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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: what if version 4 is just fine?

> Software is economically expensive to produce

Maybe we just produce too much of it in an effort to justify our salaries and stock prices?

For all the software that's been produced over the last 2 decades, I'm not aware of any significant breakthroughs to show for all that effort (LLMs might be the closest, but they are down to sheer processing power rather than software itself).

My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.

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"My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable."

Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

- Operating systems have become MUCH more stable. I restart my computer every 3 months, it used to be every 2 days.

- I remember when I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it, and then repeating. I remember constant Skype issues around 2010. Facetime is practically flawless. Encoding has quietly gotten a lot better.

- Adaptability is amazing. I remember when software was only available on extremely specific devices, and now I can access almost everything I have from literally every device.

- Encryption by default is practically universal now.

- Seamless syncing. From version recovery to web browsing. We multitask a lot more.

- Universal file formats and APIs

> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable.

While restarting some versions of Windows servers in the 2000s and 2010s to workaround memory leaks was normal, old OSes through history have been stable.

Linux has been around for decades and has been very stable.

Windows 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, NT 4.0, Server 2000, XP, Vista, 10 & 11 have all been fairly stable after patches.

Win 95 and 98 after patches were stable enough. Win ME and 8 were crap, but Win 8 was more just crap experience.

Really most of the problems with Microsoft, Apple, Linux desktop environments and package systems could be categorized into being related to increases in complexity, many unnecessary changes, and just poor design or experience.

IBM chose macOS years ago because of the reduced cost to maintain them, while most IT professionals continue to choose Microsoft because the barrier to entry cost is low and because of familiarity, likely because younger people have Windows because it’s cheaper, they can play more games on it, and that’s what they grew up with, but Linux continues to be the primary server OS.

Little of that has to do with stability, and just because Windows 10 & 11 are stable doesn’t mean that things weren’t more stable 40-50 years ago. Linux admins for years prided themselves on the uptime metrics back then.

Not one of the OSes you mention were around 40 years ago (i.e. in 1985)

I think they were just saying that was the decade when microcomputers started coming about in offices

> … 40-50 years ago. Linux admins …

Note that Linux admins would’ve been in last ~40 years, but yes things were stable even longer ago. The problems came mostly with memory/resources not being cleaned up in C/C++ libraries and programs, primarily in Windows, because it was a little more chaotic with a lot of dev, a lot of differing hardware, and not as much oversight.

Netware. That thing stayed up forever on cheap clone hardware.

> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable

2010 is Windows 7 era, not the dark ages of pre-XP-SP2. I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue - all the ones I've experienced are due to my own fault by trying to overclock the system.

I'm sure shitty hardware and drivers is a thing (this is traditionally where Apple excelled at in comparison) but I don't recall it being an issue on quality hardware.

> I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it

Shitty Wi-Fi/broadband/peering? Ironically nowadays I sometimes experience that too, except instead of waiting for video to download I'm waiting for some Javascript to finish re-rendering the page 3 times.

> I remember constant Skype issues around 2010

Again shitty connection maybe? I was spending every evening on Skype calls and to this day it's been way more reliable than anything I've tried since, thanks to it being P2P. So I guess if you were having constant issues it's down to the network.

> I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue...

I think usually Windows machines crash into blue instead

That's really just a meme though. NT has always been rock solid with just some driver related issues dotted around.

Restarting?

Huh I remember times when I was basically reinstalling the system once a month because of file system issues.

Putting computer to hibernation nowadays works and earlier it would most definitely cause problems.

> I restart my computer every 3 months

Funny how habits stick, I still shut my primary desktop down at the end of every day because for all of my youth that was just what you did.

They boot so damn fast it doesn't really matter and I kinda like starting the day with a "fresh" desktop (same reason I clean my desk every night - starting work with a neat desk is great - I trash it through the day and repeat).

Do you rely on state saving things like resumed browser sessions, or just really start fresh every day?

I start fresh every day. Bookmarks and git are durable, browser sessions are transient.

I'd call you an inspiration but that would be giving myself too much credit because in reality I don't think I could even convince myself to try.

Fully fresh everyday, it’s in the history if I want whatever it was.

I’m still fairly ruthless about not having a tonne of tabs open (also gonna be an age thing, I predate tabbed web browsers and for a while after their introduction you’d either grind them to a halt or crash them entirely with too many tabs open and too many wasn’t many).

I admire this. I'm also old but fell on the "comically large number of tabs" side.

I remember that when I clicked a button in the UI and got an instant reaction instead a pause because some resource has to be loaded the cloud.

> Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

Not really. I used a Windows 2000 computer a few months ago and it worked like a charm: quickly and efficiently. Modern Windows feels leagues behind in performance.

Agree, I never used Windows 2000, but I used NT4 in the late nineties and it was rock solid, no less reliable than Windows 11, and of course, snappier on vastly lesser hardware, I think I used it on a Pentium III.

Operating Systems are more stable compared to early nineties, but not 2010. I was using NT4 in the late nineties, and it was rock solid. I had a Sun Ultra 1 at home at the time, and that was rock solid too.

Stability got good in the mid-late nineties for most Operating Systems, it's mostly plateaued since then, because it's not like you can be more than 100% reliable. My Sun Ultra 1 never once crashed in the time I owned it, same for my NT4 machine at work.

> My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.

The problem is that everything after `-` is a service. Someone needs to keep those running.

By way of analogy: You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever. You pay a small portion of every purchase to keep the supermarket service running.

> Someone needs to keep those running.

Those services are either paid or havd (much less obnoxious) ads - that didn't change. OSes themselves were paid, typically baked into the purchase price of the computer.

> You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever

But I don't expect Walmart to get worse at its primary purpose of taking my money. Imagine if Walmart replaced its perfectly-working checkout lanes with a new version where the PoS had a random ~10s delay in between scanning items, would have a 10% chance of reloading the page and force the cashier to rescan everything, would sometimes register the wrong items, and would distract the cashier with bullshit "suggestions" while he was trying to scan items. That would be crazy right?

I don't know about Walmart, but most stores around me did replace perfectly working and very speedy checkout lanes with slow, glitchy, not fully feature-complete self checkout. Enshittification may have been invented in SaaS, but it's everywhere now.

> 10-20x

More even, for storage at least.

In 2010 I got my first taste of SSDs after I bought one for an ageing laptop and it was the single most impactful hardware upgrade I can recall experiencing. I think I was following Engadget at the time, and probably caught wind of the idea from there, convinced enough to part with a shocking $2/gb. In any case, I was blown away. I remember excitedly showing people (who could not care less) that I could click on every application as fast as I could, and they would simply pop open. Photoshop + high res photos open in seconds was unbelievable, gone were the days of getting coffee after starting something up. Crysis levels took around 10s. I was delighted by ~250mb/s. Nowadays fast drives are ~6gb/s, with pcie5 promises of ~15gb/s for something like ~$0.50/gb. The enthusiast hardware is 60x faster than it was.

As for the more common consumer side, maybe consoles? The Nintendo switch 2 just launched with internal memory access at something like 2gb/s and external memory support for memory cards that support 1gb/s. In 2010 you could get the New 3DS and enjoy ~4mb/s on the micro SD card as the nand was mostly inaccessible. So that's a cool ~250x faster. Some games released on both switch and n3ds (e.g. Monster Hunter XX), so it should even be possible to compare load times!

>> My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.

Imagine how miserable will be the experience to use 2010 computer with modern web and modern software!

I remember once I was forced to upgrade the old PC because it couldn't play YouTube video smoothly after they updated used codecs.

Eventually the company won't sell enough version 5 to keep everyone employed.

Maybe that means we don’t need version 5? Companies aren’t supposed to be immortal.

And if a critical security flaw is discovered in version 4, nobody is going to fix it, and you need to buy a new product from a different vendor.

If it's so critical, then you will buy it. Market supply/demand and all that.

But there's many "security flaws" that are nowhere near critical or just don't apply to your use-case for the software.

.. after being pwned, and even then only maybe. Unless.. pushy ads for bugfixes?

Still better than paying for SaaS, still getting pwned and getting free credit monitoring in compensation?

Not to mention local-first software has much less attack surface for pwnage. You can wrap insecure protocols with encrypted tunnels, you can share files from a legacy app with any secure file transfer app of your choice... or if all you need is local functionality you don't need to share at all which means no remote access possible.

You've touched on the business model for both Microsoft and Apple. Once they decree that the OS is no longer supported, you're forced to upgrade. Microsoft has even begun to play Apple's game by also obsoleting the hardware.

Well, when that OS version update comes and the company is no longer around, it is time to move to something else, or keep the old OS version running as long as the hardware holds.

That's the expected outcome when companies stop creating value.

In capitalism world where people don't matter, yes indeed.

I'm going to be the last person to defend capitalism as a way of organizing labor, but I think that a capitalist system where every company is actively producing something valuable is preferable to the capitalist system we have today.

Of course it sucks to occasionally lose your job, but in a system that's more efficient at allocating resources, this shouldn't be as big of a problem as it is today. I would expect purchasing power to be greater across the board and we would have a more prosperous standard of living as a baseline, primarily because labor isn't locked up and wasted in organizations that don't actually produce anything of value.

Usually people that are comfortable losing their job are lucky to live in world regions where finding a new one is easy, regardless of their age, or population demographics.

What kind of argument is that? I don't think there are any world regions where goods and services appear out of thin air, so how exactly does a society that operates in this way survive and prosper? Do you think every bullshit, non-producing job should be kept around indefinitely to avoid a temporary discomfort of finding a new job?

Eventually for every person working the fields, manufacturing goods, and delivering them to you, there will be 5 people "working" a bullshit corporate job that doesn't create any value. Then the system will crumble under its own weight even with "100% employment" because nobody is actually producing anything. This is just the worst ideas from communism combined with the worst parts of capitalism.

Writing this might make me sound like a hardened capitalist who doesn't support labor but that couldn't be further from the truth. People who lose their jobs should be taken care of - but crucially it should be done fairly, through unemployment benefits or UBI or whatever idea makes sense. That ensures that everyone has access to the same benefits, not just the few lucky ones who land the right bullshit job at the right bullshit company.

I know people that have had a disconfort that took a decade to sort out, as mention, some people are priviledged.

This isn't really an argument for making people do useless work. If we'd just pay them the same amount but without making them do the work, it would be an overall improvement. It wouldn't be game-theoretically stable, though, and as we know, game theory is the strongest force in the universe.

Every SaaS is someone's grift. It is what it is. Before that it was smartphone apps. The grift will move on eventually.

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