If I agreed with this any more, I might sprain something.
Fifteen years ago, I worked for a company that wrote software in Java, targeted at mobile phone users (one that would fail and be acquired within the following year). I did most of my shopping on-line. All of my friends could be contacted via instant messengers, phone, or e-mail. I could argue with strangers on bulletin boards. If I were more garrulous, I could have published a personal blog.
There are very few things that have changed for me between then and now:
1. More of the bandwidth I consume is over wires, instead of via optical discs sent through the post or carried by hand. Netflix, Amazon, Steam, and GOG have largely replaced... Netflix and Amazon. Hmmm.
2. I am charged more for paid services. I also note that the quality of these services is often not substantially improved since then; they merely represent a larger share of my budget.
3. I am more concerned about my privacy. Companies are still as sloppy about protecting it as they ever were; they just collect and keep more information about us.
4. DRM schemes are more pervasive and annoying. Casual copyright infringement is easier than ever.
5. My video card can push out more hi-res triangles at 60 fps.
6. My oldest still-in-use computer is 6 years older, and is more likely to be replaced due to its relatively high power draw than its inability to run newer software.
The last 15 years have been a predictable series of minor improvements on existing technologies, enabled largely by cheaper and more capable hardware, and pushed out to a progressively larger audience. This has been accompanied by aggressive attempts to squeeze more blood out of drier stones.
10 years ago, Sam's question would have appeared as a link on Slashdot, and parent post would be (+5, Insightful). There might even be meme images circulating of a caveman with caption "Facebook? // I do cave painting of my lunch 8000 year ago".
While i sympathize in some ways, i.e. looking back things are quite something to compare with the past, the reason we aren't happy yet is that things are also still kind of shitty.
Cars are still a brilliant way to get killed; cars are extremely inefficient.
Oil is going to run out at some point.
Traffic monitoring works only in some places.
Internet via cellphones is generally prohibitively expensive, and quite laggy compared to wired internet.
Cellphone UI and especially data input is still an order of magnitude slower than mouse and keyboard.
Smartphones, if used with some regularity, do need a recharge once every two days at least.
I don't even want to think how ineffecient they are.
Humanity's knowledge in the internet is difficult to access and only really accessible to those who spent a lot of time learning how to search it.
I write software for a living too, but i've no idea if it'll ever benefit anyone.
Sometimes i spend more time on a software solution to a problem that could be solved faster with less time in a manual way.
I enjoy all the fruit in the supermarket, but i don't like to think about which elements along that supply chain live a life that's much worse than mine and don't get even remotely adequate compensation. etc.
I hold both of these truths in my mind: Things are amazing. Things aren't nearly as amazing as they were thought to be.
Ten years ago? Not sure. I know fifteen years ago I was making video calls over my GSM phone, chatting with people via SMS, AIM, and ICQ, etc. Literally nothing in this post is in any way amazing to anyone who actually remembers life ten years ago. We had smartphones. We had social media. We had web forums. Just because you've dumped money into some of them doesn't make them special or even interesting from a technology standpoint.
I, too, support SpaceX (as well as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, etc) but pretending that reddit is even anywhere near that list as far as being "unimaginably fantastic" is either depressingly credulous or else clumsy false optimism.
Specifically in computing, the past ten or fifteen years have been a war on general-purpose computing; all the brands names he's slinging around amount to a celebration of the black-boxing of internet services. Ten years ago I could do all this stuff without needing a quad-core 2GHz phone to run a full-featured HTML5/CSS/JS browser platform.
More generally, in cars, computers, and most other sectors in technology, things are getting less and less accessible to casual interest or even moderately-dedicated hobbyists. Sometimes it's in the name of efficiency, sometimes it's in the name of corporate control, but with the exception of the Tesla, everything he talks about existed ten years ago in some form. It was just easier to learn the internals, then, when programs were programs, instead of HTTP APIs, and circuits were circuits, instead of closely-held intellectual properties. When was the last time anyone bought an appliance of any sort that had the wiring diagram pasted to the inside of the case?
Sorry Sam, things are prettier now, but there's nothing new under the sun.
iTunes was progressive. AppleTV is garbage. Apple makes toys for adults; nothing we can't live without.
Solar is accessible to the masses.
Cloudflare seems useful, until you need them. Never trust a company headed by a lawyer.
Netflix makes good stuff, but the bad softcore lesbian porn in every show is getting tiring. (Protip: an obligatory lesbian romance does not make boring female characters interesting!). Wokeness and all, TV is better than the cheesy 90s-00s.
TVs themselves are cheaper, but that's not the result of FAANG. Most computer parts are cheaper than in the 90s too.
Software is sortof better. The nightmare of fucking with IRQ settings to get SoundBlaster to work were behind us, but have since been replaced now replaced with virtual environments, cloud bullshit and virtual environments within cloud bullshit. We had a decent run of software that "just worked" until recently.
Google Search is garbage now. Used to be revolutionary.
AI is cool if you like motel art and corporate literature. And ignore the misery of out-of-work creatives.
Your washing machine is the same as it was in the 70s, only now the basin of water is turned sideways and a bunch of expensive computer chips are stacked around it. Laundry reinvented, now with more mildew and electrical problems!
Microwaves are exactly the same.
Food doesn't cook itself, but you can buy a fridge for $10k that shows you what's inside-- from the outside. Glass, reinvented. You can access it from Bulgaria though!
Flying cars? Still working on the self-driving part.
We don't live longer, and life is no easier. The promises of Big Tech are underwhelming.
The last ten years have not been that notable. The biggest change has been the speed and power of mobile devices - the advent of 3G (then LTE) has opened up a lot of opportunities. But that has nothing to do with Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or any of the other startups Sam mentions - it was technology developed by boring old large companies.
Ten years ago I had a Nokia Symbian phone that (if I recall) could only connect over GPRS. Could still check e-mail fine, though. I was using MSN Messenger to communicate with friends instead of Twitter. I uploaded my photos to Photobucket instead of Dropbox. I ripped CDs to MP3s instead of paying for Spotify.
Yes, there has been innovation. But it's nowhere near as remarkable as Sam makes it - it's simply easier to do things than it used to be.
I know you addressed this, but this literally could have been written in 1999, and what's more, it was probably more accurate then.
Technology has continued to expand, but I'd say the last 20 years have been a continuation of growth that's been happening since the 90's. Not all that much is fundamentally different today than it was in the early 2000's. Yeah, we all have smart phones and social media, and those are certainly cool and important things, but not quite up to breathlessly heralding a new age of humanity like you're doing.
Yeah upon a cursory evaluation, almost everything we have today was possible 20 years ago -- the software possibilities have barely changed. We read web pages, send messages, play games, edit photos and post them online. There are a couple things that weren't around, like high-fidelity VR, smartwatches, or always-online cars, but otherwise, the ways we interact with and use technology day-to-day have not really changed. I thought things would be a lot different by now, compared to what I imagined when I was first dabbling on the internet in the 90's.
IMO and in my direct experience, all of my favorite tech has gotten objectively worse over the last few years.
- My phone cannot play music through headphones and charge at the same time. Nor can I use any old pair of headphones with it, and most pairs have to spend time charging before I can use them. My phones 5+ years ago did not have these major usability problems.
- I ordered food while in NYC recently using an app. Out of 5 attempted orders, 4 were stolen by the driver and only 1 order arrived in reasonable condition. The other orders took ~3 hours to sort out. Ordering a pizza 5-10 years ago? No way is that gonna get stolen 4/5 times.
- Google Search on Android (voice) has gotten way worse. It used to offer functions like always offering to search the web (it's Google!), or letting me quickly review past audio search results. Now I cannot see any more past results without redoing the search and waiting for the response. I also cannot find any way to perform a web search on ~50% of my queries. Typing on a desktop computer is way better than voice searching on Android, but I used to have a stellar experience voice searching on Android. It's gone. Will it ever come back?
- Many websites are nearly impossible to use now. I barely use the web because there are so many intrusive ads.
Maybe my point is made. In many many cases, the last few years have seen a sharp drop in technology utility for many regular younger. None of this stuff needs to be getting worse, but it is.
In a way they were right. Movie and music have better definition, games better graphics but on a functional level everything we do today (web browsing, text messaging, video call, email, online shopping) already existed 15 years ago. There is more bloat (JS and Electron), more confusing UI design, more privacy invasive software now and but for the end user nothing really changed.
This seems to be the story of the times - swapped to google photos over my old huge manual photo collection - gain: awesome exciting “1 year ago today” and collages my wife loves, lose: all privacy, 15gb limit, compressed photos, the list goes on.
Smart TVs mostly just smart enough to show more ads, SaaS tools for work that when the internet connection flakes the entire office twiddles their thumbs, chat apps (everyone uses!) with no e2e encryption.
In some ways tech has gotten better but in many ways it’s far worse now than it ever was.
* MP3 players: I used to have a device with buttons that fit into my pocket that was able to locally hold my entire music library. I could control the device through my pocket without needing to look at it or hold it in my hand, it presented a filesystem with folders that I could simply drop music into (or whatever files I wanted, at the time 20/60gb in your pocket was a big deal). Since everythings' transitioned, first into library-based management and then into touch interfaces, actually using an MP3 player (or more specifically, whatever music program is on your phone) sucks so much more now
* Software used to work regardless of what happened to its creator. Desktop software still largely does. Nowadays it's almost like entrepreneurs enjoy writing emotional sunset posts, completely oblivious to all the customers they've fucked over because they suck at business
* Computer internals and abstractions were more exposed. Computing is slowly moving away from keeping users close to abstractions -- using modern software it feels like Product Managers want to erase and destroy users' concepts of things like files and folders. Cloud services would much rather you think of their software as an interface to their silos, and the kind of interoperability that you used to get for free by sticking to a 'protocol' of files and folders, is no longer there. (How hard is it to examine iOS or Android at the individual file level? How hard did it used to be?)
* I used to be able to open most software on my phone without being nagged with a popup for some reason or another. If it isn't a "HEY LOOK AT THIS NEW FEATURE YOU STUPID USER WHO NEVER EXPLORES ANYTHING" it's a "PLEASE VOTE ME FIVE STARS". Software talks too much, and I don't want to have a relationship with its creator. Leave me alone!
* I used to be able to boot up my computer (or, hell, even my Playstation!) without being bombarded with update requests. Software used to be finished, and as a program matured you could expect patches and update frequency to fall off dramatically. Our brave new world of evergreen programming means I am perpetually hassled with updates that I don't want, don't care about, and are frankly unnecessary. Sometimes those updates even remove features, sometimes even features that I am using! (How the fuck is that acceptable nowadays anyway? In what industry is it acceptable to take something away from users that they have paid for? We have compromised our standards too far!)
I agree. Not to mention is it all really that different? I'm a little bit older, and admittedly I was living in the future when I was younger, but 20 years ago wasn't that different for me.
Back in 2001, I was sitting on a computer even a laptop! I was reading conversations on the internet, watching videos, and listening to music. Not much has changed in 20 years. I have a better pocket computer. I had a smartphone back in 2003. Yeah the iPhone > than blackberry, but not by that much.
But you can't claim that something "wasn't possible 5 years" ago, if 7 years ago said feature was included in inexpensive consumer product (LG TV).
I'm not acting cynical, but it's tiresome for me to see people who claim that 20-30 years ago we all were living in a caves and catching bugs with wooden sticks, and now boom, ML!
Regarding "something truly different", well, my personal computing / mobile experience not changed that much from 2015. Honestly speaking, progress from 1995 to 2000 felt much more impressive and 'truly different'.
I mean, think of it, during this timeframe we went from DOOM via V.34 modems to amazon.com and ordering pizza online.
Forget the millennium, just in my lifetime I have seen:
1. Computers go from room-sized devices that only major institutions could afford to being disposable commodities. Today I can buy a machine that can run Linux for less than the cost of one hour of labor at the minimum wage. That in and of itself is staggering.
2. The internet. When I was a kid, to get information you had to go to the library, or have an encyclopedia in your house, or wait for the daily newspaper (which was actually made of paper) to be delivered. Today I have direct real-time access to most significant world events (with video!) and Wikipedia wherever I have a cell connection. And it's all free!
3. ATM machines. When I was a kid, my parents had to go to the bank and wait in line to withdraw cash to get through the weekend. When I was in college, if you wanted to travel abroad, you carried cash or traveller's checks. If you ran out, you were hosed.
4. Genome sequencing, self-driving cars, and chess-playing computers that can beat human grand masters go from a pipe dream to a consumer product.
5. GPS. Well into my adulthood, if you wanted to figure out where you were, you had to cross-reference your surroundings to a paper map. It was actually possible to get lost. Today my cell phone tells me my location accurately enough that I can tell which room of my house I am in.
I could probably go on.
(Not all the changes have been good. When I was a kid, my friends and I regularly walked to school and otherwise roamed the neighborhood without adult supervision. Nowadays, parents get arrested for letting their kids do that. :-(
I haven't felt a lot of incredible changes in the last ten years. In 2010 I had an iPhone 4, and I don't think there is a major qualitative difference between it and the latest smartphones. The computing performance may have improved since, but apart from loading increasingly bloated websites faster and allowing for higher-quality photographs, I haven't felt any major changes.
Otherwise, the changes in lifestyle since 2010 have been incremental at best. 10 years ago I could buy most things online, watch YouTube videos, consulted Google maps, had smartphone text, audio and video chat. Now I can watch videos in 4K and the internet connection is faster, and although computer graphics have indeed improved, it is nothing like the leap from 1990 to 2000.
The only new exciting development is virtual reality, which is unfortunately still fairly niche.
There is a larger difference from 2000 to 2020, but you could do a version of the above in 2000, only in a more inconvenient and expensive manner than today, while they would be largely impossible in 1980.
I don't think technology has progressed, in a meaningful way, since 2007...much less 2009.
It's still all virtualized, cloud providers, instead of servers. It's still digital advertising doing what it was doing in 2002. Myspace and Facebook were around in 2009. Twitter hashtags is a footnote. A lot of what happened is specific events, not technological leaps. I dunno, maybe I'm influenced by how it's all seemed pedestrian since the internet took over mainstream culture in the 90s and now it's just been refined to a sugary powder that's delivered through phone screens.
I find it interesting that people who are against the mainstream technology trends (smartphones, social media, cloud computing, whatever else) of today will always make the argument that the technology available X years ago when they were most comfortable with it was the pinnacle and everything has gone downhill since.
While the author is singing praises of a desktop computer with XMPP and self-hosted websites, back then there was a similar movement of people ranting against all this "modern tech" and saying we should just read the newspaper, use telephones to communicate and go out of our houses more. He probably fondly looks back at his late night IRC sessions and LAN parties while there were people writing "I don't like Computers (1996)" articles.
Fifteen years ago, I worked for a company that wrote software in Java, targeted at mobile phone users (one that would fail and be acquired within the following year). I did most of my shopping on-line. All of my friends could be contacted via instant messengers, phone, or e-mail. I could argue with strangers on bulletin boards. If I were more garrulous, I could have published a personal blog.
There are very few things that have changed for me between then and now:
1. More of the bandwidth I consume is over wires, instead of via optical discs sent through the post or carried by hand. Netflix, Amazon, Steam, and GOG have largely replaced... Netflix and Amazon. Hmmm.
2. I am charged more for paid services. I also note that the quality of these services is often not substantially improved since then; they merely represent a larger share of my budget.
3. I am more concerned about my privacy. Companies are still as sloppy about protecting it as they ever were; they just collect and keep more information about us.
4. DRM schemes are more pervasive and annoying. Casual copyright infringement is easier than ever.
5. My video card can push out more hi-res triangles at 60 fps.
6. My oldest still-in-use computer is 6 years older, and is more likely to be replaced due to its relatively high power draw than its inability to run newer software.
The last 15 years have been a predictable series of minor improvements on existing technologies, enabled largely by cheaper and more capable hardware, and pushed out to a progressively larger audience. This has been accompanied by aggressive attempts to squeeze more blood out of drier stones.
10 years ago, Sam's question would have appeared as a link on Slashdot, and parent post would be (+5, Insightful). There might even be meme images circulating of a caveman with caption "Facebook? // I do cave painting of my lunch 8000 year ago".
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