Comment by jjav
3 days ago
> Always sucked. If you don't believe me feel free to go back to any underpowered machine of your choice and use it as a daily driver for a while.
No, tech didn't always suck. Sure, it was slower hardware. But it was empowering hardware. You owned it, it served only you, didn't spy on you and you could make it do whatever you desired.
Now it's mostly walled corporate gardens, you are the product, every gadget spies on you and pushes advertising at you. On some phones you can't even choose what to run. Every mouse click and finger movement is tracked and phoned to the corportate overlords.
So yes, tech mostly sucks now but it wasn't the case earlier.
You can buy the same hardware today and do whatever you want with it.
Not really. Sure you can find something on ebay but some parts can be hard to find (I collect old SPARC machines).
More importantly, you can't go back to the time where you could interact with the world with the older machines. My SPARCstation10 would run a web browser marvelously in 1993, but that combination isn't going to browse any website today.
Yes but holy shit I can describe what I want and AI writes the code for me and then I describe the bug, talking to my phone, doing speech-to-text, and the computer fixes the problem for me! And you can be negative and dystopian about it and get hella depressed, or you can just choose not to be. Yeah, I get the Sunday scaries and freak out every so often, but are you gonna let that take you down or are you gonna do something about it?