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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Seems a lot of words to express the underwhelming hypothesis that "Software is bad because young people are overstimulated".

OK - I'm being snarky but I can't see much meat in this essay. Or much novelty. It's fairly standard greybeard fare. As a fellow greybeard I often have similar thoughts - but I'd probably wait until I was struck by a touch more novelty or insight before I chose to post them online.

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While I am frustrated by the state of modern software, this article fails to acknowledge what has got better. My daily software used to crash several times a day in the late 90s/ early 2000s. Hope you saved your work, because here’s was no auto save or anything like that. Software was so unreliable the idea of something like a browser or an image editor running for days would have seemed like a fantasy. (Nearly) show-stopping bugs would hang around for months or years.

My hypothesis is that software is facing normal tech/feature pressure around network features which are difficult to solve with local applications, and economic and social pressure to keep adding features, which is leading to enshittification.

I get what you are saying. I do agree with the sentiments of the title. With so much increase in CPU speed, why do the software runs about the same and sometimes slower? Many says it is GUI/GPU? Then I would rather be using 256 color terminal screen with cursor support.

Not exactly a true greybeard though, given that the author has "more than 10 years of experience", and judging by the picture on his GitHub page ;) [0]

[0] https://github.com/LaurentiuGabriel

Ah, that might explain why he doesn't know how bat software was in the 90s!

Holy CDs John Conway, that bat software in the 90s was worst!

Good grief. Back in my day, people used to Mark X in sharpies on the top of the card decks so when they (ineluctably) got dropped it'd be easier to re-assemble.

You kids didn't know how lucky you were.

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