I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened;
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards.
Agree that is a factor, but a small one.
> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.
1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.
2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.
3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.
The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.
>> Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose).
The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards.
It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips.
Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer.
A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.
Didn't Apple (and some other companies) also publish some form of schematics (and microcode listings?) for the Apple I and other roughly contemporary machines?
I think there's a much simpler/happier issue in play - MBAs. Games from big studios are increasingly being directed and driven by people who have zero interest in games and just view it as a means to revenue. So games are being rushed out the door prematurely in an unimaginably buggy state, development rushed such that repairing the mess created (after launch of course) is an endless series of half-working duct tape and shoe strings, designed to coerce endless DLC purchases, and more.
And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent.
This is driving an endless brain drain of bigger game companies making the problems even worse, while at the same time small companies are starting to produce some amazing games. To give a relevant example here, a couple of guys left Ubisoft. They formed Amplitude Studios, and they then created Endless Legend [1], which I would highly recommend as an alternative to Civilization.
But the story doesn't end there. Because Endless Legend / Amplitude were so successful, they were bought by Sega. And Sega knew exactly what could make their games even better. Oh yeah, MBAs baby! So now Amplitude has turned into just another "big" studio, and their latest product Humankind, ostensibly in the exact same vein as Endless Legend/Civilization, is a mess. Now we just need a couple of Amplitude employees to leave and form Next Good Game Company Studios. Ah, the cycle of life!
I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots.
That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.
I remember playing WoW on my brand new Mac Pro (circa 2005) and a month later the GPU was burned out. Replaced the GPU under warranty, a month later it burned out again. Replaced it a third time (with a lot of side eye from the Genius Bar), and decided to stop playing WoW. Never had any more issues with the GPU.
Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
/s The universe is telling you to stop playing video games while living in your parent's basement.
Seriously though thermal expansion can break copper traces and solder joints. There was a waft of people literally baking their gpu's in the oven to remelt the solder joints during that same decade.
Macs in that era were notorious for overheating under any real load.
I had a 2011 MacBook Pro for a while that I later found was keeping a constant 100c without even spinning the fan at 100%! After a while, its cd drive failed, and I learned how to install Linux from a partition made in OSX... Eventually the whole thing became a brick.
I also worked with an iMac that would get strange video errors and freeze until I found an app to turn up the fan. With a little bit of air flow, it would run just fine.
I guess Apple proved one thing: hopes and dreams are not enough to cool a Core 2 Duo.
My guess is that the fan spin-up/speed was based on the CPU temperature or the case temp, not necessarily the GPU temp. The GPU had its own puny fan, but I don't know if GPU temp was even the core issue, though likely.
I believe it's mostly due to a global change at the lower levels. It seems similar to google never ending beta (every month basic apps change in layout, color, UX.. it's surprisingly exhausting, even when there's a good idea, which is rare, it's flooded by a bag of mistakes). The constant update model with broadband/fiber access means changing things cost zero, no cost => no pressure to provide something of high quality.
Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.
To be honest though, the Civilization games in particular are badly implemented. I had no end of similar issues with Civ V and Beyond Earth (didn’t play the earlier ones). I do agree with the general sentiment, but I find Civilization to be a kind of worst case scenario.
Meh, old software was also shit. Fucking Windows was unstable for almost a decade, and that was just the base that you run the other things on. What you describe actually matches my old experience with games, things being borked all the time, clients not seeing each other, and so on. Modern games are often as simple and right clicking my friend in Steam Friends, choose Join game, and then it even starts up my game AND joins the friend. Of course, the experience varies per game. Overwatch is smooth usually, Rainbow Six Siege often behaves strangely. But there's nothing here about modernity at all. Games are like businesses, neither is perfect, all it needs to be is to be able to sell.
The people responsible for Civ 6 are advertising multiplayer online play in an effort to take your money, while investing the least amount of money to say they delivered the feature. They are just milking the Civ franchise for all they can.
Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.
Excel brings out new features all the time while keeping 100% backwards compatability. The difference in features between old and new versions is staggering. They knew parts of their usage would get replaced by other software if they don't innovate, and so they did.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan to use Excel for all the use cases it's being used for, but it's probably by far the most versatile software out there and powers more businesses than any other software.
EDIT: And if you need an example for a new feature that users wanted, I heard a lot of people being really happy about the introduction of XLOOKUP, introduced very recently.
AWS is the worst offender. They don’t allow you to set hard limits on billing, claiming that is for your own good, while the fact is they are putting all your data on hostage so they could force sell you things at ridiculously high traffic price at the next unexpected traffic surge. Traffic price into AWS is free but traffic out is extremely expensive, preventing you from getting data out of it.
It's probably not going to be a popular counterpoint, but for instance, Microsoft has used 365 subscription fees to accelerate the development of Office and in my estimation it is actually getting better over time.
I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.
What we need is liability, and returns like in other goods.
If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself.
The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to.
ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.
I’ve had a horrible experience with that game. From extremely poor performance on an expensive graphics card, to the game just refusing to start without crashing.
> Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one!
Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only somewhat dramatized memory of things. I loved every second of that struggle which is maybe why remember it. This seems to be a case of seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It was sooo much harder to get a group of friends together to play some counter strike than it is today. It’s not even close.
This entire post is pretty much the definition of having rose tinted glasses when remembering the past. There was a lot of annoying shit back then too, you just choose to not retain those memories.
There's an element that all the silliness of the LAN party was technically necessary for the production, and as a grassroots thing the hardship added to the buyin and culture.
Part of the reason this was all acceptable in the LAN party era was that you were having fun together with friends while dealing with the annoyances. You could curse, you could laugh, and you could eat pizza together while you were wrestling with the faulty ethernet hub (remember those?) or whatnot. I remember I once accidentally blew a transformer at my friend's home while getting set up, and we all had a good laugh.
Nowadays, you play a game over the internet and you would be lucky to have even a friend next to you watching enthusiastically and intently.
More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.
So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.
Prior to the pandemic we would play Diablo 3 in my home office with four people once a week, all night. Takeout food. Six plus hours of gaming after work. It's an "online" game, but we're effectively just playing a LAN game with friends. Since the pandemic we're down to three people in the home office, with desks and big monitors setup, but we still get together and play regularly.
More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.
So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.
Absolutely ... but don't forget the fun of trying to play multiplayer Command & Conquer via dial-up modem: "Wait, I thought I was calling you?", "Why is your phone engaged?", "Hold on, let me call you on my mobile" ...
Not 8 hours. More like 1. Then thinking F... it, inserting a Linux floppy, and messing with the LAN from there, unfortunately not usable for gaming then :-)
However, the instantly working IP connectivity impressed the others, and reinforced my aversion for anything from Microsoft at the time. Around 1994 to 1995 btw.
Edit: Thinking further about it, this 'demo' convinced the others to set up their IP-addresses the right way in a CLASS-C /24, statically. This accelerated the NetBIOS and IPX finding each other, so we all just checked if drivers were good, patches, levels, maps & mods for games were on the same level, and could start playing without endless rebooting. Should have done DHCP, though ;->
But then things improved and none of that had to be done to play with friends. We had it better then they ruined it again. I think that's the entire point.
Especially on consoles with limited patch sizes. Compare the experience of playing Call of Duty 4 on Xbox 360 to the experience of playing the newest CoD on a console. I haven't played in a long time but just reading that the first thing you have to do is download dozens of GB to play a disc you just bought is bonkers.
And Steam is really a great piece of software when it comes to utilizing your connection. They can saturate even high capacity connections much better than any other software I know and you can play basically immediately after the download has finished.
Just getting everyone on the same patch version to play a game was a pain. We ended up just copy pasting around Half-Life folders, and you'd have to change your player name when you first started or your have the same as the source copy.
* I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!)
* Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs.
* the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
> the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
I'm not old (mid-30s) so maybe TVs that predate me were quicker, but I remember the old Zenith[1] in the living room would take 10-15s to warm up and sometimes we had to turn it off and on again a few times to get the picture to work. The DLP Sony that replaced it was even worse; upwards of 30s before the picture was more than a dim outline moving on the screen.
TVs are objectively better in terms of speed (my Samsung Q70 takes about 5s to boot; quicker than my Apple TV) and picture quality today. You can make an argument that the smart TV aspect of a TV is worse, but you can also just not connect it to the internet and use a Roku or Chromecast or Apple TV.
I guess it's the glass half full or empty type situation
1. You can watch your favorite movie sitting on a bus stop
2. sure but i can listen to any song i like those that aren't on my playlist thanks to 4g instead of hearing annoying radio ads. i can frickin see the tyre pressure of each individual tyre fwiw.
3. yes but again i can watch anything i like as compared to having a tivo or even before that when you missed your favorite show at 9pm, you missed it forever.
2. You don't need to replace all the important knobs with a screen to do this. Also, even my truck without a touchscreen shows the individual tire pressures, so...
* One reason i enjoy actual buttons on car devices, is that I can feel them when driving and not looking at them.
* I bought a new Xbox just last Xmas. I bought the physical discs, but still had to download 100GB in data, which took a couple hours, to play the game.
Not to do a console war but the "pitch" of a console to me had always been "it just works." You don't know about computers, you don't wanna know about computers, you just wanna buy the disc, come home, put it in, pick up your controller, and play. The hardest part about the experience is supposed to be plugging the correct cords in between the console and your TV.
Nowadays you might as well just game on a PC because it's just as much work apparently, especially to play online.
Omfg and car screens universally have an input lag of over 1 second, so not only do i have to take my eyes off the road to interact with it but i have to extend my interaction by several more seconds for any multi step process. Screens might even be okay if it weren't for the input lag
To be honest, I find a lot of the comments here pretty disappointing - they basically are rehashing what seems to always come up when articles talk about problems with the direction of technology:
1. "You're just viewing the past through rose-colored glasses!"
2. "Modern technology is amazing, these are just whiny nitpicks!"
I don't think these comments are really wrong, but I do think they are missing the forest for the trees. A lot of optimism around technology as a force for good in, say, the mid 90s, has disappeared, even among the technologists that build the stuff. I'd argue that there is something behind this, and I think the author's list touches on a bunch of valid points.
Case in point, social networks. When Facebook first came out, I remember being so excited by it - I reconnected with friends I hadn't talked to in years, and in a good way. I remember thinking how much of a useful tool it was for "casually" keeping in touch with friends. That is, I wasn't going to email everyone I knew when I got a new job, but it was nice when I posted about my job on Facebook that people commented, and I enjoyed hearing about the new things in my friend's lives.
Obviously reams has been written about the downfall of Facebook, so I won't rehash that, only just to add that for me the utility of it has finally fallen so low that it wasn't hard to deactivate my account. That is, for years I was like "Man, Facebook is so shitty, but I worry about cancelling my account because every now and then I get a post from a friend that helps me connect with them." That's no longer true, and not just because of me, but because the vast majority of my friends must also be getting exhausted by Facebook because they rarely post stuff that I care to read.
The irony is that I still have a strong desire to have the Facebook from the mid-late 00s in my life. I don't find that there are any social networks today that actually help you keep in touch with friends. They've all gotten addicted to the likes, infinite scroll, bullshit drama, and "tiktok-ization" of mindless content that they foisted on the rest of us so much that they now actually suck for keeping in touch with people you care about.
That is what I think the author is getting at - technology has somehow forgotten what the ends are that it was supposed to be the means for.
The extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing decisions and thus revenue, companies are now being held hostage to be constantly driving revenue number growth. This is easily done by implementing subscriptions or implementing hardware technologies with a limited lifetime.
For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired.
On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it.
Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.
If you showed someone from 30 years ago a modern video game, a Tesla, or even TikTok, it would absolutely blow their mind. So the author comes up with some nitpicks and declares "technology has gotten objectively worse". I guess the title checks out.
The point is that this isn’t evenly distributed. A Tesla would be super impressive — but they’d also rightly point out that the giant dashboard TV distracts the driver, and moving the touchscreen controls randomly in patches is unsafe.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.
Modern technology is nice when it works. Except it doesn't always work.
Did old technology work flawlessly? No, it didn't. Memory protection in operating systems is relatively new and older computers came with dedicated reset buttons for a reason. But there was a point when it was balanced. Software was stable enough, built mostly by people who actually knew what they were doing, used the hardware more or less to the full extent, and was actually empowering users by being a useful tool, not doing everything to get some product manager a promotion.
That’s like saying any UX mistakes should be ignored because the technology powering it is ubercool. I don’t see it like that. Technology is a layer below UX and in the end we should be able to compare with past UX and at least match up if not exceed.
On one hand, it provides an unlimited stream of video that's tailored to your interests that you can consume any time you want from practically anywhere.
And on the other hand, it's a platform where anyone can create something and have it reach over a billion people around the world, with the amount of exposure you get determined by how much people engage with your content.
Contrast that to 30 years ago where you might get 10 TV channels (or 50 if you paid for cable), shows come on only at specific times, you have to be sitting in front of a TV set to watch them, and all of that content is chosen by a handful of guys in suits.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to make videos on a camcorder. Of course nobody watched these except us - because how would they? The thought of sharing these with the world and have them compete on their merits to gain an audience would have been completely insane.
These are all examples of tradeoffs that have been made, and just collecting examples of the downsides of those tradeoffs without mentioning the upsides.
Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and an "ok" button.
Similarly, games have traded off fast startup time for richer textures and assets, and the ability to patch bugs.
but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit
It is? For whom? A few years ago, I upgraded from a 2007 Hyundai Elantra to a 2019 Subaru Legacy. The new car is better in many ways (most notably, having all wheel drive) but the HVAC situation is an absolute regression. In the old Elantra, I have physical knobs. No, not physical buttons that send digital inputs, actual physical mechanical knobs connected directly to the HVAC mechanisms. I miss those knobs every time I have to take my eyes off the road and enter some kind of complicated input to get outside air blowing. In the old car, it was a matter of turning on the fan and making sure the toggle was set to outside air, rather than internal recirculation. In the new car, you have to turn the system on with the on/off button, set the temperature to "low" by twisting the temperature control until the temperature display reads "LO", adjust the fan speed with a +/- button, and then finally get the air blowing where you want by repeatedly pressing the button with the seat icon until the air is blowing at your face (rather than at your feet).
The crazy thing is, as bad as all that is, Subaru is one of the better automakers in this regard. They have the HVAC controls broken out into their own separate module on the dashboard, with its own display for the temperature, fan speed, vents, etc. And all the controls have physical buttons, so I can at least feel where the controls are, even if I can no longer determine their current state by feel. Other automakers, like Toyota, Honda and Ford consolidate everything into a single 8" display with capacitive controls. Oh you want to adjust the fan speed while also being able to see the Android Auto UI? Too bad, screw you.
Cars have improved in a lot of subtle ways, I'll admit. All-wheel drive has gone from being a relatively high-end option to being far more ubiquitous. For all its warts, I genuinely do appreciate the fact that Android Auto allows me to have a decent GPS and mapping solution built into my car. But if you gave me a way to bring the HVAC controls from my old car into my new car, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
> actual physical mechanical knobs connected directly to the HVAC mechanisms
I'll admit to not living in Phoenix or the like, and it did take me time to trust climate control after only having simple A/C, but I doubt I'm alone in preferring to only adjust target temperature and letting the car automatically control fan speed and vents. Dunno if Subaru is especially bad at that, but in any situation where the interior is hot enough that you're trying to get "max A/C", I know leaving it at my normal auto 72° will cause VW and Mercedes to choose max A/C and blow out of the top vents.
But yeah, designs that completely hide the still-occasionally-used buttons like defrost tend to suck. It sucked in the 2004 Prius, and still generally sucks now. If designers want more console space or minimalism, get rid of big gear shifters instead IMO.
I used cold air and air conditioning as an example, but my problem is actually the opposite. I live in Minnesota. It gets cold here. I need a constant supply of hot air blowing at the windshield and side windows in order to keep them defrosted. Subaru, in its infinite wisdom, decided to make the "Full Auto" default to having the hot air come out of the foot vents. It also throttles the way back when it detects that the cabin is up to temperature (68°F in my case), which is ostensibly fine, but causes problems with frost. So, every time, I end up having to do a bunch of configuration to override the "smart" HVAC system in order to actually get it to appropriately balance safety and driver comfort.
touchscreens in cars might be ok for settings, and the kinds of things you do when you are stopped.
But touchscreens have become a mess in cars.
Telsa is a horrible offender. I believe the UI designers must have stationary mockups that don't move around like a car.
Not only have they removed some dedicated controls, they have eliminated almost ALL dedicated controls now. The new model S/X cars don't have stalks - turn signals are touch buttons on the steering wheel. The car guesses what gear you want to be in.
Even older model S/X cars have been affected by updates - the targets have gotten smaller, and critical controls have lost dedicated positions on the screen.
for example: navigate home used to be a big button. Now it is tiny.
The defrost controls are not only on the touchscreen and tiny, now they can be moved and have state.
To put it into neutral you have to go completely expressionless, let your tongue hang out a little bit, and make sure your face is centered in front of the driver monitoring system
> but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit
I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface".
Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.
I bought a new Mazda last year and it doesn't have a touch screen. Big selling point for me.
Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.
I don’t mind touchscreens in cars, but there are just some controls that are used all the time and should be buttons. I think most car manufacturers are figuring out that right mix…except perhaps Tesla who is insistent on removing ever tactile button for a touchscreen or capacitive touch button.
Man vehicles are a big one. All of the infotainment crap, the 200 control computers, electronic wastegate turbos, etc. etc. are going to age so poorly. There is a reason why cars with mininal BS are fetching such a premium on the used market.
We have a 2006 Subaru Outback. I’ve rented newer cars and got late 2010s loaners a couple of times and it was quite jarring to realize that I’d actively avoid the later models due to the touchscreen UI - even if you ignore the safety issues, it was amazing how crappy the implementations were - laggy, low-precision screens; UI lag like an intercontinental Remote Desktop session; my iTunes collection broke three separate systems over USB because apparently nobody has 10k tracks; etc. It’s like being charged a couple grand for an 5 year old Android tablet which was barely mid-range when it was released.
Agreed! Big rubber controls! Designed to last 20-30 years. If you lean towards “buy things that last to reduce your footprint” and don’t commute a massive distance everyday, it’s a good and reliable car to keep in your driveway
The fuel economy is miserable. Especially if you mod it (heavier). Otherwise they have few flaws for what they are. Toyota has other SUVs if you don’t want body on frame and all that implies. Not to mention 4WD is all controlled physically in some models still, which is nice. It still has a tech package for off roading, but they are simple beasts.
I have one of the physical 4WD knobs, it’s wonderfully analog and sort of shakes with the engine in a way nothing else in the cabin does.
Even the base model has A-Trak. I highly recommend trying it off road if you get the chance. It behaves like an ABS powered diff lock and makes your brake pump sound like a machine gun and can make your 4Runner climb interesting bumpy hills.
4WD selector is a physical mechanical control like a gear shift in a manual car. I have off roaded ours a lot. A-trac is almost as good as a locking front diff. It is an incredibly capable vehicle off road for sure, ours is modded extensively as well :)
Yup. I recently bought a 4runner, not top of the line mind you, and it cost the same as my wife's Tesla Model Y. Love that thing though ... specifically bought the non-pro model to get the simple three knob climate controls. Ridiculously overpriced but no direct competition in the current US market.
The climate knobs are so great. Try them when going 60MPH in the sand (out one the desert) and it’s incredible how you can still adjust them accurately!
Relative to the market it is still a good deal, especially if you actually off road and camp with it. There is a reason there are so many here in Colorado.
In my mind that is debatable, unless you sell it after a few years to take advantage of the market price for used ones.
There is no doubt at all that it is a durable and dependable vehicle. But you're discounting how good everything else has become, with lower operating and repair costs. My parents used to be die-hard Camry fans and just wouldn't consider anything else. I totally understand how this fandom comes about :)
The Land Cruiser moved to an 8-speed transmission 6 or 7 years ago. Lexus is chock full of reliable, highly-advanced engines and hybrid drive systems. With your Colorado elevation and joke 85 octane gas, you really need the modern tech in your cars. You'd have much improved performance and dramatically lower running costs.
If you actually use it for its intended purpose and not a grocery getter it will withstand more abuse than virtually anything else on the market. We do have 91 octane... and our 4runner is supercharged to compensate for the only real failing of the vehicle (power plant output). For the $$ into it you still won't find a more capable vehicle for its intended purpose. Every Jeep I know about destroys its axles with even moderate duty off roading (part of this is self inflicted, they almost always oversize the tires because they have the space for it, but don't upgrade other components). I went pretty deep down this rabbit hole and could not find a less costly alternative in the new car market (right before supply crunch became really deep). On the other hand, if you are just fetching groceries and need something with AWD, sure, go find some market alternative. I am not a price sensitive shopper so it is just below my threshold of caring.
See, that's the thing! The Sequoia has the same twin turbo V6 and 10-speed transmission as the J300 Land Cruiser (reliability already established as it's been in the Lexus LS500 for 5 years now) but with the addition of a hybrid system. For $60k, you get a much larger vehicle with more power and better fuel economy!
Take that already-in-mass-production drivetrain (or ideally something a little smaller) and put it into a 4Runner type vehicle and you have something absolutely amazing. For the same cost. That's my beef with Toyota.
Reviews and personal experience with new Bronco (not sport) are overwhelmingly positive, though. No real issues. Let's see how the power plants hold up.
I sorta want to replace it, because I don't really like driving my children around in it, but new cars seem incredibly complex. I'm just trying to drive here, man.
It’s so wild to me. It performs objectively worse when that high, and adds no tangible benefit outside of ego, or literally looking down upon other drivers. Yet they have all gone that way to cater to the preferences of US consumers.
Depends. Some cars have really good pedestrian detection and will stop automatically. But yes, some of those full size pickups and SUVs have a pretty large front blind spot.
According to this article [1] you have 15-60 seconds until the electric windows stop working. Also, on most cars you can detatch the headrests and use the metal at the bottom to break the windows.
I think the most impressive way I've seen are known as "ninja rocks" - broken pieces of spark plug ceramic insulator. But basically anything that can apply a force to a tiny area of the glass can start a fracture that will propagate through the glass. They make little escape hammers and things if it's a concern.
Tesla model 3s (and some other cars) at least have electric door releases, maybe on the same CANbus (or whatever they use in Tesla) loop.
Also highly relevant (hilarious) story on risks of relying on celltower connectivity with Tesla vehicles (Glenn Howerton on the Always Sunny Podcast, starts at 3:45 if link strips time off):
https://youtu.be/jxud-F_kMWM?t=225
If anyone besides me is wondering what happened, it appears that someone posted a ChatGPT response to this question that was could-cause-death-in-an-emergency wrong and has now deleted the comment.
That's a pretty bad answer in general. The laminated glass part could kind of make sense, but suggesting tempered glass for a glass that only breaks from "one way"... yeah...
This article disproves its own thesis. The article shows that technology has gotten objectively better, the problem is that better technology is a double edged sword, but cynics only like to acknowledge the negatives.
This contradiction is perfectly embodied by the first example where the author bemoans 45 minutes to download 20 gigs over the internet (which is even a bit slow by today's standards). In the time of the n64 that the author alludes to you couldn't even download 20gb from local media to a hard disk in 45 minutes, not to mention there is no hard drive or media even available on the order of tens of gbs. This is objectively better technology, in fact, the technology is so unbelievably amazing that the author is actually impatient about waiting 45 minutes for what was literally a feat of grandiose fiction as imagined by the video game player of 1996.
Of course, it's not lost on me that when you want to just sit down and play a game, it's frustrating that advancements in technology can also be used to create a barrier to your enjoyment, certainly this is not good and nobody likes it, but it doesn't then follow that the technology is objectively worse because of it. Also, there are others who actually like this, they'd be excited to know that they're getting the freshest experience with bug and content updates, there are many people who deliberately hold off playing new games so that they can wait for the first round of patches to fix major issues.
All the other examples suffer from the same kind of contradiction, but I won't elucidate each one, the point is, technology has gotten objectively better.
I should write an article, "Old Man Yells At Cloud: Ungrateful hedonists don't know how good they have it"
I wouldn’t be so quick to be defensive here. While it’s true that networks and drives are faster, it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second and many modern games are much worse on that front compared to a Nintendo which was playable in about the same time it took a CRT monitor to boot up.
A more thoughtful criticism would be thinking about how gaming companies could offer the things people want (high resolution imagery, for example) with more care for the user experience - e.g. downloading in the background or after someone’s done for the night, optimizing their file structures so a small change doesn’t force most of the assets to be retransferred, telling you whether an update fixes a critical bug or can be deferred, etc. If you simplt attack people for accurately criticizing something you like, you miss out on a chance for it to be even better.
> it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second
That's the metric the author has cherry-picked, and I acknowledged their legitimate frustration, but my point is that this frustration is one isolated facet of massive technological progress. I will emphatically agree that companies have leveraged improvements in technology to encroach on their customers in increasingly frustrating ways, but I disagree that this means technology is worse.
Again, it's not "unfair", it's myopic cherry-picking. It's also wrong to label the time it takes to download a 20gig patch "time to play", an honest accounting would recognize that "time to play" is typically a couple seconds.
If you go to start the game and it blocks you on an update, it counts in time to play.
Consider why every holiday gift guide tells parents to put their kids new console online the night before Christmas so it can patch and ask whether it’s really unfair.
For all of these, an attempt to add more features (patching, additional car controls, video sharing) leads to breaking something that works. It's not so much that new tech is bad; it's that we reached a stable, pleasant equilibrium (as with the car), and then added features without considering if they improved the UX (or with the goal of finding ways to increase monetization, eg by selling feature activation in cars or adding spyware to video games).
I think one broad takeaway for me is that if tech cannot connect to the internet, it's often more pleasant to use.
I had about 9 video-games for my NES. The majority were unplayable enough that I never beat them as a child (Zelda 2, Double-dragon 2, mario 1, mario 3, gauntlet). Zelda 2 would routinely delete all of my progress because there was a physical battery in the cartridge that was running out. I had to work all kinds of magic to get the system to even start (alcohol wipes, blowing, cramming stuff in there). None of the NES games had an acceptable multiplayer.
If he had said N64 then maybe.
Regardless, downloading a 1 gigabyte update to a game takes less time than driving to the store to buy a game, so I think the whole complaint is baseless.
But this to me shows the author isn't being remotely objective in his evaluations.
Re: car touchscreens - then buy a car without touchscreens.
This is just a 4 completely unrelated complaints. Out of the 70,000 things that have changed in the last 30 years I could easily cherry-pick 4 that have gotten better and write an article about how everything has gotten objectively better.
When you've driven to the store to buy the game, pop it in, and immediately have to wait for a multi gigabyte download, the farce is made most apparent. You don't buy games at a store, you buy game coupons - the disc is just a proof of payment that is used to download the game, since the fact that it's on a disc is reasonable evidence that it's already out of date.
I get it, there's one tiny aspect which is frustrating about some modern games. I don't like mandatory updates either.
Bu if you're saying that one tiny inconvenience outweighs all the improvements since NES you're just lying to yourself and everyone around you. If I was a child I'd have waited 60 minutes PER BOOT to play a game with graphics, resolution, multiplayer of It Takes Two.
They weren't unplayable, they were hard. As a kid we routinely used to go far in the game with fun, as an adult I was shocked at how difficult they were and couldn't finish anything but we used to.
Also some games had nice enough multiplayer modes that we spent all night on these with my cousin (bubble bobble, rc pro am).
I wouldn't compare the 8bit era with the post ps3 era
Yeah I had fun too, I played Rampage for hours at my friends house. But not because it's a good game, it's bad game, objectively.
Games today are waaaay better and about 90% cheaper often. Those old games are unplayable by modern standards -- beating mario 3 in one sitting with no save capability? People wouldn't play that for free (if it weren't for the nostalgia).
The difference isn't technology is worse (in video games, and probably not in general), the difference is children are easy to entertain.
I disagree, especially mario 3 .. it was and still is brilliant. Also there are shortcuts to skip levels. Most games had codes to avoid redoing level you finished.
I don't find modern games better, they bore me and I'm not sure they have better intrinsic value (I can't stand CoD or similar games, never played pubg or recent ones though)
> children are easy to entertain.
And they're still the same, I've seen kids play with a switch and they were goofying around not understanding a single thing just like we did in the 80s. Except on a TFLOPS class portable device.
You can get around all of this by being a "mindful consumer" - if you don't like how products are, don't use them. It's like a weak version of being Amish. Buy old better stuff - it's cheaper and better for the environment anyway. Bad trends will generally fade away (looking forward to seeing all physical buttons on an EV one day!). In the meantime, why not just buy an old game system with cartridges. (My kids like ecco the dolphin on the original genesis! I drive an old toyota with no screen! I still buy CDs and I enjoy listening to actual albums!)
> Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records collected in a bound book resembling a photograph album; [...]
What you are enjoy is some weird newfangled thing where they put the whole 'album' on a single disc. Kids these days! What will they invent next?
More context:
> With the advent of 78 rpm records in the early 1900s, the typical 10-inch disc could only hold about three minutes of sound per side, so almost all popular recordings were limited to around three minutes in length.[10] Classical-music and spoken-word items generally were released on the longer 12-inch 78s, playing around 4–5 minutes per side. For example, in 1924, George Gershwin recorded a drastically shortened version of his new seventeen-minute composition Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The recording was issued on both sides of a single record, Victor 55225 and ran for 8m 59s.[11] By 1910, though some European record companies had issued albums of complete operas and other works, the practice of issuing albums was not widely taken up by American record companies until the 1920s.
> By about 1910, bound collections of empty sleeves with a paperboard or leather cover, similar to a photograph album, were sold as record albums that customers could use to store their records (the term "record album" was printed on some covers). These albums came in both 10-inch and 12-inch sizes. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them. In the 1930s, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records by one performer or of one type of music in specially assembled albums, typically with artwork on the front cover and liner notes on the back or inside cover. Most albums included three or four records, with two sides each, making six or eight compositions per album.[7]
More accurate title: some aspects of technology have gotten objectively worse.
E.g. for cars, the whole touchscreen thing instead of knobs for things like temperature control is worse, but on the other hand cars are safer than they used to be.
Similarly, while yes there are some aspects of video games that have gotten worse, like needing to download a patch for an offline game, there's some stuff that's better: there's a veritable mountain of indie games out there with great content for a great price. WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation.
How many cars are actually like that? I only know a few people with newer (2020+) cars and all of them have physical controls as well as touch screen controls. They're all Asian cars so maybe that's why, but anecdotally I've never seen a car completely controlled by a touchscreen.
JFC why does "It Takes Two" require 19.13 GB of network to update, but only 10.00 GB of disk?
This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection. Then it sat there for an hour, before I came back to Origin. And then... it told me I needed to update my game. Which went at like ~3 mbps average for another two hours, and hammered the shit out of my disk.
Just ship the updated game! Stop making everyone go through every delta! Assholes!
>This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection.
That sounds like my experience the last couple of times I've tried playing star trek online. Never actually got it to work, and wasted a lot of time downloading god knows what.
I'm generally of the opinion that games are a lesser evil than TV so I'm slightly happier when the kids turn on the Xbox instead of open the flix. However, if there is a gap of a few days, the downloads start ... And we cant play without the updates. A simple solution could be let people play the version they already have while the update is in progress. But no, the services have to be on the internet and their economics perhaps doesn't consider it worthy enough to support the last week's version.
When I was growing up .. to program, my friend and I connected the zxspectrum to a TV and switched it on to instantly get a BASIC prompt. Now I don't know what to do to get kids to experience the joy of programming (yeah I know about scratch yadayada). Making 2d games doesn't cut it for them since they're seen visual Nirvana before they got to create it. Strangely there seem to be some corners still fresh - like this surprise I got https://sriku.org/blog/2019/07/16/prolog-is-magic/ .
Minecraft is the other sane and creative place that I let the kids hang out on. Relatively infrequent updates (thank you from the bottom of heart) and open ended creative play that could be seen as a programming/learning activity if I squint the right way.
As Raph Koster put it - "fun is another word for learning".
Another factor I wonder about is whether the economic system incentivizes this degradation. By shareholders insisting that their companies keep increasing their profits - even giving it an inviolable religious name like "fiduciary responsibility" - people at the helm could easily be forced to not "do the right thing" for the people. A few like Jobs may have been strong enough at one point ... But they are very few and most have no stomach or vision to challenge / fight that force.
People here don't understand that he is not saying that technology got worse in power but that it got worse in usability.
On another point I would just contradict his father here: to have had both car with electric windows and manual windows, I really much prefer electric windows.
I just spend an hour (that I will never get back) trying to find the right app and establish a bluetooth connection between my washing machine and my iphone. I don't actually see the point of it but given the claim of capability it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. What seemed to be the correct app wanted to connect to a TV, there was some kind of copy cat app, not sure what to call it, it had the same name and talked of making the home smart. The 3rd app, after getting a flash light and scannining the bar code hidden behind the door, making an account twice and validating my email twice didn't want to connect at first since I didn't know I had to keep the washer switched off until the phone (if we can call it that) was actively searching for a washing machine. It didn't have permission from the washer to do anything and pressing the button that should have made it so did nothing. I looked in the settings and it dropped the connection silently. After restarting the app the washer was grayed out. Clicking on it did nothing. I just added a second washer with the same barcode and it connected again. It was marked as connected in the phone settings but the granting permission button still did nothing.
The thing comes with countless programs but one should (so it is claimed) be able to download even more. I will certainly never use it but wanted to, you know, experience the experience. So now I have. It was everything I expected it to be and more. The exercise in stubbornness was truly in a league of its own well beyond my capabilities. Was I outsmarted? You tell me.
Cloud has made irritating monthly payments possible even for small and tiny bits of rarely used software. As with electronics without removable batteries that will die soon, this trend is not something I will support by buying anymore. This year, I am cutting back on subscriptions in favor or whatever alternative that allows me a "reasonable" one time payment option. I hate having external dependencies and have developed subscription fatigue.
The first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can.
The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there.
The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse overall than old cars. Electric cars are amazing tech.
No, I think that games that couldn't be patched were, at the very least, just as good and very likely a lot better than modern games. At the very least, the fact that the game couldn't be patched meant that companies invested in QA and testing. In those days, "going gold" or shipping the master ROM was a big deal, and so companies went out of their way to ensure that their product didn't have any huge showstopper bugs prior to launch.
In theory, modern games, with patching could be even better. They could be just as well tested as older games, but also ship patches to fix the things that do slip through testing. But in practice nobody does that. Instead, game developers just compress the schedule, knowing full well that they can now ship games with totally breaking bugs that get addressed with multi-gigabyte "day one" patches.
Survivorship bias. Games that couldn't be patched were better if they worked on your architecture. Otherwise you were just left out in the cold or you bought an entirely new PC to play them.
Consoles were better because (after the Crash) the vendors guarded them jealously and put the developers through an absolute hell of quality control to confirm they shipped a working product on the cartridge. Of course, the consequence is that they had massive editorial power over the games that existed in their ecosystem.
You're proving my point. You're saying that the quality controls imposed upon developers by the console manufacturers resulted in fewer, but higher quality games.
Though games that couldn't be patched weren't as complex but still at least as fun or more fun than today's games. Obviously my opinion. The article is getting at that you cannot just pop in a cart and play a game - there's ceremony with today's games. And for what? It's not a better experience. Unless that's all one knows. Then maybe it's... just an experience, I guess.
the rigamarole I had to go through so my son and I could play a Double Dragon title as a 2P simultaneous experience on my X-Box is the stuff of maximum frustration. Like, exhausting. I pine for the days of hitting the "select" button to choose "2 Player" in NES Contra's main menu and off we go, playing two player. Today, such a feat is amazing technology.
Its not a Switch in the article. There's also this bad trend where publishers literally leave pieces of the game off the disc/cartridge and force you to download the rest. Not a patch, the actual game.
Is it worse than the time when games came on multiple disks or cds and you had to switch during the game? How many cds did myst come on? Prior cds was floppies which you couldn't even install it on a HD because the floppies had copy protection on.
That "trend" isn't shipping incomplete builds, but rather that the engineering work to minimize delta update sizes simply isn't a priority for games with infrequent patches, and YouTubers can't tell the difference.
Uh no. I'm not talking about updates. I'm talking about the game medium literally not containing the entire game because the publisher is too fucking cheap to spring for extra discs or a bigger cart. Some examples include L.A Noire, Spyro Trilogy, GTA trilogy, Tony Hawk 1+2 on Switch, PC games like Doom 2016 or MGSV or CoD:MW II on Series X.
LA Noire is an excellent example of my point - people just assumed the disc didn't have the game because the day-one patch was 3/4 of the installed size, but no, the delta update from the GM version on disc was just that bad.
> This is objectively a worse experience than I grew up with (and it costs a whole lot more too.)
This is objectively wrong. Inflation-adjusted Nintendo console launch prices have been trending downward since the 80s. Games are cheaper too. I remember saving up to spend $40-$50 for NES games in the early 90s, which would be in the $100 range in today's dollars. That's significantly more expensive than the $60 first-party Switch games today.
This article is absolutely fantastic, and a must-read!
I disagree with the premise "every generation has a level of tech they're comfortable with and anything new becomes foreign".
To be honest, I'm not even sure I think the safety-tradeoff of power-windows is worth the convenience of "pushing the button" instead of "turning the crank", and I hate touchscrees in cars, they're a symbol of poor, cheap and thoughtless design.
The "new" tech we're seeing, with very few exceptions, is not new, it's not more advanced, it's not cooler or faster or better.. It's a step backwards, from ignorance and the realization that as more users come, the average user-skill lowers, and so we dumb down everything.. We hide everything behind icons with stupid names and make sure that you have to make an effort AND know the secret sequences, to open up the "super user" tools.
Modern software is a joke, not because it's "so advanced" but because it's built on layer upon layer of hipster-won't-deal-with-reality technology stacks, by people who think "don't optimize too early" means "never even think about optimizing before it's provably too late" and to whom it sounds entirely reasonable that a desktop environment should use more than 100 Megabytes of memory.
We need to stop dumbing things down, and show the kind of polite mindful behaviours that the older generation showed, making SURE that _YOU_ the user was in charge, that new users could probably learn to figure it out, and that power-users never had to click too much to get at the stuff.
How sad is it not that the UI of Windows 2000 is _STILL_ the most elegant, beautiful and functional operation system UI that ever was?
GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was peak “play video games with a group of friends”. Now, it seems like every game is single player per console. So if my son has buddies over, they all haul their own Xbox’s and monitors (or scrounge my old ones from the basement closet). It’s considerably more difficult. Even though the TV screens now are so much larger! Craziness. I solidly agree.
For me playing at home with a group of friends peaked with Halo on Xbox and Smash on GameCube. Halo let you get 8 friends together on 2 tvs and 2 Xboxes with just an Ethernet cable, you could double those numbers with with a switch.
Games still loaded relatively fast, and you didn’t have to spend hours waiting for downloads.
There's something that sitting side-by-side with your teammate or opponent that modern online gaming completely misses. It's way more fun, and way more social.
In my case, the whole Smartphone ecosystem has been a disappointment.
I was an early adopter of PDAs and early smartphones, I used them constantly and wrote apps and games for those.
Today I barely touch my old iPhone SE.
I find the devices boring and bland, infinite scrolling seems to be the only thing to do. F2P ruined games, and most apps are crappy/cloud based/badly implemented web apps.
> I was an early adopter of PDAs and early smartphones, I used them constantly and wrote apps and games for those.
As background, I was one of the first to have a Kyocera QCP-6035. Now that we've established how cool I am, I confess that I do not understand how one can hold a modern smartphone in their hand and be wistful about those clumsy early years.
For me it has felt like that since the early 2000s. I was born in the seventies. Is it an age thing? I can only get into a couple of games that were made after 2000. But I beat every cave on all 5 levels in Boulder Dash!
I have troubles playing games with younger siblings. My brain never fully adjusted to ultrafast post ps3 games. Something about analog 3d aiming that is just not natural enough for my neurons, while they got fed on it and it's a second skin to them.
He had me until he started shitting on MS Office. I would disagree, I think O365 kind of crushes it value-wise. And yeah, they added the ribbon in 2007. The UI hardly changes year to year, and if you know Excel 2013 you will pick up Excel O365 pretty quickly, and you will actually be pretty psyched about some of the new features.
Subscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years.
So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.
I don't know, for me it's a onedrive subscription with extras -especially since I'm sharing the cost with a friend of mine.
I'm peeved because the friend I share the costs with is using libre office so I may have to pay for the subscription myself. I would, $99/year is worth it to me even without word etc.
Assuming the worst case of needing 3 months a year that would be 20.97 a year. Buying the home edition used to be $150. Office 365 will be cheaper until after 7 years and by then a new version of office would have been released.
It might be hardware too… or the software/firmware side:
Recently I’ve had every DX12 game crash at start-up, time to RMA my expensive graphics card.
I buy an Intel Arc A750 as a cheap stop-gap as my CPU has no iGPU. I completely wipe windows and start from scratch—I can now play DX12 games! Oh, no, they hang after about 1 hour of play time and brick the system. Hard reboot required.
Also, if my PC sleeps/hibernates then on-wake I get a screen full of GPU mess for about 1 minute before the PC hard resets by itself. Literally impossible to sleep and wake my PC with a an Arc A750 plugged into it.
The drivers (latest and greatest direct from Intel) also report my system does not support ReBAR- but it is enabled in my BIOS and reported working with other utilities like CPUZ.
I honestly disappear, I’ve never had so many problems with computers as I have in the last 5+ years. I’d trade 10 year old graphics for 10 year old stability.
Eh, it's not much better. You want to play a game, but the game needs 80GB of updates before it will open. Oops, it dropped out 90% of the way there and needs to start over. It's better than GPU-driver-hell, but consoles aren't without their flaws
In the old days it used to take a whole hour to download a simple app with just a few files over a slow modem (if you were lucky to not have your connection fail midway).
Nowadays with that high speed Internet connection you can download an app in...an hour...because the data needed just to get started is 10000x bigger.
The complexity that this article talks about was all built to solve a problem and in a lot of cases it does solve that problem. The problem might not exist for the author and a particular user and that is what makes the tech hard for them.
I cannot imagine a world without downloads, I spent a lot of time in my younger days in parts of the world where finding a gaming system, lets alone a cartridge/CD was a nightmare. I have spent hours/days/weeks looking for games. Digital downloads have virtually eliminated that problem no matter where I am.
The whole social media complexity is about how to make money off people especially when they potentially cannot afford/want to pay for a service(plus other problems like how to keep up with shareholders that expect to see a business constantly grow while being risk averse). It solves that problem with ads and a whole bunch of complexity to increase revenue. Making the app complicated for users but solving the revenue problem.
I used to be a big PGAdmin fan for Postgres management. But then they rewrote the app as a web app and I stopped using it because it was completely broken for me. But it was done to solve a problem with tech debt.
It is very easy to see in hindsight what went wrong, but at the point the solutions were created it is probably the best solution possible with the give constraints. I have seen code that was a horrible mess and wondered what the devs were thinking but then I have written horrible code too, but it was the best I could do at that point with the information I had then. I did not actively set out to write bad code and at that point I just solved the problem. But in hindsight it was horrible code.
This is such a complex topic and I do not think it is a case of "things were good in the old days, now they are bad". It is more a case of, ok today we have this information how do we fix X. But then that might lead to unknown complexity down the road. Plus there is the whole needing to cater to the needs of different people with very varied interests and often contradictory needs.
> New cars have everything on a touchscreen — like auto manufacturers noticed a trend from 2007 of phones moving to touchscreens, and decided a decade later that vehicle controls would benefit from the same evolution, never once considering that fumbling through a touchscreen UI in a rainstorm, trying to find the windshield wiper controls is an objectively worse experience than flipping a lever next to a steering wheel.
We had to transfer a perfectly legal copy of The Need for Speed (1995) from a friend's computer to mine.
It took something like 45 3.5" diskettes when compressed with ARJ and split to multiple diskettes. We owned 15 diskettes in total. And I lived a good 3km away from said friend.
So we biked between the houses and uncompressed the game one by one to my computer, went back to my friend and continued the compression/splitting process.
And yes, there was a checksum error on disk 42 and we had to do it again.
--
Later we I got a summer job where I welded together a zero modem cable and we tried Descent on multiplayer. Tried transferring the game through said cable. Took ages, it was actually faster to do the same ARJ split trick and swap two disks between the computers =)
A key point of what is now old tech is/was multiple paths of operations. On the other hand we have what I'd call appification, where there is just a single path and anything else has to be weeded out, for the sake of simplicity and the benefit of the user.
As it happens, as of today, Twitter (which provided quite a remarkable number of paths of operation), succumbed to appification and removed the option to retrieve search results ordered by recentness. (Because this is not how you operate it? You do want the most prominent ones, as by Twitter-weight, and nothing else.) As this has been rather crucial to how I operated Twitter, I guess, you have to count me out.
Same for me, as of this evening, the 'Latest' tab is now gone (it was there this afternoon). This largely eliminates my preferred way to use Twitter. I suppose I was of little value to them as a not-logged-in user, so they have eliminated any value for me.
Where's the "objective" part here? It's not impossible to do -- start with a straightforward definition of "good" (we need an axiom) and then show the data that these things have drifted away from that direction.
I don’t have a Tesla. Genuine question. Does anyone actually play video games on their car’s console? If you’re that desperate to play a video game while driving or as a passenger, can’t you use your phone?
The big problem is that there are so many points of failure that need to be kept up to date and they can fail at any time. That goes from backend systems to frontend systems. It's not too bad if there's a paid system's adim to deal with the failures but the plain everyday consumer deals with the points of failure too. I know as a consumer all I want is to watch a show not try to figure out a Rube Goldberg machine just to watch it. It sucks.
The video gaming doesn't really ring true. When I was a kid when it was bedtime unless you left the (S)NES on with the TV off and nobody shut it off in the meantime, odds were good your progress was done. On the other hand with a Switch you just turn it off and when you turn it back on you're right where you were left. The quality of life increase for young gamers is absolutely huge.
There was an era maybe 10-15 years ago where so many PC games were just these semi-automatic ports from the Xbox version, and they were just awful and lazy. That pretty much killed PC gaming for me. I remember it got so bad that Borderlands 2 specifically marketed on the fact that the PC version was not just a lazy port. They actually advertised that you could change the FOV.
Ah I still remember the good old days of TotalBiscuit, checking the options menu for an FOV slider for every game. I legitimately think that if it wasn’t for him, we’d still be in this rut of lazy ports. May he rest in peace.
Most of this I think is caused not by engineers or technology, it's caused by competitive market forces that design things not because of its technological benefit for society but because they can control and siphon value - so we have incompatable APIs, "ecosystems" etc - and the code that runs it is about as inspired as a 17 year old who quickly had to write some PHP at 1am to ship on a router - tech companies are not about technological brilliance or simplicity or useability or high technology but about engineering social relations to siphon value - that is what corporate law and contemporary code is about.
Code is a means of communication and the sort of thoughts represented in code are representative of pressured time and control that is exerted at corporations
If it was designed based on good design principles, useability, liberation and so on - we'd have S-expressions in the browser and Javascript wouldn't have been a sort of attempt to make a lisp deal with xml and look like the language de jour - Java - but would be an actual lisp. The browser would not be a proliferation of 6 kinds of syntax that looks like a bathroom wall graffitti but rather each site would look like a single specimen of some species of plant (s-expressions of course being a great representation either of structured data or an abstract syntax tree)
* The cause of conceptual proliferation which makes so many systems incompatable and sort of semi-broken *is greed*
* The cause of simplicity and beauty (think a good physics theory) is in an attempt to communicate understanding and give that understanding to others, in essence thoughts based by intentions of parsimony, renunciation, generosity, understanding. In short the cause of simplicity *is kindness*
So when people talk of "mindful use of technology" they mean this latter part - mindfulness works with contentment, generosity, understanding - if we keep grabbing at the next idea "oooh" "ah" constantly searching for the next hit (products) or even conceptual "hit" like suddenly the clouds will part and this thought will solve all our problems - that leads to conceptual proliferation. We allways are looking onwards to find the code that can solve this problem and if we find it it usually introduces its own new problems. Everything is trying to sell us on that what we have is deficient and we need more. Why not - learn and trust our tools? Here's a knife, some fruit and vegetables and a source of heat: go and cook! Corporations do they want to be ahead of the curve and siphon value into their "ecosystem" - we get 6 protocols and non-transparent interactions between things - like cooking with some demented expensive $600 multi appliance that sits there like a white elephant.
That generosity and kindness is so central to simplicity is why I think the best kind of code has been written by people who are almost like monks, or they are like the old "ivory tower" sort - hermits with a stipend free to consider how to contribute to the world. In a word, the "Contemplatives". I think of Larry Wall and his interest in understanding the biblical texts giving us Perl and the Perl communities adaptation of the use of zen koans and "monk" type language. Or recently someone like David Botton who is also a rabbi who has gone a long way in Common Lisp to making a healthy community and empowering of people to make UIs like it's Borland Pascal days. OR the almost religious nature of "Freesoftware" RMS is another example - a hermit in the MIT office essentially with a mission of generosity of "people have a freedom to understand their own software".
I love my Nintendo Classic- no accounts, no ads, works offline.
I also agree with everything the author wrote about cars. I would add- for all the technology in cars, you still can’t see the exact amount of fuel in your tank. Because then you could determine exactly what mileage you’re getting.
Ted had a point that the industrial revolution is a disaster for the human race. The thing is you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube when your economic competitors have access to all the same technology. It's a race to the bottom.
i was having a conversation about this with my friend the other day, his theory is that technology used to required you to exercise your brain a wee bit, that it enhanced your thinking. But now the focus is on making it as slimmed down, "easy" as possible, brainless as possible, unfunctional as possible.
It made me think about my understanding of the old GNU folks, that software should be free to modify, because everyone should be poking around in the software on their systems on their own. An ambitious dream probably, but I don't really hear about ideas like that in my day to day work anymore.
I agree but I also wonder how much of this is a failing or ceiling of capitalism? Where things can never be complete or perfected, where we have to invent new problems to sell new crap?
But Game Pass as an option didn't even exist before – more options is still net gain. However, if/when we get to the point where Game Pass is your only option, that will be a different story.
If you set your Xbox settings to "Go Offline" on console or PC after you lose the connection, your Game Pass games will work for up to 30 days before an active internet connection is required
I mostly agree with Jon, but I'll be a contrarian for the sake of exercise.
I can't speak to games, as I don't play them. I'm sure downloading updates to some $70 you just bought can't be fun. (I will say that it is insanely cool that much of the US has access to terrestrial gigabit or high-speed broadband and those that don't can Starlink. I used Starlink on a Royal Caribbean cruise recently. It was FAST. Way faster than the bullshit they had before. Crazy that you can get fast Internet literally anywhere now.)
Social media telemetry is definitely invasive, and misinformation spreads faster than ever. But on the flipside, there are plenty of TikToks and Instagram accounts that are educational and useful, and it is very easy to find niches for literally everyone.
Also, social media has made it really easy for businesses and customers to interact. The only reason why we do cool shit is because my wife gets notified of stuff on the socials.
Also, much of the work done to make social media profitable (did anyone REALLY think that the FB of old would last? No-one would pay for FB outright) has led to an unbelievable amount of really cool tech that makes problems that were really difficult ten years ago child's play now (gRPC/Thrift/protobuf come to mind, and that's before frameworks like React or even standards like HTML5).
Touchscreens are harder to develop muscle memory around than knobs and buttons. But now we have ELECTRIC cars that are unreasonably fast that you can fill up every day at home that get insane updates over the air like iPhones. I think that's pretty cool. I also really like the idea of not needing to completely upgrade my entire car just to get new key features.
Yeah, subscriptions are everything these days, and I hate how predatory sites have become in getting you to convert. However, I also remember $99 getting you basically the most neutered version of Office ever, with no ability to upgrade. If you wanted a capable version of Office, you either paid the $300 or whatever it was (PER MAJOR RELEASE!), you got it free from school or employer, or your sailed the high seas and downloaded sweet wArEz with super cool happy hardcore music playing in the background while they produced serials that you hoped worked. These days, no need for serials because you can just pay $7/ month of every Office tool you need until you don't need it anymore, or you just do the free trial.
I really really like the fact that software and contracts in general are super non-committal. (Remember when cell phone companies would only allow you to pay $69.99/mo for some BS 2-year plan with a BS phone that was WAY more expensive than it should have been and your only way out was a cool $500?)
Netflix is garbage and half of their shows are trash quality. But I remember when pirating was the new hotness and ALL of the cordcutters wanted a la carte TV (i.e. paying for the channels they watched instead of paying $139.99/mo for 700 channels of garbage), and now we have that! It sucks that shows are spread out across a billion streaming apps, but I personally find that better than being forced to a single provider with artificial channel packages (not like my opinion matters here; I don't watch TV).
That's before considering the absolutely insane amount of content out there that would have NEVER gotten airtime in the traditional entertainment industry. Do you think MKBHD, LTT or Try Guys would've gotten their own shows on the big three?
VR, MR and ChatGPT are fucking terrifying, but at the same time I can see these technologies unlocking a lot of potential for humanity. Imagine MR assisted surgeries that derisk previously-impossible procedures, or freeing journalists from writing boring stories so they can focus more on investigative journalism, or having chatbots that actually fucking work.
Everything is awesome and terrible. Always has been!
Rename the headline to: "Software has gotten objectively worse"
Technology on the hardware front has long track record of getting better. But the software stack running on them has gotten worse. Writing good, optimal code is no longer economical. Move fast and break things. Marketing wants new features and done quickly. They want to monetise everything, and run things on subscription model. And they want to spy on you. VC funded tech is even worse.
Yeah, with all the money being in software (at least in western nations' job markets), it's honestly amazing the hardware keeps getting better and better. I guess we can thank the Asians for this, especially the Chinese.
I don’t agree with all of the example a here—I think software subscriptions work well in some instances and cars, besides a few outliers that have a terrible over reliance on touchscreens, are generally the best they have ever been—but social media and video games are worse in many ways.
Social media companies, but Facebook in particular, have always operated out of fear of missing the next big trend and never stopped to be content with what they were. And that poisonous attitude took over social media. They are all complicated algorithm driven nightmares. Twitter’s ability to sort chronologically is a cold glass of water in hell.
Video games aren’t completely bad. I think games are in some ways the best they have ever been, especially when it all comes together, but it is rare when it all comes together these days. All the big publishers put out broken, derivative games that require constant patching with giant downloads. It is especially bad on PC. Every big game is some level of broken for the first year. Part of that is probably a hangover from the pandemic, but I really hope something changes. It feels downright unprofessional the state some games release in.
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.