who needs free software or getting rid of planned obsolescence?
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Does newer tech just kinda suck?
I'm the millennial version of a tech illiterate, I have very basic coding skills in Java and that's it, but I've noticed that everything just gets worse as time goes on, and I want a second opinion:
Everything new just seems more laggy and more prone to random catastrophic failure.
When I was young I actually didn't know what the BSOD was because I literally never experienced it. My first BSOD was in 2017 on Windows 8, even though I've been computing since 1998
The golden age for "normie" consumer computing definitely feels like it took place in the 2000s, and ended somewhere around 2014
Without giving anything specific away, I am a software developer and a consultant, and mostly work on web stuff.
I'll try to keep this short, but in general, yes. Basically, computers keep getting faster, which allows software developers to use higher-level libraries, which are actually less efficient, and thus your average piece of software actually takes more processing power and RAM than back in the day.
As well, because of those high-level libraries, programming is a lot easier than it used to be. Unfortunately, that means that we just hire cheaper developers that aren't as skilled, and they have a harder time tracking down and fixing bugs. Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can't always fix things that arise inside of them easily.
But software development companies have basically figured out that shitty software doesn't really hurt their bottom line in the end. For the most part, people will use it if it's a name brand piece of software, like Google or Apple or Microsoft. They don't need to build high quality software because it's basically going to be used by default. The money will come in if you corner a market or if you build something unique, or contract with another business. It doesn't actually have to be high quality.
As well, websites make more money the more ads you put on them. So it doesn't matter how efficient you build it, it's going to be slow. And it doesn't matter how slow it is, because you're going to make more money the more ads and tracking you have. All you need is good search engine optimization and you will get traffic by default. SEO Is easier said than done, but the point is nobody really focuses on performance when it's more profitable to focus on search engines.
If by "higher level" you mean something like Java libraries, I'd say the opposite is true - at least if you don't have the source for a Java class it is trivial to decompile and have something immediately readable. Can't say the same for something like a dll originally written in C++.
More high level in that, think really deeply embedded JavaScript frameworks. In this situation, even Java is comparatively low level. Although a lot of people just rely on spring and spring boot, and don't understand how it works.