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Comment by PortiaBerries | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.

Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a means to a different end. However, today, I definitely see my macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an end, the way people saw old PCs.

same. it's hard to describe how 10-year-old me felt about 8bit dithered graphics sparkling through phosphorus but 30 years later the magic is gone. I can't point to any one thing (maybe the advent of webapps) but it has something to do with software just generally becoming more and more sucky.

How user hostile technology has become killed the magic for me.

I constantly have to think about not being tracked on the web, manipulated by an ad or astroturfed, scammed by companies with fake reviews, exploited by "algorithms", dodging dark patterns, fighting my OS to do what I want, protecting my data and privacy, hackers stealing my data from companies I entrusted it with, cryptoscams, IoT devices leaking my data, malicious libraries (npm, etc.), hardware exploits (Meltdown/Spectre), obscure firmware, PC in my PC (Intel ME), etc. etc. etc.

The worry about viruses and trojans in the 90s pales in comparison.

I still enjoy tinkering with technology, but most days it feels like a chore, and I do it less in my spare time.

Exactly. On newer systems I sometimes feel a bit like an abused spouse. The love is there, but I'm always on guard, waiting for the insult or hit that comes out of nowhere. Every day it's "What unwanted thing will be forced on me this time?" or "How will I be taken advantage of now?"

I don't think it's entirely unintentional either. I think the feelings of being powerless to protect yourself, the expectations that at any time your own devices will have things silently changed leaving you with no choice but accept it, I suspect it's conditioning us to accept whatever is pushed on us and feel resigned as control is increasingly taken from us.

> How user hostile technology has become

Hm, I don’t know - old DOS was pretty user hostile, but it rewarded people with the patience to stick with it. Nowadays there’s no reward.

Old systems may not have been friendly, but they were never out to get you; they were merely indifferent, and your job was to make them work. Modern systems, for all their aesthetic effort, know that you are a valuable resource, and try to exploit you; your job is to keep them contained.

That's true - they were as user friendly as the technology let them be.

When I was in my late teens I lived with an older friend who worked as a web developer at the beginning of the dot com boom. He would come home stressed from work and I'd think how can be stressed? He gets to work on a computer all day!

That's more a reflection of your mental state than anything relating to computers really. Kids today see ipads and nintendo switches the same way you saw old computers.

It's because we live in a very low-agency world, an effect which is massively more noticeable when you're underage, and computers represented a tiny universe where through hard work and learning you could gain control and eventual mastery.

I can’t tell if it’s just simple nostalgia, but I feel it too.

I got my first Mac when I was in 4th grade in 1994. (A Performa 630CD, which is so slow that I assume my AirPods have an order of magnitude more computational power.) By god I loved that thing.

And I think in part it’s because I could poke at it. You could fiddle around inside the System Folder. You could modify application resources with ResEdit. You could really dig in and see all the files, and then probably accidentally ruin something, but still, you could do it. And you simply cannot do that on an iOS device outside of jailbreaking, and increasingly you cannot do that with SIP and other security measures on macOS.

Which is probably for the best, for obvious security reasons. But I feel like I miss that joy of exploration…

The first app I opened up was ResEdit; the jack-in-the-box gave me a big wave of nostalgia... But yeah, it's hard to separate fond memories of youth from the changes in computing. Plus when I was a kid learning HyperTalk and then C on System 7 it was all for fun; no one was asking anything of me. Now my coding supports my family; I haven't done any coding for fun since a few years ago when I took a sabbatical from my SDE job and worked half-time as a farm hand.

It was a uniformly designed tool and simple enough that you could feel to have full control over. Nowadays not so much, either because of walled-garden aspirations (Windows, macOS) and/or increasing complexity and fracturedness (on Linux for example the whole X/Wayland, DE, GUI toolkits, hi-DPI and font rendering mess, package managers vs. snap/flatpak and containers, …).

May that be because most of the modern software, including operating systems, is a royal clusterfuck of superfluous abstractions and arbitrary design decisions prioritizing looks over function?

And games. Games back then were definitely better.

(I've never used classic Mac OS when it was current — almost no one here could afford a Mac, and those who could didn't buy one either because everyone else used Windows)

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