5 ms·

I went to read Ted Gioia’s original piece to try to figure out why he thought his new computer was a downgrade, but he doesn’t say. There was a period in the 90

I went to read Ted Gioia’s original piece to try to figure out why he thought his new computer was a downgrade, but he doesn’t say. There was a period in the 90s where Windows machines were increasingly cheap and loaded with crapware, but otherwise my computers continue to get better and better. I agree Google and social media has gotten worse, but I don’t see a larger trend here. I’ll happily trade any of 90s (or 2010 for that matter) cars, computers, phones, cameras, dentist visits, TVs, video games, etc. etc. for the author’s new “downgrade.”

anjel 3y ago
What about dentists is so much better now??
- persedes 3y ago
  Might be referring to the notion that nowadays dentists are more generous with anesthesia. E.g. it used to be normal to pull out wisdom teeth without general anesthesia. Also their diagnostic tools have gotten a lot better (recent x-rays are insanely detailed).
  - jampekka 3y ago
    Is it really normal to use general anesthesia for that somewhere? Sounds quite risky.
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      It's only normal in America, as is the tradition of being overmedicated for just about any minor discomfort. I opted for my wisdom teeth to be taken out with local and don't regret it. The worst part is the recovery anyway, not the 20 minutes in the chair.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    When I was in high school (late 90s) I remember getting cavities filled without any numbing at all. I just had to deal with it. Maybe it was a bad dentist, because I know that stuff existed then, but I wasn't assertive enough at that age to call out the dentist. These days they numb me up and I don't feel anything, but I still tense up a lot out of habit from when I was younger. They also used to take impressions at the dentist where they'd fill your mouth with some kind of goop in trays. Now they have cameras they can just move around your mouth and it stitches a model together.
    - fulladder 3y ago
      I had that done within the past 5 years. The dentist said the decay was very superficial and asked if I wanted the local anesthetic. I figured the mere fact that he was asking meant it was surely not necessary, so I said no. It was not painful.
- vishnugupta 3y ago
  Root Canal treatment has gotten objectively better. I have got about 10 of those over last 18 years. The first one was spread across three weeks, 6-7 sittings. Compare that to the latest one I had a few months ago. One week, three sittings. And significantly less painful.
  - ebiester 3y ago
    You may be an outlier. nearly 20 years ago, my root canal was 2 sittings. In 2012, I had a mistranslation and the temporary work ended up lasting ten years. (I got it fixed up in 2022) (I am guessing that if you have 10 root canals, you've gotten the short end of the stick genetically or through childhood.)
- com2kid 3y ago
  X-Rays are trivial now. Doses are lower and results are instant. Dentists can easily send x-rays to each other, making visiting a specialist easier. Cosmetic treatments like Invisalign use (really cool!) 3d mapping techniques to create a treatment plan and track progress. Fluoride treatments are now more effective (the brush on fluoride vs the tray that you's soak your teeth in for a few minutes).
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > X-Rays are trivial now. The most important part is what the handheld ones are used through the procedure so the doc can see and correct their action in the process and you don't even need to get up.
  - bloomingeek 3y ago
    Pain management is far superior today, thankfully.
- pageld 3y ago
  Digital Xrays save time, pain and radiation Electronic health records Cordless instruments save pain for the hygienist / dentist and angst of moving around a cord Cavitrons reduce hygiene pain and do a better job of removing calculus Invisiline gives a significant part of the population an option of not having metal mouth Then there's better techniques, materials and various other things. Dental offices have changed quite a bit in the last 25 years.
  - johngossman 3y ago
    ^These are the things I was thinking of. I haven’t had any serious work (knock on wood) in years, so I can’t comment on anesthesia
- danaris 3y ago
  In addition to the things others have mentioned, the introduction of ultrasonic tools for cleaning teeth (probably alongside some of the other innovations) has dropped at least my average time for a regular cleaning from about 45 minutes to about 20.
FeepingCreature 3y ago
My personal pet peeve: Budget phones have barely budged over the last seven years. Look at the Moto G series in comparison: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?&idPhone1=8103&idPhone3=12447&idPhone2=10051 https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?&idPhone1=8103&idPhone... 8core arm big.little, 1080p IPS, 15MP front, GPS, LTE. Am I talking about 2016 or 2023? All that's changed is that the screen glass has gotten worse. Also, I checked a few months ago and as far as I can tell it isn't possible any longer to get a Thinkpad T series with a 4K monitor. edit: Though they seem to have fixed that at least.
- sapiogram 3y ago
  A few counterpoints: * If going by the article, price has decreased from €130 to €95, a significant reduction even if not accounting for inflation. * RAM has doubled from 2GB to 4GB. * Per-core CPU performance has presumably increased considerably.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Counter-counters: - GSM price check is extremely random and can basically be ignored. Afaict, the price is stable with inflation. - Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore. - Checking on cpubenchmark.com, A53 vs A55 is like a 20% increase. The A75 is admittedly a nice step up.
    - znpy 3y ago
      > - Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore. RAM has been slowing down a lot in the last ~10 years. I had 16GB ram in my ThinkPad X220 ten years ago and the W520 could already get 32GB ram. Laptops with 128GB ram have been around for at least five years (workstation-class laptop). Why are computers still being shipped with 8GB ram (or less)? Why is 32GB a premium and not the bare minimum? A whole class of performance issues could be entirely avoided just by having enough ram.
      - 3y ago
dexwiz 3y ago
It’s a bit slower to upgrade so there isn’t as much delight to counter the negative. In the 90s you had to constantly upgrade. A 1995 computer wasn’t going to work in 2004s environment. But a 2015 computer still is largely functional now. No machine learning or fancy games, but it can still surf the web.
- apantel 3y ago
  This is because CPU’s haven’t gotten any faster in almost 20 years because of the problem of heat dissipation, so all that can be done to make computers feel more powerful is to get better at writing parallelizable software… which is just a very hard problem for humans to tackle. Also, the latency to/from main memory is the main bottleneck now for all jobs whether or not they are parallelizable. And it is very hard to get insight into how you can organize things at a high level to optimize for low-level memory usage… humans aren’t good at that either. The problem is that now gains in the experience of using computers have to come from humans getting better at writing software in light of hardware constraints. You can’t get a whole lot these days from throwing new hardware at the problem.
  - dexwiz 3y ago
    I don't get how you claim CPUs are the same as 20 years ago? Maybe the clock speed is the same, but they are demonstrably denser. Lithography continues to improve as extreme costs, so wins are eaked out. The numbers don't seem to change much, but that is because we are approaching a limit of what a transistor can do with current approaches, and alternative approaches are literally millennia of engineering hours behind. Intel and x86(_64) has had a hold for two decades, but GPUs and AArch64 are making inroads addressing memory bandwidth issues.
    - apantel 3y ago
      I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware). A top-of-the-line processor today is maybe 3x more capable than one from a decade ago. And that doesn’t help with the real bottleneck of accessing memory, especially main memory, which is bound by the laws of physics. The CPU can’t do anything until it has the data, no matter how fast it is. Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware. Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant… My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.
Udo 3y ago
I was curious about that as well. He probably doesn't tell because there would be instant arguing. To be fair though, hardware development feels like it has slowed down while the parts are becoming more expensive. I have a thing where I wait to upgrade my workstation until performance of newer hardware has 2x'ed on most workloads. I had to wait quite long this time. My trusty 1080 Ti was not 2x'ed until fairly recently, and that came at a hefty price and much increased power draw. It feels like a lot of low hanging fruits have already been picked.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I just got back into PC building after taking years off using Macs. Put together a "mid range" gaming system and put a 4 year old RX 5700 XT in it, which is similar to (probably a little slower than) your 1080 Ti, and it's shocking how good GPUs are today vs. graphics cards 10 and 20 years ago. Like mind blowing. This GPU which has long since been leapfrogged chews through every game I like to play and delivers 1440p/144Hz. Really incredible compared to trying to sustain 30FPS Quake 1 back in 1999.
flohofwoe 3y ago
For me, finally leaving my Amiga 3000 behind in the second half of the 90's for a Windows PC felt like stepping from a happy utopia back into the grim Dark Ages when it comes to productivity and being able to customize my workspace to my needs. But PC was where the games and frantic hardware progress happened (3D accelerators! Doom! Quake!), even if the 'productivity software' which ran on that hardware mostly sucked (every UI application was siloed away instead of cooperating - which unfortunately hasn't changed much).
- johngossman 3y ago
  Yeah, lots of people moved from Apple/Amiga/Atari to PC at that time, as those ecosystems struggled. But the PC manufacturers, without any competition, took advantage of that to produce crap. It took Apple’s resurgence to turn that around. (Switched from Amiga myself in early 90s)
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
If his new computer runs Windows 11, I'd consider it a downgrade too. All my computers run Linux now, so only the hardware gains are salient. :p
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Until you try the touchpad that is :/ Linux works well on the desktop with a mouse, but I didn't have a great Linux experience on any laptop I owned in the last two decades.
  - longitudinal93 3y ago
    I'm delighted with the touchpad on my new Framework. By far my best experience and I've been running Linux as my daily driver on laptops from Sony, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, & Purism for over two decades.
al_borland 3y ago
Some things are being taken too far, imo. I think all controls being moved to touch screens in cars make them objectively worse. A touch screen requires the driver take their eyes off the road, while knobs, buttons, and switches can all be done by feel. I hope we eventually see things return to a more logical balance. Phone size is another one. I get it, people want their phone to be their only device, and that makes them want a big screen to do more stuff... but for me, a phone should be sized to a human hand. If I can't do everything with one hand, or they need to add software features to compensate for the size of the hardware, it's a failure. I do wonder how much price comes into play. If someone is only going to have one device, because that's all they can afford, it's going to be a phone. In both of these cases, the technology seems to forget about the humans that need to use these things. From a repairably point of view, older devices are easier to understand and built to be repairable, where modern devices are cheap and complex (or proprietary), which leads to more waste. This can also be considered worse. That complexity can make for a better product during its serviceable life, but that life may be much shorter. So we have to weigh the improvement of the product against the cost of replacement. Not only the cost in terms of money, but also cost in terms of the environmental impact. Sometimes it is worth taking a step back to make sure we are taking a thoughtful approach to technology and improvement, to make sure it makes sense and we're not just doing it because we can. I think some people, especially in silicon valley, forget how normal people live and are too wrapped up in technology for technology's sake.
bloomingeek 3y ago
As a "boomer", I agree, the good old days weren't all that great. People of my age group are afraid to get out of their comfort zone, it's my belief that's why our political situation is so full of turmoil. Yes, there are some problems with some of today's tech, I'm not crazy about my cars spying on me, but I do love the infotainment system and GPS.

anjel 3y ago

What about dentists is so much better now??

persedes 3y ago
Might be referring to the notion that nowadays dentists are more generous with anesthesia. E.g. it used to be normal to pull out wisdom teeth without general anesthesia. Also their diagnostic tools have gotten a lot better (recent x-rays are insanely detailed).
- jampekka 3y ago
  Is it really normal to use general anesthesia for that somewhere? Sounds quite risky.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    It's only normal in America, as is the tradition of being overmedicated for just about any minor discomfort. I opted for my wisdom teeth to be taken out with local and don't regret it. The worst part is the recovery anyway, not the 20 minutes in the chair.
- al_borland 3y ago
  When I was in high school (late 90s) I remember getting cavities filled without any numbing at all. I just had to deal with it. Maybe it was a bad dentist, because I know that stuff existed then, but I wasn't assertive enough at that age to call out the dentist. These days they numb me up and I don't feel anything, but I still tense up a lot out of habit from when I was younger. They also used to take impressions at the dentist where they'd fill your mouth with some kind of goop in trays. Now they have cameras they can just move around your mouth and it stitches a model together.
  - fulladder 3y ago
    I had that done within the past 5 years. The dentist said the decay was very superficial and asked if I wanted the local anesthetic. I figured the mere fact that he was asking meant it was surely not necessary, so I said no. It was not painful.
vishnugupta 3y ago
Root Canal treatment has gotten objectively better. I have got about 10 of those over last 18 years. The first one was spread across three weeks, 6-7 sittings. Compare that to the latest one I had a few months ago. One week, three sittings. And significantly less painful.
- ebiester 3y ago
  You may be an outlier. nearly 20 years ago, my root canal was 2 sittings. In 2012, I had a mistranslation and the temporary work ended up lasting ten years. (I got it fixed up in 2022) (I am guessing that if you have 10 root canals, you've gotten the short end of the stick genetically or through childhood.)
com2kid 3y ago
X-Rays are trivial now. Doses are lower and results are instant. Dentists can easily send x-rays to each other, making visiting a specialist easier. Cosmetic treatments like Invisalign use (really cool!) 3d mapping techniques to create a treatment plan and track progress. Fluoride treatments are now more effective (the brush on fluoride vs the tray that you's soak your teeth in for a few minutes).
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > X-Rays are trivial now. The most important part is what the handheld ones are used through the procedure so the doc can see and correct their action in the process and you don't even need to get up.
- bloomingeek 3y ago
  Pain management is far superior today, thankfully.
pageld 3y ago
Digital Xrays save time, pain and radiation Electronic health records Cordless instruments save pain for the hygienist / dentist and angst of moving around a cord Cavitrons reduce hygiene pain and do a better job of removing calculus Invisiline gives a significant part of the population an option of not having metal mouth Then there's better techniques, materials and various other things. Dental offices have changed quite a bit in the last 25 years.
- johngossman 3y ago
  ^These are the things I was thinking of. I haven’t had any serious work (knock on wood) in years, so I can’t comment on anesthesia
danaris 3y ago
In addition to the things others have mentioned, the introduction of ultrasonic tools for cleaning teeth (probably alongside some of the other innovations) has dropped at least my average time for a regular cleaning from about 45 minutes to about 20.

FeepingCreature 3y ago

My personal pet peeve: Budget phones have barely budged over the last seven years. Look at the Moto G series in comparison: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?&idPhone1=8103&idPhone3=12447&idPhone2=10051 https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?&idPhone1=8103&idPhone... 8core arm big.little, 1080p IPS, 15MP front, GPS, LTE. Am I talking about 2016 or 2023? All that's changed is that the screen glass has gotten worse. Also, I checked a few months ago and as far as I can tell it isn't possible any longer to get a Thinkpad T series with a 4K monitor. edit: Though they seem to have fixed that at least.

sapiogram 3y ago
A few counterpoints: * If going by the article, price has decreased from €130 to €95, a significant reduction even if not accounting for inflation. * RAM has doubled from 2GB to 4GB. * Per-core CPU performance has presumably increased considerably.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  Counter-counters: - GSM price check is extremely random and can basically be ignored. Afaict, the price is stable with inflation. - Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore. - Checking on cpubenchmark.com, A53 vs A55 is like a 20% increase. The A75 is admittedly a nice step up.
  - znpy 3y ago
    > - Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore. RAM has been slowing down a lot in the last ~10 years. I had 16GB ram in my ThinkPad X220 ten years ago and the W520 could already get 32GB ram. Laptops with 128GB ram have been around for at least five years (workstation-class laptop). Why are computers still being shipped with 8GB ram (or less)? Why is 32GB a premium and not the bare minimum? A whole class of performance issues could be entirely avoided just by having enough ram.
    - 3y ago

dexwiz 3y ago

It’s a bit slower to upgrade so there isn’t as much delight to counter the negative. In the 90s you had to constantly upgrade. A 1995 computer wasn’t going to work in 2004s environment. But a 2015 computer still is largely functional now. No machine learning or fancy games, but it can still surf the web.

apantel 3y ago
This is because CPU’s haven’t gotten any faster in almost 20 years because of the problem of heat dissipation, so all that can be done to make computers feel more powerful is to get better at writing parallelizable software… which is just a very hard problem for humans to tackle. Also, the latency to/from main memory is the main bottleneck now for all jobs whether or not they are parallelizable. And it is very hard to get insight into how you can organize things at a high level to optimize for low-level memory usage… humans aren’t good at that either. The problem is that now gains in the experience of using computers have to come from humans getting better at writing software in light of hardware constraints. You can’t get a whole lot these days from throwing new hardware at the problem.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  I don't get how you claim CPUs are the same as 20 years ago? Maybe the clock speed is the same, but they are demonstrably denser. Lithography continues to improve as extreme costs, so wins are eaked out. The numbers don't seem to change much, but that is because we are approaching a limit of what a transistor can do with current approaches, and alternative approaches are literally millennia of engineering hours behind. Intel and x86(_64) has had a hold for two decades, but GPUs and AArch64 are making inroads addressing memory bandwidth issues.
  - apantel 3y ago
    I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware). A top-of-the-line processor today is maybe 3x more capable than one from a decade ago. And that doesn’t help with the real bottleneck of accessing memory, especially main memory, which is bound by the laws of physics. The CPU can’t do anything until it has the data, no matter how fast it is. Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware. Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant… My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.

Udo 3y ago

I was curious about that as well. He probably doesn't tell because there would be instant arguing. To be fair though, hardware development feels like it has slowed down while the parts are becoming more expensive. I have a thing where I wait to upgrade my workstation until performance of newer hardware has 2x'ed on most workloads. I had to wait quite long this time. My trusty 1080 Ti was not 2x'ed until fairly recently, and that came at a hefty price and much increased power draw. It feels like a lot of low hanging fruits have already been picked.

ryandrake 3y ago
I just got back into PC building after taking years off using Macs. Put together a "mid range" gaming system and put a 4 year old RX 5700 XT in it, which is similar to (probably a little slower than) your 1080 Ti, and it's shocking how good GPUs are today vs. graphics cards 10 and 20 years ago. Like mind blowing. This GPU which has long since been leapfrogged chews through every game I like to play and delivers 1440p/144Hz. Really incredible compared to trying to sustain 30FPS Quake 1 back in 1999.

flohofwoe 3y ago

For me, finally leaving my Amiga 3000 behind in the second half of the 90's for a Windows PC felt like stepping from a happy utopia back into the grim Dark Ages when it comes to productivity and being able to customize my workspace to my needs. But PC was where the games and frantic hardware progress happened (3D accelerators! Doom! Quake!), even if the 'productivity software' which ran on that hardware mostly sucked (every UI application was siloed away instead of cooperating - which unfortunately hasn't changed much).

johngossman 3y ago
Yeah, lots of people moved from Apple/Amiga/Atari to PC at that time, as those ecosystems struggled. But the PC manufacturers, without any competition, took advantage of that to produce crap. It took Apple’s resurgence to turn that around. (Switched from Amiga myself in early 90s)

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

If his new computer runs Windows 11, I'd consider it a downgrade too. All my computers run Linux now, so only the hardware gains are salient. :p

flohofwoe 3y ago
Until you try the touchpad that is :/ Linux works well on the desktop with a mouse, but I didn't have a great Linux experience on any laptop I owned in the last two decades.
- longitudinal93 3y ago
  I'm delighted with the touchpad on my new Framework. By far my best experience and I've been running Linux as my daily driver on laptops from Sony, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, & Purism for over two decades.

al_borland 3y ago

Some things are being taken too far, imo. I think all controls being moved to touch screens in cars make them objectively worse. A touch screen requires the driver take their eyes off the road, while knobs, buttons, and switches can all be done by feel. I hope we eventually see things return to a more logical balance. Phone size is another one. I get it, people want their phone to be their only device, and that makes them want a big screen to do more stuff... but for me, a phone should be sized to a human hand. If I can't do everything with one hand, or they need to add software features to compensate for the size of the hardware, it's a failure. I do wonder how much price comes into play. If someone is only going to have one device, because that's all they can afford, it's going to be a phone. In both of these cases, the technology seems to forget about the humans that need to use these things. From a repairably point of view, older devices are easier to understand and built to be repairable, where modern devices are cheap and complex (or proprietary), which leads to more waste. This can also be considered worse. That complexity can make for a better product during its serviceable life, but that life may be much shorter. So we have to weigh the improvement of the product against the cost of replacement. Not only the cost in terms of money, but also cost in terms of the environmental impact. Sometimes it is worth taking a step back to make sure we are taking a thoughtful approach to technology and improvement, to make sure it makes sense and we're not just doing it because we can. I think some people, especially in silicon valley, forget how normal people live and are too wrapped up in technology for technology's sake.

bloomingeek 3y ago

As a "boomer", I agree, the good old days weren't all that great. People of my age group are afraid to get out of their comfort zone, it's my belief that's why our political situation is so full of turmoil. Yes, there are some problems with some of today's tech, I'm not crazy about my cars spying on me, but I do love the infotainment system and GPS.