for young gamers is absolutely huge.
- capybara_2020 4y agoThe complexity that this article talks about was all built to solve a problem and in a lot of cases it does solve that problem. The problem might not exist for the author and a particular user and that is what makes the tech hard for them. I cannot imagine a world without downloads, I spent a lot of time in my younger days in parts of the world where finding a gaming system, lets alone a cartridge/CD was a nightmare. I have spent hours/days/weeks looking for games. Digital downloads have virtually eliminated that problem no matter where I am. The whole social media complexity is about how to make money off people especially when they potentially cannot afford/want to pay for a service(plus other problems like how to keep up with shareholders that expect to see a business constantly grow while being risk averse). It solves that problem with ads and a whole bunch of complexity to increase revenue. Making the app complicated for users but solving the revenue problem. I used to be a big PGAdmin fan for Postgres management. But then they rewrote the app as a web app and I stopped using it because it was completely broken for me. But it was done to solve a problem with tech debt. It is very easy to see in hindsight what went wrong, but at the point the solutions were created it is probably the best solution possible with the give constraints. I have seen code that was a horrible mess and wondered what the devs were thinking but then I have written horrible code too, but it was the best I could do at that point with the information I had then. I did not actively set out to write bad code and at that point I just solved the problem. But in hindsight it was horrible code. This is such a complex topic and I do not think it is a case of "things were good in the old days, now they are bad". It is more a case of, ok today we have this information how do we fix X. But then that might lead to unknown complexity down the road. Plus there is the whole needing to cater to the needs of different people with very varied interests and often contradictory needs.
- dontknowwhyihn 4y agoI love my Nintendo Classic- no accounts, no ads, works offline. I also agree with everything the author wrote about cars. I would add- for all the technology in cars, you still can’t see the exact amount of fuel in your tank. Because then you could determine exactly what mileage you’re getting.
- windex 4y agoCloud has made irritating monthly payments possible even for small and tiny bits of rarely used software. As with electronics without removable batteries that will die soon, this trend is not something I will support by buying anymore. This year, I am cutting back on subscriptions in favor or whatever alternative that allows me a "reasonable" one time payment option. I hate having external dependencies and have developed subscription fatigue.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoIs there a way to view HN without blog posts? I just want the technology, not the editorials
- sriku 4y agoI'm generally of the opinion that games are a lesser evil than TV so I'm slightly happier when the kids turn on the Xbox instead of open the flix. However, if there is a gap of a few days, the downloads start ... And we cant play without the updates. A simple solution could be let people play the version they already have while the update is in progress. But no, the services have to be on the internet and their economics perhaps doesn't consider it worthy enough to support the last week's version. When I was growing up .. to program, my friend and I connected the zxspectrum to a TV and switched it on to instantly get a BASIC prompt. Now I don't know what to do to get kids to experience the joy of programming (yeah I know about scratch yadayada). Making 2d games doesn't cut it for them since they're seen visual Nirvana before they got to create it. Strangely there seem to be some corners still fresh - like this surprise I got https://sriku.org/blog/2019/07/16/prolog-is-magic/ https://sriku.org/blog/2019/07/16/prolog-is-magic/ . Minecraft is the other sane and creative place that I let the kids hang out on. Relatively infrequent updates (thank you from the bottom of heart) and open ended creative play that could be seen as a programming/learning activity if I squint the right way. As Raph Koster put it - "fun is another word for learning". Another factor I wonder about is whether the economic system incentivizes this degradation. By shareholders insisting that their companies keep increasing their profits - even giving it an inviolable religious name like "fiduciary responsibility" - people at the helm could easily be forced to not "do the right thing" for the people. A few like Jobs may have been strong enough at one point ... But they are very few and most have no stomach or vision to challenge / fight that force. (Excuse typos due to mobile)
- javajosh 4y agoYou can get around all of this by being a "mindful consumer" - if you don't like how products are, don't use them. It's like a weak version of being Amish. Buy old better stuff - it's cheaper and better for the environment anyway. Bad trends will generally fade away (looking forward to seeing all physical buttons on an EV one day!). In the meantime, why not just buy an old game system with cartridges. (My kids like ecco the dolphin on the original genesis! I drive an old toyota with no screen! I still buy CDs and I enjoy listening to actual albums!)
- eru 4y ago> [...] and I enjoy listening to actual albums! No, you don't. :) As Wikipedia says on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album : > Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records collected in a bound book resembling a photograph album; [...] What you are enjoy is some weird newfangled thing where they put the whole 'album' on a single disc. Kids these days! What will they invent next? More context: > With the advent of 78 rpm records in the early 1900s, the typical 10-inch disc could only hold about three minutes of sound per side, so almost all popular recordings were limited to around three minutes in length.[10] Classical-music and spoken-word items generally were released on the longer 12-inch 78s, playing around 4–5 minutes per side. For example, in 1924, George Gershwin recorded a drastically shortened version of his new seventeen-minute composition Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The recording was issued on both sides of a single record, Victor 55225 and ran for 8m 59s.[11] By 1910, though some European record companies had issued albums of complete operas and other works, the practice of issuing albums was not widely taken up by American record companies until the 1920s. > By about 1910, bound collections of empty sleeves with a paperboard or leather cover, similar to a photograph album, were sold as record albums that customers could use to store their records (the term "record album" was printed on some covers). These albums came in both 10-inch and 12-inch sizes. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them. In the 1930s, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records by one performer or of one type of music in specially assembled albums, typically with artwork on the front cover and liner notes on the back or inside cover. Most albums included three or four records, with two sides each, making six or eight compositions per album.[7] See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuoFW2yAD7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuoFW2yAD7g for how people used to listen to a whole album of records in one go via automatic record changers.
- derrida 4y agoMost of this I think is caused not by engineers or technology, it's caused by competitive market forces that design things not because of its technological benefit for society but because they can control and siphon value - so we have incompatable APIs, "ecosystems" etc - and the code that runs it is about as inspired as a 17 year old who quickly had to write some PHP at 1am to ship on a router - tech companies are not about technological brilliance or simplicity or useability or high technology but about engineering social relations to siphon value - that is what corporate law and contemporary code is about. Code is a means of communication and the sort of thoughts represented in code are representative of pressured time and control that is exerted at corporations If it was designed based on good design principles, useability, liberation and so on - we'd have S-expressions in the browser and Javascript wouldn't have been a sort of attempt to make a lisp deal with xml and look like the language de jour - Java - but would be an actual lisp. The browser would not be a proliferation of 6 kinds of syntax that looks like a bathroom wall graffitti but rather each site would look like a single specimen of some species of plant (s-expressions of course being a great representation either of structured data or an abstract syntax tree) * The cause of conceptual proliferation which makes so many systems incompatable and sort of semi-broken *is greed* * The cause of simplicity and beauty (think a good physics theory) is in an attempt to communicate understanding and give that understanding to others, in essence thoughts based by intentions of parsimony, renunciation, generosity, understanding. In short the cause of simplicity *is kindness* So when people talk of "mindful use of technology" they mean this latter part - mindfulness works with contentment, generosity, understanding - if we keep grabbing at the next idea "oooh" "ah" constantly searching for the next hit (products) or even conceptual "hit" like suddenly the clouds will part and this thought will solve all our problems - that leads to conceptual proliferation. We allways are looking onwards to find the code that can solve this problem and if we find it it usually introduces its own new problems. Everything is trying to sell us on that what we have is deficient and we need more. Why not - learn and trust our tools? Here's a knife, some fruit and vegetables and a source of heat: go and cook! Corporations do they want to be ahead of the curve and siphon value into their "ecosystem" - we get 6 protocols and non-transparent interactions between things - like cooking with some demented expensive $600 multi appliance that sits there like a white elephant. That generosity and kindness is so central to simplicity is why I think the best kind of code has been written by people who are almost like monks, or they are like the old "ivory tower" sort - hermits with a stipend free to consider how to contribute to the world. In a word, the "Contemplatives". I think of Larry Wall and his interest in understanding the biblical texts giving us Perl and the Perl communities adaptation of the use of zen koans and "monk" type language. Or recently someone like David Botton who is also a rabbi who has gone a long way in Common Lisp to making a healthy community and empowering of people to make UIs like it's Borland Pascal days. OR the almost religious nature of "Freesoftware" RMS is another example - a hermit in the MIT office essentially with a mission of generosity of "people have a freedom to understand their own software". </rant>
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoTo be honest, I find a lot of the comments here pretty disappointing - they basically are rehashing what seems to always come up when articles talk about problems with the direction of technology: 1. "You're just viewing the past through rose-colored glasses!" 2. "Modern technology is amazing, these are just whiny nitpicks!" I don't think these comments are really wrong, but I do think they are missing the forest for the trees. A lot of optimism around technology as a force for good in, say, the mid 90s, has disappeared, even among the technologists that build the stuff. I'd argue that there is something behind this, and I think the author's list touches on a bunch of valid points. Case in point, social networks. When Facebook first came out, I remember being so excited by it - I reconnected with friends I hadn't talked to in years, and in a good way. I remember thinking how much of a useful tool it was for "casually" keeping in touch with friends. That is, I wasn't going to email everyone I knew when I got a new job, but it was nice when I posted about my job on Facebook that people commented, and I enjoyed hearing about the new things in my friend's lives. Obviously reams has been written about the downfall of Facebook, so I won't rehash that, only just to add that for me the utility of it has finally fallen so low that it wasn't hard to deactivate my account. That is, for years I was like "Man, Facebook is so shitty, but I worry about cancelling my account because every now and then I get a post from a friend that helps me connect with them." That's no longer true, and not just because of me, but because the vast majority of my friends must also be getting exhausted by Facebook because they rarely post stuff that I care to read. The irony is that I still have a strong desire to have the Facebook from the mid-late 00s in my life. I don't find that there are any social networks today that actually help you keep in touch with friends. They've all gotten addicted to the likes, infinite scroll, bullshit drama, and "tiktok-ization" of mindless content that they foisted on the rest of us so much that they now actually suck for keeping in touch with people you care about. That is what I think the author is getting at - technology has somehow forgotten what the ends are that it was supposed to be the means for.
- veridies 4y agoFor all of these, an attempt to add more features (patching, additional car controls, video sharing) leads to breaking something that works. It's not so much that new tech is bad; it's that we reached a stable, pleasant equilibrium (as with the car), and then added features without considering if they improved the UX (or with the goal of finding ways to increase monetization, eg by selling feature activation in cars or adding spyware to video games). I think one broad takeaway for me is that if tech cannot connect to the internet, it's often more pleasant to use.
- tptacek 4y agoThe rear passenger doors on a Tesla really won't open if the power fails?
- didgetmaster 4y agoIn the old days it used to take a whole hour to download a simple app with just a few files over a slow modem (if you were lucky to not have your connection fail midway). Nowadays with that high speed Internet connection you can download an app in...an hour...because the data needed just to get started is 10000x bigger.
- poulpy123 4y agoPeople here don't understand that he is not saying that technology got worse in power but that it got worse in usability. On another point I would just contradict his father here: to have had both car with electric windows and manual windows, I really much prefer electric windows.
- nunez 4y agoI mostly agree with Jon, but I'll be a contrarian for the sake of exercise. I can't speak to games, as I don't play them. I'm sure downloading updates to some $70 you just bought can't be fun. (I will say that it is insanely cool that much of the US has access to terrestrial gigabit or high-speed broadband and those that don't can Starlink. I used Starlink on a Royal Caribbean cruise recently. It was FAST. Way faster than the bullshit they had before. Crazy that you can get fast Internet literally anywhere now.) Social media telemetry is definitely invasive, and misinformation spreads faster than ever. But on the flipside, there are plenty of TikToks and Instagram accounts that are educational and useful, and it is very easy to find niches for literally everyone. Also, social media has made it really easy for businesses and customers to interact. The only reason why we do cool shit is because my wife gets notified of stuff on the socials. Also, much of the work done to make social media profitable (did anyone REALLY think that the FB of old would last? No-one would pay for FB outright) has led to an unbelievable amount of really cool tech that makes problems that were really difficult ten years ago child's play now (gRPC/Thrift/protobuf come to mind, and that's before frameworks like React or even standards like HTML5). Touchscreens are harder to develop muscle memory around than knobs and buttons. But now we have ELECTRIC cars that are unreasonably fast that you can fill up every day at home that get insane updates over the air like iPhones. I think that's pretty cool. I also really like the idea of not needing to completely upgrade my entire car just to get new key features. Yeah, subscriptions are everything these days, and I hate how predatory sites have become in getting you to convert. However, I also remember $99 getting you basically the most neutered version of Office ever, with no ability to upgrade. If you wanted a capable version of Office, you either paid the $300 or whatever it was (PER MAJOR RELEASE!), you got it free from school or employer, or your sailed the high seas and downloaded sweet wArEz with super cool happy hardcore music playing in the background while they produced serials that you hoped worked. These days, no need for serials because you can just pay $7/ month of every Office tool you need until you don't need it anymore, or you just do the free trial. I really really like the fact that software and contracts in general are super non-committal. (Remember when cell phone companies would only allow you to pay $69.99/mo for some BS 2-year plan with a BS phone that was WAY more expensive than it should have been and your only way out was a cool $500?) Netflix is garbage and half of their shows are trash quality. But I remember when pirating was the new hotness and ALL of the cordcutters wanted a la carte TV (i.e. paying for the channels they watched instead of paying $139.99/mo for 700 channels of garbage), and now we have that! It sucks that shows are spread out across a billion streaming apps, but I personally find that better than being forced to a single provider with artificial channel packages (not like my opinion matters here; I don't watch TV). That's before considering the absolutely insane amount of content out there that would have NEVER gotten airtime in the traditional entertainment industry. Do you think MKBHD, LTT or Try Guys would've gotten their own shows on the big three? VR, MR and ChatGPT are fucking terrifying, but at the same time I can see these technologies unlocking a lot of potential for humanity. Imagine MR assisted surgeries that derisk previously-impossible procedures, or freeing journalists from writing boring stories so they can focus more on investigative journalism, or having chatbots that actually fucking work. Everything is awesome and terrible. Always has been!
- throwaway14356 4y agoI just spend an hour (that I will never get back) trying to find the right app and establish a bluetooth connection between my washing machine and my iphone. I don't actually see the point of it but given the claim of capability it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. What seemed to be the correct app wanted to connect to a TV, there was some kind of copy cat app, not sure what to call it, it had the same name and talked of making the home smart. The 3rd app, after getting a flash light and scannining the bar code hidden behind the door, making an account twice and validating my email twice didn't want to connect at first since I didn't know I had to keep the washer switched off until the phone (if we can call it that) was actively searching for a washing machine. It didn't have permission from the washer to do anything and pressing the button that should have made it so did nothing. I looked in the settings and it dropped the connection silently. After restarting the app the washer was grayed out. Clicking on it did nothing. I just added a second washer with the same barcode and it connected again. It was marked as connected in the phone settings but the granting permission button still did nothing. The thing comes with countless programs but one should (so it is claimed) be able to download even more. I will certainly never use it but wanted to, you know, experience the experience. So now I have. It was everything I expected it to be and more. The exercise in stubbornness was truly in a league of its own well beyond my capabilities. Was I outsmarted? You tell me.
- j1elo 4y ago> New cars have everything on a touchscreen — like auto manufacturers noticed a trend from 2007 of phones moving to touchscreens, and decided a decade later that vehicle controls would benefit from the same evolution, never once considering that fumbling through a touchscreen UI in a rainstorm, trying to find the windshield wiper controls is an objectively worse experience than flipping a lever next to a steering wheel. Well, coincidentally, a couple days ago we had this in the HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283385 Since 2007 to 2020 when that study was done... one would hope auto makers would realize it too after 13 years
- theshrike79 4y ago45 minutes of downloading. Bah. Humbug. We had to transfer a perfectly legal copy of The Need for Speed (1995) from a friend's computer to mine. It took something like 45 3.5" diskettes when compressed with ARJ and split to multiple diskettes. We owned 15 diskettes in total. And I lived a good 3km away from said friend. So we biked between the houses and uncompressed the game one by one to my computer, went back to my friend and continued the compression/splitting process. And yes, there was a checksum error on disk 42 and we had to do it again. -- Later we I got a summer job where I welded together a zero modem cable and we tried Descent on multiplayer. Tried transferring the game through said cable. Took ages, it was actually faster to do the same ARJ split trick and swap two disks between the computers =)
- t0bia_s 4y agoThe good thing is... We dont need to waste our free time by more steering at screen. Real life has much more enjoyable things to do.
- komali2 4y agoi was having a conversation about this with my friend the other day, his theory is that technology used to required you to exercise your brain a wee bit, that it enhanced your thinking. But now the focus is on making it as slimmed down, "easy" as possible, brainless as possible, unfunctional as possible. It made me think about my understanding of the old GNU folks, that software should be free to modify, because everyone should be poking around in the software on their systems on their own. An ambitious dream probably, but I don't really hear about ideas like that in my day to day work anymore.
- dusted 4y agoThis article is absolutely fantastic, and a must-read! I disagree with the premise "every generation has a level of tech they're comfortable with and anything new becomes foreign". To be honest, I'm not even sure I think the safety-tradeoff of power-windows is worth the convenience of "pushing the button" instead of "turning the crank", and I hate touchscrees in cars, they're a symbol of poor, cheap and thoughtless design. The "new" tech we're seeing, with very few exceptions, is not new, it's not more advanced, it's not cooler or faster or better.. It's a step backwards, from ignorance and the realization that as more users come, the average user-skill lowers, and so we dumb down everything.. We hide everything behind icons with stupid names and make sure that you have to make an effort AND know the secret sequences, to open up the "super user" tools. Modern software is a joke, not because it's "so advanced" but because it's built on layer upon layer of hipster-won't-deal-with-reality technology stacks, by people who think "don't optimize too early" means "never even think about optimizing before it's provably too late" and to whom it sounds entirely reasonable that a desktop environment should use more than 100 Megabytes of memory. We need to stop dumbing things down, and show the kind of polite mindful behaviours that the older generation showed, making SURE that _YOU_ the user was in charge, that new users could probably learn to figure it out, and that power-users never had to click too much to get at the stuff. How sad is it not that the UI of Windows 2000 is _STILL_ the most elegant, beautiful and functional operation system UI that ever was?
- prakashn27 4y agoTotoally relate to most of the things he tells, Why would my oven need wifi? Watching movies which I enjoy the most is now game of guessing which service has it. I am preferring theatre nowadays like old times.