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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Tech is the way it is because Big Tech wants it to be. Social media is engineered to be the most profitable for the big corporations who run the attention economy which incidentally is a surveillance and content exploitation economy hosting too many narcissists yammering for attention. The software world is several stages of enshittification deep, and yet we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.

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> we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.

This is the part of it that bums me out the most. I just wish aesthetics didn't drive so much of the current tech world. Everything has an absolutely beautiful interface now that is slow, buggy, can't be shared, etc. But I guess at least it's pretty and pays the bills.

Agreed. Have a look at the music app that Jordan Rudess built for the iPad that allows a kind of tapped steel guitar / keyboard interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JA4DqWmHBY&t=165s

He made the touch screen interface into a low latency, multi-touch musical instrument. I couldn't seem to find if he had made this program open source or otherwise available, but it looks pretty cool.

I am amazed at the displays, CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and not to mention GPUs of 2026. They are really incredible. Then I derp around on my tablet with these clunky ad-laden websites with extremely poor layout, janky scrolling, barely registering my fat finger flailings, alternating between hitting a one pixel button amongst a sea of mis-aligned text and a grid of six big stupid square things, two of which are ads, and all of which are algorithm-computed content that isn't really what I wanted to see...

Big Tech is nefarious, but not the only force to blame. I think that modern internet use would be inferior to the early millennium regardless, just because people's main interface these days is the smartphone with its small screen and keyboard, and that tends to discourage long-form text and nuance. If you look at libre corners of the internet, they have seen that decline nearly as much as corporate platforms.

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