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Comment by digi_owl | Hacker News Reader

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware".

Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher.

I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the same information.

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> It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

Spot on. I find myself frequently and increasingly frustrated with how slow most software is nowadays. Every app in my phone takes 2-3 seconds to load. Lots of websites/webapps take several seconds to load before they are readable/usable (Google Sheets is particularly offensive here).

Years ago I had a lot less hardware than today, and the software I use had less features, but I remember response times being much faster. I hope we're able to reverse this situation soon.

Graphics are no longer the issue. The issue these days is that your browser has to download an entire is apps with all it's dependencies before it can start rendering the few KB of text.

While i agree on the "app" thing, and something i tried to capture with the comment about abstraction, i have seen way too many sites default to massive images that they expect the client to scale as needed, taking up both bandwidth and client hardware resources.

I know people (mostly under 25) who look at a text document like that and complain "why isn't this a YouTube? I don't want to read shit"

Ah youth, and their fervent belief that they can multitask...

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