4 ms·

It's fashionable to complain about bloat and npm and etc. Rust is going in that same direction. But, the world is more complex. My Atari 800 had 48k and a cass

It's fashionable to complain about bloat and npm and etc. Rust is going in that same direction. But, the world is more complex. My Atari 800 had 48k and a cassette drive. My PC has a GPU, an audio system. Multiple audio outputs, multiple audio inputs, USB, a camera, a mouse, a keyboard, can run 3 displays, it has ethernet and wifi. My Atari 800 connected to almost nothing. At one point I had a 300 baud acoustic modem and a terminal emulator that required me to scroll over a virtual 80x25 display on the Atari's 40x25 text display. It could do max 352x240 pixels in 128 colors. My PC/Mac on displays 16 million colors, my browser loads 100s of images in every page in moments - vs my 1989 PC when downloading a single 800x600 image too minutes. Unlike my old computers that could only display ASCII my modern computer displays all the worlds languages with ease, and if turned on previous input assistance for various languages including accessability languages. My browser displays iframes in iframes in iframe showing all kinds of amazing content from all over the wrold. My Mac/Iphone copies and pastes between each other, and automagically shares wifi passwords. My iPhone does that amazing proximity sharing thing like magic with strangers. The software i use interfaces with tons of services. Maybe it's email, or instagram, or slack, or square, or apple pay, or google wallet, or ..... I don't know if I'm making my point well but the point I'm trying to make is our software has tons of features because we need and want tons of features. If you don't add Apple Pay then you potentially lose me as a customer. If your app can't let me send a picture through it then I'm not using it. If I can't share directly from your app I rate you 1 out of 5. That's not an excuse for bloated webpages. But, software is almost always going to NEED, more features over time. I think that's inevitable. We keep inventing new things and new services appear and people want all the softwares to support them. I would love it if my Nintendo Switch's screenshot function magically did the Apple clipboard magic so when I took a screenshot on my Switch could then instantly paste on my Mac or iPhone and the screenshot would appear. So much easier than what I have to do now. But that would require "adding a feature"!

AndyMcConachie 2y ago
90% of the features on my iPhone are not interesting to me. Worse yet, everytime Apple pushes a new feature they enable it by default on the next upgrade. Here's a radical thought. "Every feature in a piece of software that I don't want or use is a bug." This is radical user centric design. It's also completely unworkable. Why can't I buy a phone that better matches my feature needs? One might expect capitalism and competition to produce many different implementations of different products catered to individual users' needs. Instead we have monopolistic monocultures and feature bloat. Apple is driven to constantly add new features to capture new customers and respond to new features from its few competitors. Rarely does any of this movement serve me as a customer. I, like the vast majority of iPhone users, rarely see value in new feature. Sometimes I do. But it's probably 5% or less of new features are things I actually want. I don't need any of them. I'm feature content and everything new is just a bug.
flohofwoe 2y ago
> My Atari 800 had 48k and a cassette drive... Your Atari 800 also had multiple 'GPUs' (CTIA and ANTIC), and a dedicated 'audio processing unit' (POKEY) as well as various input/output ports. Conceptually it was more advanced than the IBM PC up to around the mid-90s and closer to the modular hardware design we have today with multiple losely coupled autonomous coprocessors. It is kind of interesting how the first popular 8-bit home computer also was the most technically advanced until the Commodore Amiga entered the scene (which was the direct technical successor to the 8-bit Atari, designed by the same people).
- Lio 2y ago
  > first popular 8-bit home computer Are you claiming that the Atari 800 was the first popular 8-bit computer or just the first popular Atari computer? It may depend on where you lived but the Atari 800 was neither the first or most popular 8-bit computer. I think it could be argued that wasn't the most advanced either, although they were really cool.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    The 800 was released in 1979 which was long before the Speccy, C64, Amstrad CPC and MSX (which I consider the other 'popular' home computers). (ok I forgot about the Apple II (1977) I think that was mainly a 'big in USA' phenomenon)

AndyMcConachie 2y ago

90% of the features on my iPhone are not interesting to me. Worse yet, everytime Apple pushes a new feature they enable it by default on the next upgrade. Here's a radical thought. "Every feature in a piece of software that I don't want or use is a bug." This is radical user centric design. It's also completely unworkable. Why can't I buy a phone that better matches my feature needs? One might expect capitalism and competition to produce many different implementations of different products catered to individual users' needs. Instead we have monopolistic monocultures and feature bloat. Apple is driven to constantly add new features to capture new customers and respond to new features from its few competitors. Rarely does any of this movement serve me as a customer. I, like the vast majority of iPhone users, rarely see value in new feature. Sometimes I do. But it's probably 5% or less of new features are things I actually want. I don't need any of them. I'm feature content and everything new is just a bug.

flohofwoe 2y ago

> My Atari 800 had 48k and a cassette drive... Your Atari 800 also had multiple 'GPUs' (CTIA and ANTIC), and a dedicated 'audio processing unit' (POKEY) as well as various input/output ports. Conceptually it was more advanced than the IBM PC up to around the mid-90s and closer to the modular hardware design we have today with multiple losely coupled autonomous coprocessors. It is kind of interesting how the first popular 8-bit home computer also was the most technically advanced until the Commodore Amiga entered the scene (which was the direct technical successor to the 8-bit Atari, designed by the same people).

Lio 2y ago
> first popular 8-bit home computer Are you claiming that the Atari 800 was the first popular 8-bit computer or just the first popular Atari computer? It may depend on where you lived but the Atari 800 was neither the first or most popular 8-bit computer. I think it could be argued that wasn't the most advanced either, although they were really cool.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  The 800 was released in 1979 which was long before the Speccy, C64, Amstrad CPC and MSX (which I consider the other 'popular' home computers). (ok I forgot about the Apple II (1977) I think that was mainly a 'big in USA' phenomenon)