And it is not necessarily AI that ruined it.
For the past few years, I feel a strange kind of emptiness when it comes to technology. Sure, I am a software engineer, and I still love to code (manually). I play and program games in my spare time, and I have an ESP8266-powered companion robot on my desk that I intend to finish someday. I still love anything retro, hacky, and/or indie.
It is the "big-tech", everyday, corpo technology that brings me sadness. We are long past the point of the wild-west internet. We are long past the point where true peer-to-peer networking was possible and easy, where FOSS was a cool hobby, and where corporations were making stuff we wanted, instead of forcing us to buy sloppy crap.
This is going to be a bit of a member berries article, celebrating the cool and odd of yesteryear, pondering the boring we have now.
Remember LAN parties?
Remember the times when folks brought laptops or even heavy desktops to a basement, hooked them up with LAN cables and played Doom (or Quake, Trackmania, HoM&M, Age of Empires, Warcraft, ...) all day and night?
First Doom used a lockstep networking model meaning that you needed to distribute inputs for the current frame between all players before the next frame could be simulated. Playing Doom over LAN offered the smoothest experience possible. I am not going to advocate that lockstep is the best networking model when it was rightfully superseded by predictive/reconciliation models, but it was certainly neat in its simplicity.
I am however sad that the culture of LAN parties vanished. It was replaced by developer-maintained servers that can be shut down forever with very little heads up. It was replaced with a mandate of having an account tied to some corporate overlord. From the developer perspective, that adds so much extra complexity - you need an identity provider, you need user databases, you need regulatory compliance, you need a lot of crap that just makes everything more expensive to develop and maintain.
You can argue that even today, players can enjoy split-screen multiplayer, especially on consoles. It is, however, a dying trend, mostly reserved for sports, racing, and party games. And predominantly available on Nintendo consoles. It is also important to add that in order to play premium games on consoles online, you need to pay a monthly subscription fee to the console manufacturer.
Yes, the older you get, the fewer gamer friends you are going to have. Online gaming helps with the lack of play buddies, but it can't provide the same level of joy. How could it when your opponents are most likely 13-year-olds constantly yelling into the mic? And as I said, your favorite game can die and disappear forever at any given moment (which is what the Stop Killing Games initiative is trying to prevent).
Remember when hacking was fun?
Huge disclaimer aside - hacking is never a victimless affair. Even prank-hacking has victims. However, there were simpler, tamer days, where hacking was at least incredibly funny. Remember when people were using whistles from a Captain Crunch cereal box to make long-distance calls for free from payphones? Also, do you remember the last time you saw a telephone box outside of a Doctor Who show?
My email provider used to have an open telnet port on their SMTP server. It didn't allow breaches into other users' accounts, but it allowed sending emails with full control over the sender address, meaning that you could spoof any origin email address without anyone knowing. Very funny for a kid.
One time, my whole laptop was nuked by a computer worm, forcing my first experience with Linux. I'd argue that destructive viruses, while annoying, were more fun as they didn't threaten to steal your life savings (and taught the importance of making backups).
This reminds me of the computer virus Stuxnet that was targeted at Iran's nuclear facilities, forcing the controllers for centrifuges to spin faster, causing hardware and experiment failures.
These days, it is all about stealing your money and/or identity. It forced us into crazy long passwords, password managers and annoying 2FAs. So much of computer engineering these days is about stopping the bad actors and the tools to do so usually go directly against user convenience.
Even something as inconspicuous as process sandboxing can be incredibly annoying at the user level. For instance, installing Visual Studio Code from Flatpak or Snap on Linux is a hidden footgun, because it will be sandboxed, and you will be unable to invoke compilers and development tools when you decide to use it as an IDE. Sandboxed browsers restrict files opened via file:/// protocol so much that you will be unable to even load CSS styles.
Yes, you are able to either install from an alternative package manager like APT, or you can instruct Flatpak/Snap to relax the sandbox for a particular process. The point is that it will catch you off-guard sooner or later and waste your time. All because of some potential bad actor sending you a malicious file that could execute arbitrary code on your machine.
Windows had Electron before it was cool
It feels like almost every single desktop application is powered by Electron, and written in Javascript/Typescript. Before that, the cool kid on the block was Java, and before that we had native applications. But long before Electron was cool, Windows had a built-in feature that worked the exact same way and almost nobody knows about it.
At least since Windows XP, there is a command-line script runner called cscript. It allows you to execute either Javascript or VBScript files that have full access to your computer resources and therefore can be used in the exact same way as you would use bash or Python on your Linux machine. Good luck looking up documentation though.
That is not all. If you create a static HTML page (one that doesn't require backend to work), and then rename it to .hta, it becomes an executable application. Any JavaScript used by the application will be interpreted through the cscript interpreter, again with full system access.
I used it for many things in the past, notably for making my own Steam Big Picture mode before Steam Big Picture mode was cool. To this day I still have one HTA application that I use for comparing and voting for nicest wallpapers that I want to put on my phone.
If you are wondering, the rendering used Internet Explorer as a core until it was discontinued, so no CSS3 was available. And since Windows select what browser core to use, it doesn't have to be bundled with the HTA app and therefore the whole application is just the few kilobytes of the actual markup and code. Unlike Electron which has to bundle the entire Google Chrome core. And yeah - I switched to present tense because this feature still exists and is still usable.
Obscure technologies such as this one excite me much more than established industry standards, maybe because they carry a sense of discovery - of doing something nobody else has attempted yet (at least not in said techstack).
Web used to be a quirky place
Remember when cookies were for logins and website visit counters and not for spawning pop-ups? Remember the times of message boards, chat rooms, and forums? When the internet was about sharing hand-animated shorts of Misty getting some futanari fun with Squirtle, instead of everybody selling their personal brand?
These days, every other website starts with a big, splashy hero image, a hand-picked title font and a color palette of exactly five colors - background, secondary background, text, accent, and secondary accent. Most pages are just a long scroll, with a top navbar with shortcuts to each section. Each section usually has a totally unrelated stock image placed either to the left, or to the right of the single paragraph of text full of empty, business phrases.
There were times when people were hand-crafting their websites in a text editor, experimenting with effects such as blink, and fixed position for the sidebar element. If you are doing a web now, you probably can't imagine anything other than HTML5 and CSS3 flexboxes, but we used to debate the difference between XHTML and HTML4, all while doing our layouts with <table> elements.
Every single game had a fan page, with an associated forum, and a community of like minded people formed around it. It was not uncommon for this fan page to host a dedicated multiplayer server for the game, organizing events and tournaments. And while there was certainly drama in those communities, it was much tamer when compared to social networks of today.
Recently, I learned about an "indie web". These are regular websites, run by the people who miss all of the above that I just listed. People who miss the whacky times of GeoCities. They are forming web-rings of sites sharing some common interest, being linked in a circular fashion with links to "previous" and "next" sites in the ring.
The color scheme probably looks horrible to you, but I really wanted to go back in time with that style
Sad reality is that these sites die almost as fast as they pop up. People who run them are grown ups with families, responsibilities, hobbies, and very little time to maintain their websites. I have my own still running, but I must admit that I am not giving it enough love either.
There are still hints at the old internet here and there. There are still discussion forums around the most obscure of communities. And Reddit is technically a blend of both the old and the modern web, but it is a real hit or miss in my eyes, depending on the specific subreddit community.
Mobile gaming was cooler when it was premium
Do you remember those old phones with buttons, running a customized version of Java called J2ME? Most prominent were devices from Sony Ericsson, like the K610i. These were amazing gaming devices.
These were the times where you could buy a printed magazine full of reviews on games for those little devices. If you wanted to play one, the review had an associated premium SMS code that you'd send and got a download link in response (note that the download used WAP which was really, really expensive). And boom - you got your game.
And they were not an afterthought, niche games either. Big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and others were releasing dedicated versions of their big releases, such as the Prince of Persia trilogy, Splinter Cell, or The Sims. It was a golden age of licensed games from the universes of Lost, King Kong, or teenage drama telenovelas like O.C..
Publishers like Gameloft/Fishlabs and franchises like Gangstar, Asphalt, or Galaxy on Fire started on J2ME phones. I have fond memories of playing Worms hot seat multiplayer during classes in high school. I enjoyed a duology of Magnetic Joe games, the second of which was also released on the Nintendo DS. I enjoyed it so much that I paid it homage in my MagRider game.
When smartphones were introduced, this trend continued. We had mobile versions of Mass Effect, Dead Space, and Deus Ex and they were great! A little game studio from Czech Republic called Madfinger Games started with bangers like Shadowgun, which was basically Gears of War, but on smartphones.
Shadowgun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqdsKKpENhk
Unfortunately, due to hardware limitations, these games could not be as complex and big and flashy as their console counterparts and hardcore players viewed the entire platform as inferior. This meant publishers shifted towards the casual gaming crowd that was not willing to pay premium and instead was happy with zero gameplay and a lot of timers that you could erase with hard cash.
I am very sad that neither premium, nor F2P worked for Madfinger Games
so they pulled out from the smartphone market and reoriented towards
PC gaming. I liked their older games, while the currently developed
Gray Zone Warfare, being a jungle extraction shooter, is completely
out of my range of interests. Nonetheless I am still their fan and if
somebody from Madfinger is reading this - I work in the building next
to you and I would very much love to see your offices! ;)
These dark ages are hopefully coming to an end. Smartphones are as capable as desktop computers. If you have a flagship Samsung phone and buy a Backbone/Gamesir gamepad for it, you can enjoy all of Xbox gamepass, you can emulate games up to and including Nintendo Switch 1, and you can create an entire game (and publish it too), on a phone, using Godot engine. Many games are getting native Android ports, such as Dead Cells, Stardew Valley, and GTA: San Andreas. And thanks to GameNative, you can even emulate PC games. Even on a budget phone such as Motorola G84, you can enjoy a lot of what I just named and I kinda hope that the whole market will gradually shift towards this platform. Especially when console gaming is becoming a luxury at this point.
Corporations were never fun
Technology is usually fun until some corpo shithead tries to extract value from it. Having a website about your hobby was cool until the dotcom bubble which poisoned the web with many useless websites, and polluted search engines with paid/crafted SEOs so people could no longer find the actually valuable sites.
AJAX calls and client-side computations alleviated stress from servers that used to render the entire HTML through languages like PHP. It made eshops smoother and it opened possibilities to many interesting web-based applications. Applications that you could build once and not worry about different CPU architectures (instead you had to worry about different browser feature support, so yaay!). But once corporations figured out that they can extract much more money if they move their succesful desktop application to the web, and switch from lifetime licensing to a monthly fee, those applications went to shit with it (both performance-wise and feature-wise).
Tangent: Have you heard about elastic hashing? A young guy, in
college, needed a faster hash table. He didn't know there is a
40-year-old paper proving you can't get a faster hash table. And
because he didn't know, he fucking invented a faster hash table. The
sad part is that it probably will be only used at Google and Meta to
sell their users' personal data more efficiently, but the idea behind
that algorithm is just brilliant!
Blockchain is an algorithmic ledger of transactions that are P2P validated. It could be really useful in building attack/failure-resistant distributed database systems. Instead it is used by the President of the USA for crypto pump-and-dump schemes.
Playstation recently announced they will stop releasing games on physical media by the end of 2027. HP printers require subscription for you to print on a physical device that is in your home. LG monitors are installing spyware and adware. Any copyright holder goes nuts with cease & desist notices even if fans are just restoring a piece of media that is not available to purchase anywhere on the internet, yet their main aim is to deprive us, the customers, of the right to own stuff.
No wonder the internet started chanting "if buying isn't owning, then pirating is not stealing" mantra once again.
When corporations are taking a nap from screwing us over, we can bet our governments will take up the pace. With regulations. And you know, I'll admit that GDPR is a good piece of regulation, it is the enforcement that was poorly regulated. Yes, I am talking about everpresent cookie pop-ups. If the regulators went just a little bit further, defined a mandatory shared UX, we could easily have a universal browser addin that would dismiss these pop-ups for us.
Now a new threat is emerging. I want to enjoy some privacy on the internet, which is in direct opposition to what regulatory bodies are attempting to achieve all around the world. All of those "child protection" acts are less interested in protection of minors and more aimed at collecting every single bit of telemetry data about yourself. Especially if you pair it with the "chat control" proposal currently circulating in the European parliament.
AI...
From a technical standpoint it is a really marvellous technology. Fifteen years ago, I spent countless hours looking for speech2text and text2speech solutions compatible with C++ so I could build my own AI assistant. But now that this tech is readily available, I feel no urge or excitement to use it.
My employer would love it if I did all of my coding with AI, but such thing is boring and sucks all of the joy from being a software engineer. At least for me, because I have colleagues that do pretty much everything through AI, not even questioning whether there is any better and/or more consistent way to achieve the same results. They will use Claude hooks instead of git hooks for the exact same purpose. Stuff that should've been a script suddenly becomes a Claude "skill" with no discernible added value.
Mathematically, gen AI and all of the tech leading up to it is super clever. Natural language processing (NLP) that forms a lot of current day AI is surprisingly simple and powerful. For example, word2vec algorithm by Tomáš Mikolov assigns an N-dimensional vector to text, representing its meaning in N-dimensional space. You can find similar documents by comparing their vectors and picking the closest ones.
I would be so happy if I could train a ghost-text autocomplete on my git repos only, because ghost-text autocomplete speeds up my typing while not doing my job for me (depends on the configuration but if you let it just complete the current line, it is exactly that). But I can't. I could fine tune an existing model, but that model was trained on stolen data, so half of the tech community would hate me for it anyway.
Closing thoughts
This article probably sounds like an old man yelling at clouds even though I am just recently-turned-30 somebody. Some of my sadness is caused by being an adult under a constant barrage of stress and negative news. The other part is seeing what corporations/governments do to everything I love and how they slowly destroy things. Netflix destroyed movies. Spotify is destroying music. Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sony, and EA execs are destroying gaming. AI bros are destroying hardware. Governments might destroy free internet.
When a corporation unveils a new product, I know they will enshittificate it as much as possible. When a new startup emerges, I count the days until it becomes a corporation.
But I don't want to end on a sour note. There is still so much tech that is joyful to me, so let me briefly list it in no particular order whatsoever:
- C++ and CMake
- Playdate (don't own, but I find the whole concept refreshing)
- Gamepads for Android devices
- LocalSend, Obsidian, Gimp, Tiled
- Emulators and retrogaming
- Playtile (don't own, but I admire the effort, even if regular gamepad is better)
- Anything akin to Google Cardboard for those who need to spice up their spank bang with an affordable - VR solution
- Free porn without ID verification - neither god, state, nor Discord shall know what you are watching in bed late at night
- Maximum Fun podcasting network
- Any Doom source port and the forums/community around it
- Raspberry Pi
- 3D printers
- Pegboards
- Free webhosting with PHP/MySQL
- Browser-compatible JavaScript
- Hardware by Valve (Steam Deck, Steam Machine, etc)
- Accumulator-based tools
- Cold-fission modular reactors
- Sodium-based batteries
- Fediverse
- DDA-algorithm (we wouldn't have Doom without it), running random sample, jump-point search, finite state machines
