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Where Did Personal Computing Go Wrong (2020)

68 points by mpweiher 4y ago

drpixie 4y ago
> Computational power ... could be harnessed by anyone with a few thousand dollars and the willingness to learn. That was the "vibe" of early mass computing. Anyone could be involved and anyone could make things better. It was fundamentally optimistic - felt a bit like Startrek NG :) Have a look at "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" by Nelson. > the fundamental shift that transformed personal computing ... away from empowerment is the realization from industry giants that the platforms that they built ... they could exploit. There has always a portion of the field that was looking to profit, but it wasn't the completely overwhelming portion that it has become, and the feel was for reasonable profit, not VC yields and "the company is the product" that came to characterise the field :( Was it VC that killed computing?
- pipo234 4y ago
  > Was it VC that killed computing? That certainly played a role. But as your first citation already suggests, another major factor is that personal computers have steadily evolved into incredibly complicated systems, the details of which are way beyond what can be harnessed by anyone with the means and willingness to learn...
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    there's also a tension between making things simple and making things customisable. The reality is that for most a computer is not a hobby but a tool. They use it to do something and do not want to babysit it. The simpler, the better. Ideally no interaction required beside the interaction you want. It's similar to cars. Nobody can fix todays cars besides professionals and I bet most have really no idea what's going. But most also don't care because they do not view cars as a hobby but as a tool that just has to work (it usually just works). If they are not required to fix them themselves they won't engage with it at all.
    - trasz4 4y ago
      Except todays applications are way less reliable than what we used two decades ago. It's not that we don't _nee to fix them anymore, quite the opposite. Instead we just learned to ignore those screwups, manually refreshing a page when it fails.
- teekert 4y ago
  Uhm, isn't the world running on Linux, a super open platform with tons of documentation? I feel no real need to join the platforms tbh. Yeah, the platforms are easier, but that's to be expected, addictive fast-food is also easier. "Slow computing" takes some effort, and is not for everyone. But it's there for anyone seeking it out. I'm on Matrix, run NextCloud, use Podverse for podcasts. Anyone can do that (well maybe NextCloud is bit on the technical side).
  - jdkdldod 4y ago
    Matrix is a fake open project controlled by one megalomaniac that successfully brain drained XMPP while everyone in the chat world uses Discord and Teams There was a brief moment ten years ago when XMPP ruled the world. Matrix sucks.
  - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    Decentralizated computing is inherently "slower" than centralized computing, for example. You're buying flexibility and freedom in exchange for complexity and service degradation. If you think that stuff is worth it, you have to conclude it's like vegetables: they're healthier, but no one will want to eat them, even the people who realize they're heathier. :p
    - teekert 4y ago
      If you take time to prepare them right, veggies are great. Even more so when you culture them yourself (even slower!). I come from a culture of: Boil you veggies to death, squash with potatoes, eat (most taste comes from the meat presented on the side). This can be delicious if the veggie is kale, the potatoes are squashed with butter, you add bacon baked in wine vinegar and honey, and eat it with some mustard. But generally the taste is boiled away. But, if you take your chicory for example, fry it, then add some orange juice, steam it a bit, make it into a "tarte tartin" with goat cheese, rocket and sun dried tomatoes on top... That's a new world.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > isn't the world running on Linux? Well, all the powerful entities in IT are. Most people are on Android, that is technically Linux but not open by any standard. Most others are on iOS, that is even less open, besides technically being BSD. Most of the ones trying to get an open platform to do something useful are stuck on Windows, and completely under the whims of a few powerful players.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  The Byte era was very much "extremely wealthy values of anyone." The original 16K Apple II cost the equivalent of more than $5k. If you wanted 48k - and you did for any kind of non-trivial programming - the equivalent price would be $11k. Computing isn't dead, it's just entirely commoditised. Most people who drive cars don't care about what's under the hood. They don't care they could build themselves a custom engine which is four times as powerful. They just want a transport appliance that works reliably and doesn't cost too much to run. Modern phone-based computing is actually an insane success. Go to a restaurant and you'll get a QR code link to today's menu, which can be changed daily or even hourly. Sometimes you can even order from the table. Go to a show, book a flight, or maybe just use some public transport, and there's a good chance you'll be able to use a digital ticket. Or at least use your phone for payment. You can book medical appointments, fill prescriptions, track your fitness, and so on - all with one device. Never mind basics like location and navigation, which aren't even surprising any more. If you ever use a paper street atlas you'll see how convenient they are. The fact that you can't write your own code is of zero interest to most users. They don't want to write their own code. They just want something that makes life simpler. And mobile computing does. The real problem are the social media monopolies and ad tech. But those are a political problem, not a technical one - specifically regulatory capture which neutered the anti-trust laws and allowed most commodity computing to be owned by a handful of monopolies.
NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
So, from my perspective, I've been through this evolution of home computing from the early hobbyist days until now. In the hobbyist days before I got involved, you might build your own computer. The Altair 8800 and Heathkit type systems were meant to be assembled by the end-user. Of course, the tinkering did not end there, as they were programmable, and you typically didn't purchase a library of apps to load onto it, you wrote your own. Now my family purchased a VIC-20 and soon after, a Commodore 64. Since I was a child, there was a heavy dose of gaming done on these machines, and I had joystick controllers and a library of commercial games that I could load. But, it was also very much an intro to systems architecture for me, where I learned how the memory is laid out, the function of various chips on the board, and how to program various subsystems from BASIC to do what I wanted. So at that point, the computer was really a good tool, and educational, with all sorts of ways that it could do my bidding. In this era, BASIC and other end-user languages such as LOGO taught us how to program from the metal on up. And this was the joy of personal computing to us, the hobbyist. Soon I graduated from high school and was presented with a real business-oriented 286 system, while my father got a similar one. We would run DOS and Windows 3.1. There was a lot less of programming it ourselves and a lot more of loading commercial software on those. So I think that was the turning point of home computing, from hobbyist workbench into a business appliance that was a real means to an end. My later computers, a 386 and a 486, were partly gaming machines and partly Internet terminals, and of course my phase of programming it myself had fallen by the wayside, in favor of loading ever more complex applications and operating systems, and that was where my tinkering focused for the next phase: the administration of the OS. So in my career I became a systems admin who enjoyed configuring stuff, taking security measures, and tweaking the OS for performance. I also enjoyed building my own computers, as they call it, "LEGO for Adults". A year and a half ago, I shut down my Linux system. It was the last desktop system that I owned. I had assembled it myself from discrete parts. I had tweaked the Ubuntu OS endlessly. I no longer needed this power-user stuff. Today I get by on notebook computers only. I run Windows and ChromeOS. I'm truly an end-user, if on the power-user side, but I never program the system myself anymore, and I don't tweak the OS like a systems admin, I just dutifully install the updates. Because my computers are "in production". They serve me to work for my employer and to manage my household. They are an integral part of it, rather than a hobbyist's workbench. I don't know if that has somehow "gone wrong" along the way, but it has definitely changed character since 10-year-old me picked up that VIC-20.
hnbear 4y ago
One small tangent: “Microsoft realized how lucrative platforms are when it made a lot of money selling MS-DOS licenses in the 1980s, and we are all familiar with the history of Windows and Internet Explorer.” The story of Microsoft’s late 80s and 90s dominance is fading fast. My kids, now in the early to mid-teens, have grown up with Apple as the dominant phone, tablet and watch platform. All their friends have them. Here in the US (NY metro), Android seems a second rung system. Common but not poplar. They use Chromebooks and GSuite at school. Windows is an after thought. Even on the cheap Windows laptops we have for them at home they’re not really “Microsoft” machines. No Office, no heavy O365 anything. They’re terminals for Chrome and web-apps. The rest of the article is interesting, but user-developed improvements can be found in fun and interesting places. The same kids play Minecraft and Roblox heavily. My 12yo has made and sold Roblox clothing. It’s not “programming” or self-solving problems, but it’s interesting creation in a similar vein. Minecraft is full of people creating fantastic and interesting mods and improvements to it.
- ido 4y ago
  I know you probably know it, but ios dominance is very US-specific (+ maybe another small amount of other countries) situation. World-wide Android is much more popular than iOS (but less profitable, as the phones are cheaper).
  - brookst 4y ago
    This is changing: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-os-market-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-os-ma... And for premium phones, iOS has had >50% market share for a long time: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-takes-62-premium-market-q1-2022/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-takes-62-premium-...
  - hnbear 4y ago
    Yes, definitely, although what I meant to say, and forgot was that Android is the second mobile OS, and Microsoft doesn't even register.
- j-bos 4y ago
causi 4y ago
The more accessible a computer system is, the less savvy its average user will be, and the more exploitable.
jacknews 4y ago
This is not just a problem with computing, it all stems from 'gillette' style business models, and similar, which ultimately come from that flavor of capitalism that says the only reason that any company or endeavor exists is to make a 'profit'. And so the actual goal is not to provide people with the best things, experiences, whatever. The goal is to make as much money as possible from them; the 'thing' being sold is just a hook. You can see it all around; Razors and all kinds of other 'subscription' services, 'smart' devices, which could provide some kind of local smart interface that would truly give users more control, but instead insist on connecting back to a manufacturer's limited service, so data can be mined, adverts sold, etc.
- brookst 4y ago
  There's some truth to that, but it's a very edgy/cynical view that ignores all of the good from connected platforms. The phone I bought four years ago has a bunch of great features now that were not present when I bought it, and I got those for free. Today, software engineers will go to work and write code to make it even better. The subscription media services I pay for release more new content than I can possiblh watch or read or listen to, and I don't have to drive somewhere and pay for physical media. And in winter months when it's snow and ice outside, I can start my car and get the heater and defroster running from my phone, even if it's in a garage a half mile away. There are some aspects of some business models to dislike, but it is needlessly negative to complain about those without at least being aware of some really great changes since the days of "you bought this brick, it will be the same brick tomorrow".
  - jacknews 4y ago
    Well of course, there are some conveniences. But why are they giving you more stuff for free? Obviously to keep you inside their system. And of course some subscription services are just that, you're paying for their ongoing work. To be clear I'm not at all against companies updating their software, in fact they should make it all open so anyone can update it, or at least open up the hardware so anyone can make their own programs for it. I think what you'll find with some of your free updates though, is that eventually they stop, when the product is no longer making money, or for example the demographic that is still using old devices is not one that is deemed profitable. And then you'll be all but forced to buy another device. One that has the same features that are now essential to the way you live your life.
avg_dev 4y ago
This article resonates deeply with me. I love it.
boffinAudio 4y ago
OS designers decided it was too hard to educate their users and that they couldn't compete with the marketing people, so had to find a way to build 'value' and 'earned revenue' with their Operating System plans. So .. They dumbed-down the filesystem so they wouldn't have to explain it any more. And then they decided to never fix Finder/Explorer ever again .. and then they tried to get rid of it altogether. And even still today there are people who cannot understand the difference between a file and a folder, nor where or how they should organize their personal data in a way that makes sense. OS vendors decided to exploit this stupidity through anti-patterns that gave their bosses (the Marketing People) access to millions of users data... The OS vendors dumbed down the user interface to make it more appealing to look at every day for hours and hours .. and then they forced us to watch ads in that interface. They forgot that computers are general purpose devices, and tried to make us only do a few things with them. They removed the compiler. They removed the compiler. <-- this is the most significant point at which personal computing went wrong. Instead of building a better compiler and a nicer machine to use, the OS vendors decided to make money off their developers, instead. OS vendors stopped vending operating systems and became Marketing People™,®,© instead .. Meanwhile, users get away with still not knowing what a filesystem is .. or why it matters to have a copy of that data out in the cloud, or locally on a machine in a place they can easily find it. The fact that this is still such a huge conundrum means that there really aren't any good computer operating system people out there any more. They all went off to work for a FAANG and promptly retired.
- brookst 4y ago
  That was a lot of words to say "end users wanted simpler computers and some companies got rich meeting that need."
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    This is true, but the same argument could be made for "magic" crystals and homeopathy. People wanted an "easy" cure and some companies got rich meeting that need. Similar to homeopathy, to me the overly simplified and locked down computing experiences point to a regulatory failure - but admittedly the harms are much harder to pin down. At a minimum something like "right to repair" or a "right to open digital locks" on your own devices would be nice.
jmclnx 4y ago
>any one with a compiler could write a Windows app or (in pre-notarization days) a macOS app, but distributing an Android or iPhone app requires paying for access to an app store. This is the most telling quote in the article. Companies took over computing by locking down Cell Phones. Now this model seems to be in the process of moving into to M/S Windows 10/11. I do not use MAC/OS, but to get your application in the MAC store, do you need to pay a fee or give a cut if you sell it ? I suspect you do, or where else would Microsoft get their Ideas from. In anycase, to me if you are not using Linux or a BSD, I think you are slowly being moved into a Walled Garden. I also noticed in Linux there is now a "GNOME Store" and a "KDE Store", so far, I think those still remain free for developers to get their work into. But seems to me, Linux is very slowly becoming commercialized, who knows where Linux will be in 10 to 20 years. I am starting to think eventually the only place people in the future will have access tp Linux is via WSL. With Secure Boot becoming more accepted, I think that is a very big risk.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  This is my perception as well, and the direction of Linux development of late (such as systemd) offers no comfort. I am in the process of moving all of my machines away from Linux and to BSD as a result of this trend.
- supernikio2 4y ago
  Most times, those "stores" you mention within Linux are just graphical frontends for package managers, nothing more than that.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    This is such a dangerous way to look at this; this is exactly the sort of thinking that makes these bad ideas happen.
    - xedrac 4y ago
      You're saying that making something more comfortable for new users is the same as marching towards a walled garden? Linux has been criticized for decades about its inaccessibility to the masses. I'm about as hardcore a Linux guy as they come, and were it not for these sort of improvements, I'm not sure my wife and kids would have been willing to use Linux on all of our home computers. And as much as some people complain about the GPL license, it has been remarkably useful in keeping Linux free from corporate take over.
SpacePortKnight 4y ago
The article makes the statement that platforms has abandoned user empowerment, but have they really? Windows 11 certainly has more ads than Window 7 but as a user, I can still do everything in Win 11 that I could in Windows 7. > I also believe another important step to user empowerment is making programming easier for casual users, and making it easier for casual users to contribute to open-source software In the history of Computer Science, it has never been easier to start programming than it is now. You have excellent support of WSL, access to Raspberry Pis, and $5 digital ocean cloud server to experiment with vast variety of technologies. Lastly, I think there is some selection bias going on or looking at the past from the rose tinted glasses. Before computers were democratized, only people who were passionate about them used them. It's no surprise that they did all sorts of innovative things with them. Now that computers are widely available, the blame is being put on platforms instead of accepting the fact that the majority of population does not care about programming or computer science.
- userbinator 4y ago
  but as a user, I can still do everything in Win 11 that I could in Windows 7. Have you tried moving the taskbar, customising the UI fonts/colours/sizes, or anything else in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...
  - SpacePortKnight 4y ago
    I made the comment in context to article i.e. innovation and not out of the box support for UI customization. For desktop customization, Linux provides the most flexibility, against which even Windows 7 wouldn't hold a candle.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Are you more empowered in Win 11 than you could in Win 7, appropriate for the thousands of person-years effort that have gone into the newer versions? > "In the history of Computer Science, it has never been easier to start programming than it is now." Sure it has, 8-bit computers which started into BASIC interpreters in an instant, Visual Basic and Delphi drag-and-drop, HyperCard style environment - having to install WSL or buy and learn to access a cloud server is much more up front effort.
agentultra 4y ago
> Where Did Personal Computing Go Wrong When they became traps for our minds rather than tools. When business interested in attention, retention, churn, and keeping people paying started dominating the industry. When they became closed appliances instead of projects to build. When the Web made us depend on them.
drbig 4y ago
I find my personal computer very personal, much more personal than say the Commodore 64 I had when I was a kid. I think the current state is mainly the inevitable outcome of most people wanting their computers toaster-like, i.e. appliances; and companies just doing their thing, which is maximizing profits. Having lived through a lot of changes I think we're in a much better place than 20 years ago. The stuff I can do with my laptop to work exactly as I want it, while still being able to say access my bank account, is amazing. In other words, I strongly believe that the "personal" part of the equation is strictly in the hands of the _person_.
- deleted 4y ago
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- gspencley 4y ago
  I've been a computer nerd since a very young age. I'm now in my early 40s. I've been a professional coder for 25 years. Started coding when I was 10. I'm trying to figure out why these last 10 years or so I'm starting to feel like a luddite. I just find myself using tech less and less in my day to day life, for the most part. There are certain things that are "new" that I wouldn't give up: grocery delivery services, online shopping and the ability to work remotely from home. In those specific areas, I can say that I "use" tech more. But when I'm not working or avoiding driving to a store? I find that I have little to no interest in most of what modern tech has to offer these days. For me, personally, something feels like it has been lost. The closest analogue that I can think of is cars. I've never been a car person, but I live in the Detroit area and so I'm surrounded by people who are very much "car people." They hate modern cars. Why? Because to them, a car is not just an appliance or a way to get from one place to another. It was something that they took care of, maintained, nurtured, poured themselves into. And these days? Their local mechanic who they've known since they were a little kid can't even perform maintenance on it anymore. It needs to be sent to technicians who plug in a computer and will ultimately send it back to the manufacturer for parts replacements. Is this worse than before? Arguably it's better in many ways... probably safer. But it took something away from the people who loved the independence of being able to connect to a machine on an intimate level. For me it was the "mobile revolution" that made me feel like I was becoming an old fashioned "car person." I never liked phones. I'm an asocial loner who doesn't like being interrupted by noise making devices. I don't want to have to remember to bring the thing with me. I never trusted the security and privacy of the things. I never enjoyed using a device with such a small screen and no keyboard (let alone the lack of a mechanical one to provide me with tactile feedback). So I never jumped on the bandwagon. To this day, I use GrapheneOS and a few FOSS apps (mp3 player and Signal to talk to my wife and that's about it), and I always have notifications turned off because I despise push notifications as a concept. As a programmer, I have always felt this intimate connection between myself and "the machine." Although I never did a lot of low-level systems programming, that's where I find my heart going to these days. I feel so removed from the bare metal, like the connection has been severed and I've lost a lifelong partner. But this still doesn't explain everything. It explains why I feel a loss as a PROGRAMMER and HACKER. But it doesn't explain why, as an END USER, I don't find myself using as many products and tech-related tools as I used to. I'm still searching for those answers. Maybe it's me that changed, and not technology. I don't know.
api 4y ago
The cause is 100% economic. Software is incredibly expensive to produce and yet people have become accustomed to it being free, either as free (as in beer) open source or free SaaS supported by ads. This leads to "creative" ways of monetizing software by exploiting the user and to an endless drive to lock people into platforms where this can be accomplished. In computing the effect is to create a two-tier caste system where tech-savvy people have freedom and privacy and regular folk do not. This is because while all software is expensive (in time or money) it becomes exponentially expensive as one tries to make it more and more usable by regular people. In other words polishing software is often many times more costly than creating the core systems that underlie it. This is different from many other products. Imagine what cars might be like if the dashboard controls and interior finishings cost as much as 100X more than the engine and drive train. That's software. For most products the working parts are the most expensive part. For software the polish is the most expensive part.
jmull 4y ago
Written like Linux and the web don't even exist.
Michelangelo11 4y ago
I think the issue is just that the vast majority of people don't want and have no use for the kind of for the kind of thing the article talks about as "empowering the user through technology." They have no particular desire to tinker or create, but they're very happy to consume an endless stream of entertainment that requires no initiative or decision-making (beyond, say, what option to choose from an RPG menu). If this wasn't the case, then locking down the user to one platform, as the article describes, would never have been so profitable -- most people would prefer customizability and "empowerment" over avoiding the slight inconvenience of using a different platform, and you couldn't build whole companies around locking down people at scale. But not only can you do that, those companies are hailed as being on the bleeding edge of innovation. Now I personally find all this kinda depressing, but I think there's no point trying to turn away from it. Most people are simply very unlike the median HN user -- not in the sense of technical affinity or whatever, but in the sense of being curious and inclined to tinker -- and that is, alas, yet one more untoward fact to incorporate into your worldview.
- rektide 4y ago
  I hear this negativity so much. And I am so sympathetic to the users. What is the current opportunity for them? Nearly nothing. They might learn one system or another that can empower them. But the rest of computing is still like Philip K Dick's semi-proverbial Black Iron Prison. Maybe they can get off the wall in Plato's Cave for an hour & see a nice little tour around, but they'll spend the rest of their adult lives immiserated & chained back on the wall regardless. I think people are very hungry for a better outlook with computing & e-social (which are so intertwined). Subconsciously they know the effort isn't worth the squeeze. Rejecting the premise of empowerment is actually just a value judgement, and a somewhat shrewd one. The technics have to change first. The hobbyists, governments, research institutes need to drive forward some new malleable systems that actually get some inertia & growth & promise behind them. We need some users who spend the majority of their time not-chained up, who happily do most of their computing in the free. Computing needs a solid place to go, a worthwhile form of existence, before we can ask to attract people. I stand with the banner mission of Malleable Systems Collective, a quote by J. C. R. Licklider, from Some Reflections on Early History (1986): > The user wants open software, software that can be modified, and that can participate in a progressive improvement process. https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/ But right now users have no where to turn to. This experience is unattainable, except on very small scales, and only after immense & painful toil. It's too early to tell what users want, because right now, there's hardly any choice. What choice there is comes with extreme sacrifice, is either disconnected & isolated alternative apps that offer little relative advantage & no interconnectivity, or difficult to host online services requiring dedication & committed-resources to try (YunoHost being perhaps the shiningest meta-attempt we could suggest https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/).
327488347223348 4y ago
Most people can't into computers, selling them computer and software they can use makes a lot of money.
rektide 4y ago
This is a great article & accurate in so many ways. We are lucky to have such great writing & distillation of the times as this; a fine treasure. This pairs very well & adds a lot of context to "What I want from the Internet"[1], which was submitted yesterday & which I am also very aglow over. Both the rise of platforms & the smartphone are tightly interwoven around a new connected axis of computing emerging & being useful. McThrow somewhat generously includes the web in his "personal computing" vision but alas, even as a huge web fan, it's pretty clear that the brief "intertwingularizing" moment (which was extremely pro user) was giving way to Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), to a de-personalized experience. The relevance of desktop faded, and relevance faded because users were well served by new connected services. Software effervescing, sublimating up into the cloud made it easier to share, made it easier to access to demand, freed us from worrying about backups. I think this is one of the critical junctures that Linux and the rest of the Desktops has failed to internalize, as a new need: the need to be connected. The need to be more than just isolated personal, the need to be available, the need to be connectable. I don't know quite what this future looks like or what it implies, but the "Linux on the desktop" spoke of competition with an outmoded, fading mode of computing. What was really needed was a further push onward, was a backbone for inter-app systems & development. One of the few efforts here is one people love to hate on (even though I think most have a superficial at best grasp of the technics): One Laptop Per Child, OLPC/XOPC. My word what a wonderful & interesting system, powered by a grand already-well-adopted-on-FreeDesktop/Linux desktop bus (DBus) that underpins a wide variety of the software matter about. And then the team went further & built DBus Telepathy[2], to connect DBus instances to one a other, across the local 802.11s mesh the laptop had, to create a very compelling shared multi-player object stage that apps could use to create shared experiences. Stunning smart extension of existing highly personal intra-desktop tech into a connected form, a connected media; simply brilliant. There's a couple reasons for hope in my view. First, the connected age is new & we are iterating & learning what broader connectivities work, and in there I think is the real base of power, the higher path that will be compelling for folks to get into. Nostr in particular has a very grand set of Nostr Implementation Possibilities[3] that shows how flexible the simple protocol is. But works like Dat, Hyper, ActivityPub, AtProto/BlueSky, Solid show a hunger & willingness to find out, to explore, at the base of a big tree of possibilities that more personal yet connected futures might emerge upon. I'm also happy to see computing operations getting mature. It was a free for all, learn everything do everything, everything is different & unique, there are no standard all-encompassing routes until the last half decade. Love it or hate it but there is nothing as integrative & consistent for operating computing resources as Kubernetes. It's an incredibly simple pattern at heart, applicable to almost all computing, and its aspirations of being autonomic, self-maintaining, are such a compelling human-liberating spirit that server-hugging desperately needed. Even if it's not Kubernetes in the end, the spirit of an integrating platform for computing that can reasonably self-manage is a must, if we want personal computing to win. Personal computing has to become more than a machine, it just has to, the demands are too high, and we are not going back, and thankfully, we now have good mature sensible ways to weave together the thousands of different threads of running these online endpoints ourselves. We'll keep getting better with smarter packaged implementations, and better tooling; the momentum is for real on & it's so good. The hardest to hope for win is the Web, but it's to most essential. The web has a lot of good-hearted people who care about personal computing. But the forces stacked up are huge; the industrialization of the field has been epic. (And getting ghastly worse, with WebGPU canvases threatening to turn the screen into just a bunch of pixels, see Hixie's Towards a modern Web Stack[4] and Flutter CanvasKit implementation). Alas in my view many of the good, spirited radicals differentiate themselves negatively, regressively, with back to the land ethos rather than having willingness or interest in forward advancement, when what we need is ambition & striving & exploration forward, particularly by rejecting industrialized best practices & asking ourselves again & again what best serves the user, what is the most open & empowering routes we can find? What course forward would we lead? I think there are some HyperCard-ish futures about in easy-ish reach, some explainable observable quick & interactive modes of computing, if we go hunting, and that the web is already almost the perfect material/medium. WebComponents are a key abstraction, and I'm not ashamed to say how thankful I am that the biggest most powerful tech companies are quickly adopting it en-mass & seeing great success (YouTube, GitHub, Google, Salesforce[5]), and that although underpublicized, it creates learnable moments & good offshoot tech (Stencil.js, Github's Catalyst, Google's Lit). Embedding app state into the DOM makes it malleable, makes it learnable in a way code isn't. My hope is we can start to create more visual editor like systems, where the page itself exposes it's own tools to better show the user the objects on the screen, and let's them play and explore more. Make the medium more live & interactable. Yet this is still not enough. A more user-friendly web page medium still, and better ability to host endpoints, still leaves a whole question of what's in the middle & how does it work. It returns to the protocols like Nostr I mentioned above. Figuring out how to personalize the protocols, how to Augment Intellect (the highest mission, the Engelbartian vision) in computing needs so many levels of the stack to be illuminated & graspable. And above all that stack, what is the experience? The world of applications, what most users use, is a lot of isolated systems. This hearkens back to the point of this submission, that personal computing had fallen, and in many ways it's because the at hand value to capture was upmarket, was higher level concerns: apps. Personal Computing fell away because each app is it's own fief, it's own walled garden, and we didn't emerge a broader system of computing that meaningfully intersected with and connected with thr apps. Isolated industrial experiences has been the name of the game for decades now, that brief Intertwingularity/Cluetrain Manifesto zeitgeist the late aughts aside. I've talked a lot about stack & technics, but ultimately a more integrative holistic stack has to be here to be useful, to serve the needs we have. Making HyperCard-y experiences that can interlink & coexist together on the canvas feels like a maybe possible vision here, something works like OpenSocial[6] were trying for during the greatest headiest API-based moments of computing history. It was a greater effort, but that attempt to stitch together widgets & data has some notable overlap with above mentioned Solid. Overall, I'd emphasize that for computing to be personal, it has to be personalizable. It has to be the users, in some degree. On these simple grounds, I can think of no more direct & overarching a cause than the Malleable Systems Collective[7], which is a wonderful home-base for exploring what computing do, how it might get out of the imprisonment of the data keep, oops i mean data center, & back into the hands of users. [1] https://www.chrbutler.com/what-i-want-from-the-internet https://www.chrbutler.com/what-i-want-from-the-internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852516 [2] https://aosabook.org/en/v1/telepathy.html https://aosabook.org/en/v1/telepathy.html [3] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips [4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit?resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 [5] https://levelup.gitconnected.com/web-components-at-big-tech-companies-youtube-84266bb507fd https://levelup.gitconnected.com/web-components-at-big-tech-... [6] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial [7] https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/
revelio 4y ago
The author explains the trend of lower innovation in personal computing, which I think we all feel, as to do with corporate greed and the solution is "academics, non profits, non-VC funded companies, hobbyists" etc. But this is not a great explanation because human nature didn't really change since the 1980s, yet personal computing did. These sweeping but vague explanations are tempting, but I think the cause is actually a lot more technical and random: the OS design culture that spawned Windows, UNIX and macOS pre-dated the internet. The internet was a fundamental shift that changed everything, and yet the NT and Apple design teams all traced their roots back to the pre-internet era (and Linux just made a UNIX for the PC, same thing, design rooted in the 80s). Their whole OS design thinking was fundamentally pre-internet and never caught up. Even basic tasks like uploading files to a server through a GUI STILL aren't well supported in desktop operating systems, in 2023! What platform did fundamentally get the internet? The web - born of the internet, made of the internet. Web apps don't even start up without the internet. Whilst Microsoft snoozed, Apple thrashed around and the UNIX people spent all their efforts on cloning the past, web browsers became the new way software got distributed. The web had so many benefits over writing PC/Mac apps. Suddenly you could iterate every day, you could write the bulk of your software in nice high level scripting languages, your software was accessible by just typing in its name, you could use databases instead of designing binary file formats, app UI was automatically portable between operating systems, typography and layout were taken seriously, people could easily discover and access your software with one click on a link, the platform had a nice open easy to use protocol set up for you out of the box. And dozens more. So many wins for developers and users in there. Unfortunately, it was never meant for this. People spent vast effort hacking the web into a barely-passable app platform because it was the closest thing to an Internet OS, and nobody else was offering that. But the web was simply never thought about by its developers in terms of empowering personal computing users. Whilst the people at PARC, NeXT, Apple, Microsoft and so on spent lots of time thinking big 1990s era thoughts about making programming easy, computers powerful, component systems, filing systems with search, AppleScripting, better window management and so on, this utopian way of thinking never entered the culture of browser developers. There was a brief attempt at some sort of structured higher level planning, that open hackable spirit during the W3C era, but the XML stack was made by academics and despite good intentions a failure. So browser makers just kept randomly flinging stuff into HTML, but without the animating forward-looking spirit of the PC era, in fact without much of a vision at all beyond trying to keep the show on the road and better competing with 'real' app platforms. It could easily have been very different. If the people doing OS development in the 90s had fully understood the importance of being an internet OS we might have had things like a global filesystem namespace, start menus that could directly launch sandboxed OS-native apps from a domain name, internet sharable clipboards, who knows what else. Unfortunately that's not how it worked out. Today OS research is basically dead. ChromeOS is the newest and probably the least powerful, least ambitious OS ever made. On the rare occasions people get to make a new OS they never make it past micro-kernels. The kind of sweeping ambition that launched the PC era is gone.

68 points by mpweiher 4y ago

> Computational power ... could be harnessed by anyone with a few thousand dollars and the willingness to learn. That was the "vibe" of early mass computing. Anyone could be involved and anyone could make things better. It was fundamentally optimistic - felt a bit like Startrek NG :) Have a look at "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" by Nelson. > the fundamental shift that transformed personal computing ... away from empowerment is the realization from industry giants that the platforms that they built ... they could exploit. There has always a portion of the field that was looking to profit, but it wasn't the completely overwhelming portion that it has become, and the feel was for reasonable profit, not VC yields and "the company is the product" that came to characterise the field :( Was it VC that killed computing?

pipo234 4y ago
> Was it VC that killed computing? That certainly played a role. But as your first citation already suggests, another major factor is that personal computers have steadily evolved into incredibly complicated systems, the details of which are way beyond what can be harnessed by anyone with the means and willingness to learn...
- LeanderK 4y ago
  there's also a tension between making things simple and making things customisable. The reality is that for most a computer is not a hobby but a tool. They use it to do something and do not want to babysit it. The simpler, the better. Ideally no interaction required beside the interaction you want. It's similar to cars. Nobody can fix todays cars besides professionals and I bet most have really no idea what's going. But most also don't care because they do not view cars as a hobby but as a tool that just has to work (it usually just works). If they are not required to fix them themselves they won't engage with it at all.
  - trasz4 4y ago
    Except todays applications are way less reliable than what we used two decades ago. It's not that we don't _nee to fix them anymore, quite the opposite. Instead we just learned to ignore those screwups, manually refreshing a page when it fails.
teekert 4y ago
Uhm, isn't the world running on Linux, a super open platform with tons of documentation? I feel no real need to join the platforms tbh. Yeah, the platforms are easier, but that's to be expected, addictive fast-food is also easier. "Slow computing" takes some effort, and is not for everyone. But it's there for anyone seeking it out. I'm on Matrix, run NextCloud, use Podverse for podcasts. Anyone can do that (well maybe NextCloud is bit on the technical side).
- jdkdldod 4y ago
  Matrix is a fake open project controlled by one megalomaniac that successfully brain drained XMPP while everyone in the chat world uses Discord and Teams There was a brief moment ten years ago when XMPP ruled the world. Matrix sucks.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Decentralizated computing is inherently "slower" than centralized computing, for example. You're buying flexibility and freedom in exchange for complexity and service degradation. If you think that stuff is worth it, you have to conclude it's like vegetables: they're healthier, but no one will want to eat them, even the people who realize they're heathier. :p
  - teekert 4y ago
    If you take time to prepare them right, veggies are great. Even more so when you culture them yourself (even slower!). I come from a culture of: Boil you veggies to death, squash with potatoes, eat (most taste comes from the meat presented on the side). This can be delicious if the veggie is kale, the potatoes are squashed with butter, you add bacon baked in wine vinegar and honey, and eat it with some mustard. But generally the taste is boiled away. But, if you take your chicory for example, fry it, then add some orange juice, steam it a bit, make it into a "tarte tartin" with goat cheese, rocket and sun dried tomatoes on top... That's a new world.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > isn't the world running on Linux? Well, all the powerful entities in IT are. Most people are on Android, that is technically Linux but not open by any standard. Most others are on iOS, that is even less open, besides technically being BSD. Most of the ones trying to get an open platform to do something useful are stuck on Windows, and completely under the whims of a few powerful players.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
The Byte era was very much "extremely wealthy values of anyone." The original 16K Apple II cost the equivalent of more than $5k. If you wanted 48k - and you did for any kind of non-trivial programming - the equivalent price would be $11k. Computing isn't dead, it's just entirely commoditised. Most people who drive cars don't care about what's under the hood. They don't care they could build themselves a custom engine which is four times as powerful. They just want a transport appliance that works reliably and doesn't cost too much to run. Modern phone-based computing is actually an insane success. Go to a restaurant and you'll get a QR code link to today's menu, which can be changed daily or even hourly. Sometimes you can even order from the table. Go to a show, book a flight, or maybe just use some public transport, and there's a good chance you'll be able to use a digital ticket. Or at least use your phone for payment. You can book medical appointments, fill prescriptions, track your fitness, and so on - all with one device. Never mind basics like location and navigation, which aren't even surprising any more. If you ever use a paper street atlas you'll see how convenient they are. The fact that you can't write your own code is of zero interest to most users. They don't want to write their own code. They just want something that makes life simpler. And mobile computing does. The real problem are the social media monopolies and ad tech. But those are a political problem, not a technical one - specifically regulatory capture which neutered the anti-trust laws and allowed most commodity computing to be owned by a handful of monopolies.

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago

So, from my perspective, I've been through this evolution of home computing from the early hobbyist days until now. In the hobbyist days before I got involved, you might build your own computer. The Altair 8800 and Heathkit type systems were meant to be assembled by the end-user. Of course, the tinkering did not end there, as they were programmable, and you typically didn't purchase a library of apps to load onto it, you wrote your own. Now my family purchased a VIC-20 and soon after, a Commodore 64. Since I was a child, there was a heavy dose of gaming done on these machines, and I had joystick controllers and a library of commercial games that I could load. But, it was also very much an intro to systems architecture for me, where I learned how the memory is laid out, the function of various chips on the board, and how to program various subsystems from BASIC to do what I wanted. So at that point, the computer was really a good tool, and educational, with all sorts of ways that it could do my bidding. In this era, BASIC and other end-user languages such as LOGO taught us how to program from the metal on up. And this was the joy of personal computing to us, the hobbyist. Soon I graduated from high school and was presented with a real business-oriented 286 system, while my father got a similar one. We would run DOS and Windows 3.1. There was a lot less of programming it ourselves and a lot more of loading commercial software on those. So I think that was the turning point of home computing, from hobbyist workbench into a business appliance that was a real means to an end. My later computers, a 386 and a 486, were partly gaming machines and partly Internet terminals, and of course my phase of programming it myself had fallen by the wayside, in favor of loading ever more complex applications and operating systems, and that was where my tinkering focused for the next phase: the administration of the OS. So in my career I became a systems admin who enjoyed configuring stuff, taking security measures, and tweaking the OS for performance. I also enjoyed building my own computers, as they call it, "LEGO for Adults". A year and a half ago, I shut down my Linux system. It was the last desktop system that I owned. I had assembled it myself from discrete parts. I had tweaked the Ubuntu OS endlessly. I no longer needed this power-user stuff. Today I get by on notebook computers only. I run Windows and ChromeOS. I'm truly an end-user, if on the power-user side, but I never program the system myself anymore, and I don't tweak the OS like a systems admin, I just dutifully install the updates. Because my computers are "in production". They serve me to work for my employer and to manage my household. They are an integral part of it, rather than a hobbyist's workbench. I don't know if that has somehow "gone wrong" along the way, but it has definitely changed character since 10-year-old me picked up that VIC-20.

hnbear 4y ago

One small tangent: “Microsoft realized how lucrative platforms are when it made a lot of money selling MS-DOS licenses in the 1980s, and we are all familiar with the history of Windows and Internet Explorer.” The story of Microsoft’s late 80s and 90s dominance is fading fast. My kids, now in the early to mid-teens, have grown up with Apple as the dominant phone, tablet and watch platform. All their friends have them. Here in the US (NY metro), Android seems a second rung system. Common but not poplar. They use Chromebooks and GSuite at school. Windows is an after thought. Even on the cheap Windows laptops we have for them at home they’re not really “Microsoft” machines. No Office, no heavy O365 anything. They’re terminals for Chrome and web-apps. The rest of the article is interesting, but user-developed improvements can be found in fun and interesting places. The same kids play Minecraft and Roblox heavily. My 12yo has made and sold Roblox clothing. It’s not “programming” or self-solving problems, but it’s interesting creation in a similar vein. Minecraft is full of people creating fantastic and interesting mods and improvements to it.

ido 4y ago
I know you probably know it, but ios dominance is very US-specific (+ maybe another small amount of other countries) situation. World-wide Android is much more popular than iOS (but less profitable, as the phones are cheaper).
- brookst 4y ago
  This is changing: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-os-market-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-os-ma... And for premium phones, iOS has had >50% market share for a long time: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-takes-62-premium-market-q1-2022/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-takes-62-premium-...
- hnbear 4y ago
  Yes, definitely, although what I meant to say, and forgot was that Android is the second mobile OS, and Microsoft doesn't even register.
j-bos 4y ago

causi 4y ago

The more accessible a computer system is, the less savvy its average user will be, and the more exploitable.

jacknews 4y ago

This is not just a problem with computing, it all stems from 'gillette' style business models, and similar, which ultimately come from that flavor of capitalism that says the only reason that any company or endeavor exists is to make a 'profit'. And so the actual goal is not to provide people with the best things, experiences, whatever. The goal is to make as much money as possible from them; the 'thing' being sold is just a hook. You can see it all around; Razors and all kinds of other 'subscription' services, 'smart' devices, which could provide some kind of local smart interface that would truly give users more control, but instead insist on connecting back to a manufacturer's limited service, so data can be mined, adverts sold, etc.

brookst 4y ago
There's some truth to that, but it's a very edgy/cynical view that ignores all of the good from connected platforms. The phone I bought four years ago has a bunch of great features now that were not present when I bought it, and I got those for free. Today, software engineers will go to work and write code to make it even better. The subscription media services I pay for release more new content than I can possiblh watch or read or listen to, and I don't have to drive somewhere and pay for physical media. And in winter months when it's snow and ice outside, I can start my car and get the heater and defroster running from my phone, even if it's in a garage a half mile away. There are some aspects of some business models to dislike, but it is needlessly negative to complain about those without at least being aware of some really great changes since the days of "you bought this brick, it will be the same brick tomorrow".
- jacknews 4y ago
  Well of course, there are some conveniences. But why are they giving you more stuff for free? Obviously to keep you inside their system. And of course some subscription services are just that, you're paying for their ongoing work. To be clear I'm not at all against companies updating their software, in fact they should make it all open so anyone can update it, or at least open up the hardware so anyone can make their own programs for it. I think what you'll find with some of your free updates though, is that eventually they stop, when the product is no longer making money, or for example the demographic that is still using old devices is not one that is deemed profitable. And then you'll be all but forced to buy another device. One that has the same features that are now essential to the way you live your life.

avg_dev 4y ago

This article resonates deeply with me. I love it.

boffinAudio 4y ago

OS designers decided it was too hard to educate their users and that they couldn't compete with the marketing people, so had to find a way to build 'value' and 'earned revenue' with their Operating System plans. So .. They dumbed-down the filesystem so they wouldn't have to explain it any more. And then they decided to never fix Finder/Explorer ever again .. and then they tried to get rid of it altogether. And even still today there are people who cannot understand the difference between a file and a folder, nor where or how they should organize their personal data in a way that makes sense. OS vendors decided to exploit this stupidity through anti-patterns that gave their bosses (the Marketing People) access to millions of users data... The OS vendors dumbed down the user interface to make it more appealing to look at every day for hours and hours .. and then they forced us to watch ads in that interface. They forgot that computers are general purpose devices, and tried to make us only do a few things with them. They removed the compiler. They removed the compiler. <-- this is the most significant point at which personal computing went wrong. Instead of building a better compiler and a nicer machine to use, the OS vendors decided to make money off their developers, instead. OS vendors stopped vending operating systems and became Marketing People™,®,© instead .. Meanwhile, users get away with still not knowing what a filesystem is .. or why it matters to have a copy of that data out in the cloud, or locally on a machine in a place they can easily find it. The fact that this is still such a huge conundrum means that there really aren't any good computer operating system people out there any more. They all went off to work for a FAANG and promptly retired.

brookst 4y ago
That was a lot of words to say "end users wanted simpler computers and some companies got rich meeting that need."
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  This is true, but the same argument could be made for "magic" crystals and homeopathy. People wanted an "easy" cure and some companies got rich meeting that need. Similar to homeopathy, to me the overly simplified and locked down computing experiences point to a regulatory failure - but admittedly the harms are much harder to pin down. At a minimum something like "right to repair" or a "right to open digital locks" on your own devices would be nice.

jmclnx 4y ago

>any one with a compiler could write a Windows app or (in pre-notarization days) a macOS app, but distributing an Android or iPhone app requires paying for access to an app store. This is the most telling quote in the article. Companies took over computing by locking down Cell Phones. Now this model seems to be in the process of moving into to M/S Windows 10/11. I do not use MAC/OS, but to get your application in the MAC store, do you need to pay a fee or give a cut if you sell it ? I suspect you do, or where else would Microsoft get their Ideas from. In anycase, to me if you are not using Linux or a BSD, I think you are slowly being moved into a Walled Garden. I also noticed in Linux there is now a "GNOME Store" and a "KDE Store", so far, I think those still remain free for developers to get their work into. But seems to me, Linux is very slowly becoming commercialized, who knows where Linux will be in 10 to 20 years. I am starting to think eventually the only place people in the future will have access tp Linux is via WSL. With Secure Boot becoming more accepted, I think that is a very big risk.

JohnFen 4y ago
This is my perception as well, and the direction of Linux development of late (such as systemd) offers no comfort. I am in the process of moving all of my machines away from Linux and to BSD as a result of this trend.
supernikio2 4y ago
Most times, those "stores" you mention within Linux are just graphical frontends for package managers, nothing more than that.
- jrm4 4y ago
  This is such a dangerous way to look at this; this is exactly the sort of thinking that makes these bad ideas happen.
  - xedrac 4y ago
    You're saying that making something more comfortable for new users is the same as marching towards a walled garden? Linux has been criticized for decades about its inaccessibility to the masses. I'm about as hardcore a Linux guy as they come, and were it not for these sort of improvements, I'm not sure my wife and kids would have been willing to use Linux on all of our home computers. And as much as some people complain about the GPL license, it has been remarkably useful in keeping Linux free from corporate take over.

SpacePortKnight 4y ago

The article makes the statement that platforms has abandoned user empowerment, but have they really? Windows 11 certainly has more ads than Window 7 but as a user, I can still do everything in Win 11 that I could in Windows 7. > I also believe another important step to user empowerment is making programming easier for casual users, and making it easier for casual users to contribute to open-source software In the history of Computer Science, it has never been easier to start programming than it is now. You have excellent support of WSL, access to Raspberry Pis, and $5 digital ocean cloud server to experiment with vast variety of technologies. Lastly, I think there is some selection bias going on or looking at the past from the rose tinted glasses. Before computers were democratized, only people who were passionate about them used them. It's no surprise that they did all sorts of innovative things with them. Now that computers are widely available, the blame is being put on platforms instead of accepting the fact that the majority of population does not care about programming or computer science.

userbinator 4y ago
but as a user, I can still do everything in Win 11 that I could in Windows 7. Have you tried moving the taskbar, customising the UI fonts/colours/sizes, or anything else in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...
- SpacePortKnight 4y ago
  I made the comment in context to article i.e. innovation and not out of the box support for UI customization. For desktop customization, Linux provides the most flexibility, against which even Windows 7 wouldn't hold a candle.
jodrellblank 4y ago
Are you more empowered in Win 11 than you could in Win 7, appropriate for the thousands of person-years effort that have gone into the newer versions? > "In the history of Computer Science, it has never been easier to start programming than it is now." Sure it has, 8-bit computers which started into BASIC interpreters in an instant, Visual Basic and Delphi drag-and-drop, HyperCard style environment - having to install WSL or buy and learn to access a cloud server is much more up front effort.

agentultra 4y ago

> Where Did Personal Computing Go Wrong When they became traps for our minds rather than tools. When business interested in attention, retention, churn, and keeping people paying started dominating the industry. When they became closed appliances instead of projects to build. When the Web made us depend on them.

drbig 4y ago

I find my personal computer very personal, much more personal than say the Commodore 64 I had when I was a kid. I think the current state is mainly the inevitable outcome of most people wanting their computers toaster-like, i.e. appliances; and companies just doing their thing, which is maximizing profits. Having lived through a lot of changes I think we're in a much better place than 20 years ago. The stuff I can do with my laptop to work exactly as I want it, while still being able to say access my bank account, is amazing. In other words, I strongly believe that the "personal" part of the equation is strictly in the hands of the _person_.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gspencley 4y ago
I've been a computer nerd since a very young age. I'm now in my early 40s. I've been a professional coder for 25 years. Started coding when I was 10. I'm trying to figure out why these last 10 years or so I'm starting to feel like a luddite. I just find myself using tech less and less in my day to day life, for the most part. There are certain things that are "new" that I wouldn't give up: grocery delivery services, online shopping and the ability to work remotely from home. In those specific areas, I can say that I "use" tech more. But when I'm not working or avoiding driving to a store? I find that I have little to no interest in most of what modern tech has to offer these days. For me, personally, something feels like it has been lost. The closest analogue that I can think of is cars. I've never been a car person, but I live in the Detroit area and so I'm surrounded by people who are very much "car people." They hate modern cars. Why? Because to them, a car is not just an appliance or a way to get from one place to another. It was something that they took care of, maintained, nurtured, poured themselves into. And these days? Their local mechanic who they've known since they were a little kid can't even perform maintenance on it anymore. It needs to be sent to technicians who plug in a computer and will ultimately send it back to the manufacturer for parts replacements. Is this worse than before? Arguably it's better in many ways... probably safer. But it took something away from the people who loved the independence of being able to connect to a machine on an intimate level. For me it was the "mobile revolution" that made me feel like I was becoming an old fashioned "car person." I never liked phones. I'm an asocial loner who doesn't like being interrupted by noise making devices. I don't want to have to remember to bring the thing with me. I never trusted the security and privacy of the things. I never enjoyed using a device with such a small screen and no keyboard (let alone the lack of a mechanical one to provide me with tactile feedback). So I never jumped on the bandwagon. To this day, I use GrapheneOS and a few FOSS apps (mp3 player and Signal to talk to my wife and that's about it), and I always have notifications turned off because I despise push notifications as a concept. As a programmer, I have always felt this intimate connection between myself and "the machine." Although I never did a lot of low-level systems programming, that's where I find my heart going to these days. I feel so removed from the bare metal, like the connection has been severed and I've lost a lifelong partner. But this still doesn't explain everything. It explains why I feel a loss as a PROGRAMMER and HACKER. But it doesn't explain why, as an END USER, I don't find myself using as many products and tech-related tools as I used to. I'm still searching for those answers. Maybe it's me that changed, and not technology. I don't know.

api 4y ago

The cause is 100% economic. Software is incredibly expensive to produce and yet people have become accustomed to it being free, either as free (as in beer) open source or free SaaS supported by ads. This leads to "creative" ways of monetizing software by exploiting the user and to an endless drive to lock people into platforms where this can be accomplished. In computing the effect is to create a two-tier caste system where tech-savvy people have freedom and privacy and regular folk do not. This is because while all software is expensive (in time or money) it becomes exponentially expensive as one tries to make it more and more usable by regular people. In other words polishing software is often many times more costly than creating the core systems that underlie it. This is different from many other products. Imagine what cars might be like if the dashboard controls and interior finishings cost as much as 100X more than the engine and drive train. That's software. For most products the working parts are the most expensive part. For software the polish is the most expensive part.

jmull 4y ago

Written like Linux and the web don't even exist.

Michelangelo11 4y ago

I think the issue is just that the vast majority of people don't want and have no use for the kind of for the kind of thing the article talks about as "empowering the user through technology." They have no particular desire to tinker or create, but they're very happy to consume an endless stream of entertainment that requires no initiative or decision-making (beyond, say, what option to choose from an RPG menu). If this wasn't the case, then locking down the user to one platform, as the article describes, would never have been so profitable -- most people would prefer customizability and "empowerment" over avoiding the slight inconvenience of using a different platform, and you couldn't build whole companies around locking down people at scale. But not only can you do that, those companies are hailed as being on the bleeding edge of innovation. Now I personally find all this kinda depressing, but I think there's no point trying to turn away from it. Most people are simply very unlike the median HN user -- not in the sense of technical affinity or whatever, but in the sense of being curious and inclined to tinker -- and that is, alas, yet one more untoward fact to incorporate into your worldview.

rektide 4y ago
I hear this negativity so much. And I am so sympathetic to the users. What is the current opportunity for them? Nearly nothing. They might learn one system or another that can empower them. But the rest of computing is still like Philip K Dick's semi-proverbial Black Iron Prison. Maybe they can get off the wall in Plato's Cave for an hour & see a nice little tour around, but they'll spend the rest of their adult lives immiserated & chained back on the wall regardless. I think people are very hungry for a better outlook with computing & e-social (which are so intertwined). Subconsciously they know the effort isn't worth the squeeze. Rejecting the premise of empowerment is actually just a value judgement, and a somewhat shrewd one. The technics have to change first. The hobbyists, governments, research institutes need to drive forward some new malleable systems that actually get some inertia & growth & promise behind them. We need some users who spend the majority of their time not-chained up, who happily do most of their computing in the free. Computing needs a solid place to go, a worthwhile form of existence, before we can ask to attract people. I stand with the banner mission of Malleable Systems Collective, a quote by J. C. R. Licklider, from Some Reflections on Early History (1986): > The user wants open software, software that can be modified, and that can participate in a progressive improvement process. https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/ But right now users have no where to turn to. This experience is unattainable, except on very small scales, and only after immense & painful toil. It's too early to tell what users want, because right now, there's hardly any choice. What choice there is comes with extreme sacrifice, is either disconnected & isolated alternative apps that offer little relative advantage & no interconnectivity, or difficult to host online services requiring dedication & committed-resources to try (YunoHost being perhaps the shiningest meta-attempt we could suggest https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/).

327488347223348 4y ago

Most people can't into computers, selling them computer and software they can use makes a lot of money.

rektide 4y ago

This is a great article & accurate in so many ways. We are lucky to have such great writing & distillation of the times as this; a fine treasure. This pairs very well & adds a lot of context to "What I want from the Internet"[1], which was submitted yesterday & which I am also very aglow over. Both the rise of platforms & the smartphone are tightly interwoven around a new connected axis of computing emerging & being useful. McThrow somewhat generously includes the web in his "personal computing" vision but alas, even as a huge web fan, it's pretty clear that the brief "intertwingularizing" moment (which was extremely pro user) was giving way to Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), to a de-personalized experience. The relevance of desktop faded, and relevance faded because users were well served by new connected services. Software effervescing, sublimating up into the cloud made it easier to share, made it easier to access to demand, freed us from worrying about backups. I think this is one of the critical junctures that Linux and the rest of the Desktops has failed to internalize, as a new need: the need to be connected. The need to be more than just isolated personal, the need to be available, the need to be connectable. I don't know quite what this future looks like or what it implies, but the "Linux on the desktop" spoke of competition with an outmoded, fading mode of computing. What was really needed was a further push onward, was a backbone for inter-app systems & development. One of the few efforts here is one people love to hate on (even though I think most have a superficial at best grasp of the technics): One Laptop Per Child, OLPC/XOPC. My word what a wonderful & interesting system, powered by a grand already-well-adopted-on-FreeDesktop/Linux desktop bus (DBus) that underpins a wide variety of the software matter about. And then the team went further & built DBus Telepathy[2], to connect DBus instances to one a other, across the local 802.11s mesh the laptop had, to create a very compelling shared multi-player object stage that apps could use to create shared experiences. Stunning smart extension of existing highly personal intra-desktop tech into a connected form, a connected media; simply brilliant. There's a couple reasons for hope in my view. First, the connected age is new & we are iterating & learning what broader connectivities work, and in there I think is the real base of power, the higher path that will be compelling for folks to get into. Nostr in particular has a very grand set of Nostr Implementation Possibilities[3] that shows how flexible the simple protocol is. But works like Dat, Hyper, ActivityPub, AtProto/BlueSky, Solid show a hunger & willingness to find out, to explore, at the base of a big tree of possibilities that more personal yet connected futures might emerge upon. I'm also happy to see computing operations getting mature. It was a free for all, learn everything do everything, everything is different & unique, there are no standard all-encompassing routes until the last half decade. Love it or hate it but there is nothing as integrative & consistent for operating computing resources as Kubernetes. It's an incredibly simple pattern at heart, applicable to almost all computing, and its aspirations of being autonomic, self-maintaining, are such a compelling human-liberating spirit that server-hugging desperately needed. Even if it's not Kubernetes in the end, the spirit of an integrating platform for computing that can reasonably self-manage is a must, if we want personal computing to win. Personal computing has to become more than a machine, it just has to, the demands are too high, and we are not going back, and thankfully, we now have good mature sensible ways to weave together the thousands of different threads of running these online endpoints ourselves. We'll keep getting better with smarter packaged implementations, and better tooling; the momentum is for real on & it's so good. The hardest to hope for win is the Web, but it's to most essential. The web has a lot of good-hearted people who care about personal computing. But the forces stacked up are huge; the industrialization of the field has been epic. (And getting ghastly worse, with WebGPU canvases threatening to turn the screen into just a bunch of pixels, see Hixie's Towards a modern Web Stack[4] and Flutter CanvasKit implementation). Alas in my view many of the good, spirited radicals differentiate themselves negatively, regressively, with back to the land ethos rather than having willingness or interest in forward advancement, when what we need is ambition & striving & exploration forward, particularly by rejecting industrialized best practices & asking ourselves again & again what best serves the user, what is the most open & empowering routes we can find? What course forward would we lead? I think there are some HyperCard-ish futures about in easy-ish reach, some explainable observable quick & interactive modes of computing, if we go hunting, and that the web is already almost the perfect material/medium. WebComponents are a key abstraction, and I'm not ashamed to say how thankful I am that the biggest most powerful tech companies are quickly adopting it en-mass & seeing great success (YouTube, GitHub, Google, Salesforce[5]), and that although underpublicized, it creates learnable moments & good offshoot tech (Stencil.js, Github's Catalyst, Google's Lit). Embedding app state into the DOM makes it malleable, makes it learnable in a way code isn't. My hope is we can start to create more visual editor like systems, where the page itself exposes it's own tools to better show the user the objects on the screen, and let's them play and explore more. Make the medium more live & interactable. Yet this is still not enough. A more user-friendly web page medium still, and better ability to host endpoints, still leaves a whole question of what's in the middle & how does it work. It returns to the protocols like Nostr I mentioned above. Figuring out how to personalize the protocols, how to Augment Intellect (the highest mission, the Engelbartian vision) in computing needs so many levels of the stack to be illuminated & graspable. And above all that stack, what is the experience? The world of applications, what most users use, is a lot of isolated systems. This hearkens back to the point of this submission, that personal computing had fallen, and in many ways it's because the at hand value to capture was upmarket, was higher level concerns: apps. Personal Computing fell away because each app is it's own fief, it's own walled garden, and we didn't emerge a broader system of computing that meaningfully intersected with and connected with thr apps. Isolated industrial experiences has been the name of the game for decades now, that brief Intertwingularity/Cluetrain Manifesto zeitgeist the late aughts aside. I've talked a lot about stack & technics, but ultimately a more integrative holistic stack has to be here to be useful, to serve the needs we have. Making HyperCard-y experiences that can interlink & coexist together on the canvas feels like a maybe possible vision here, something works like OpenSocial[6] were trying for during the greatest headiest API-based moments of computing history. It was a greater effort, but that attempt to stitch together widgets & data has some notable overlap with above mentioned Solid. Overall, I'd emphasize that for computing to be personal, it has to be personalizable. It has to be the users, in some degree. On these simple grounds, I can think of no more direct & overarching a cause than the Malleable Systems Collective[7], which is a wonderful home-base for exploring what computing do, how it might get out of the imprisonment of the data keep, oops i mean data center, & back into the hands of users. [1] https://www.chrbutler.com/what-i-want-from-the-internet https://www.chrbutler.com/what-i-want-from-the-internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852516 [2] https://aosabook.org/en/v1/telepathy.html https://aosabook.org/en/v1/telepathy.html [3] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips [4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit?resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 [5] https://levelup.gitconnected.com/web-components-at-big-tech-companies-youtube-84266bb507fd https://levelup.gitconnected.com/web-components-at-big-tech-... [6] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial [7] https://malleable.systems/ https://malleable.systems/

revelio 4y ago

The author explains the trend of lower innovation in personal computing, which I think we all feel, as to do with corporate greed and the solution is "academics, non profits, non-VC funded companies, hobbyists" etc. But this is not a great explanation because human nature didn't really change since the 1980s, yet personal computing did. These sweeping but vague explanations are tempting, but I think the cause is actually a lot more technical and random: the OS design culture that spawned Windows, UNIX and macOS pre-dated the internet. The internet was a fundamental shift that changed everything, and yet the NT and Apple design teams all traced their roots back to the pre-internet era (and Linux just made a UNIX for the PC, same thing, design rooted in the 80s). Their whole OS design thinking was fundamentally pre-internet and never caught up. Even basic tasks like uploading files to a server through a GUI STILL aren't well supported in desktop operating systems, in 2023! What platform did fundamentally get the internet? The web - born of the internet, made of the internet. Web apps don't even start up without the internet. Whilst Microsoft snoozed, Apple thrashed around and the UNIX people spent all their efforts on cloning the past, web browsers became the new way software got distributed. The web had so many benefits over writing PC/Mac apps. Suddenly you could iterate every day, you could write the bulk of your software in nice high level scripting languages, your software was accessible by just typing in its name, you could use databases instead of designing binary file formats, app UI was automatically portable between operating systems, typography and layout were taken seriously, people could easily discover and access your software with one click on a link, the platform had a nice open easy to use protocol set up for you out of the box. And dozens more. So many wins for developers and users in there. Unfortunately, it was never meant for this. People spent vast effort hacking the web into a barely-passable app platform because it was the closest thing to an Internet OS, and nobody else was offering that. But the web was simply never thought about by its developers in terms of empowering personal computing users. Whilst the people at PARC, NeXT, Apple, Microsoft and so on spent lots of time thinking big 1990s era thoughts about making programming easy, computers powerful, component systems, filing systems with search, AppleScripting, better window management and so on, this utopian way of thinking never entered the culture of browser developers. There was a brief attempt at some sort of structured higher level planning, that open hackable spirit during the W3C era, but the XML stack was made by academics and despite good intentions a failure. So browser makers just kept randomly flinging stuff into HTML, but without the animating forward-looking spirit of the PC era, in fact without much of a vision at all beyond trying to keep the show on the road and better competing with 'real' app platforms. It could easily have been very different. If the people doing OS development in the 90s had fully understood the importance of being an internet OS we might have had things like a global filesystem namespace, start menus that could directly launch sandboxed OS-native apps from a domain name, internet sharable clipboards, who knows what else. Unfortunately that's not how it worked out. Today OS research is basically dead. ChromeOS is the newest and probably the least powerful, least ambitious OS ever made. On the rare occasions people get to make a new OS they never make it past micro-kernels. The kind of sweeping ambition that launched the PC era is gone.