What has expanded the utility of computers for you in the last decade?

L. Rhodes:

I’m trying to think of an innovation made in the last 10 years that has seriously expanded the utility of computers for me, and I’m coming up blank.

At first (I was afraid, I was petrified?) I thought I’d easily be able to come up with something substantial. A decade is a long time in computing; the one I grew up in started with the 386, and ended with broadband Internet, for Pete’s sake.

As I sat with my coffee on the balcony this morning reading through my RSS feeds, checking email, logging into a jumpbox to check some logs, and catching up on company chat… I shared in their struggle to identify anything substantial. After prior years of constant improvements, I fundamentally use computers the same way I did a decade ago.

(Heck, I even still use some computers from a decade ago. Our primary homelab server runs a Xeon CPU and workstation motherboard from 2015, and my on-call laptop is a similar vintage; save for its battery).

I suppose I can think of three major things:

• Monitors. Affordable(ish), accessible, widely-supported 2× HiDPI monitors are available now, and they’re wonderful. Having a viewport into your text, photos, and videos that looks crisp and detailed makes daily use of these machines wonderful.

• Retrocomputer hardware. The ingenuity, creativity, and frankly genius of the retrocomputing scene has been a wonder to behold. Their ability to teach old dogs new tricks has allowed me to reintroduce so much classic hardware into my daily life again. Just this morning I used my PowerMac G4 to rip a CD onto its emulated SCSI hard drive! Good times.

• Linux gaming. Having the ability to play contemporary games on Linux has made downtime that much more fun. I dreaded booting into Windows to do this before, but now I don’t have to.

Really though, could I say any of those things “expanded” the utility of modern computing? It’s certainly made it more fun and pleasant. But ultimately I’m using the same software, platforms, and methods of interaction I did before. About all the industry has given me to improve this in the last decade are blockchain, VR headsets, and stochastic parrots that can’t outperform my novelty Commodore calculator that’s more than a decade older than me. On the work side, I have K8s, “serverless”, and a flock of additional stochastic parrots. Goodie!

It’s at this point where I feel like I need to make some excuses. I could bring up my point from earlier this year that boring is a feature, that you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken, and that tech doesn’t always need to change. You could argue—and I’d be sympathetic to the idea—that the latest round of enshittification is precisely down to vendors having to come up with new ways to extract resources from us, in part because tech always has to be seen as getting bigger and better. We might solve a lot of these problems if we admitted the treadmill doesn’t always need to be running.

But… BUT! The whole promise of tech was a brighter future; or at least, that’s what Beyond 2000, and those those old copies of Quest magazine from the UK told me. It’s what made tech such a fascinating field to want to dedicate one’s life to. It’s what pulled me in. It’s what made me become known as “the tech guy” among friends and family. It’s what kept me up at night, too excited to sleep. It’s what motivated me to study at uni, to start a career, and to spend my waking hours after studies and work tinkering and building and exploring. Tech! I suspect if you’re the kind of person reading this, a lot of this applies (or applied) to you too.

I’ve got a decent… here comes that awful word again… workflow sorted out over the last decade. But surely, surely… that can’t be it?

Maybe when the current opportunity costs have expired from the latest industry-wide delusion/bubble, we can start doing some of that again. That’d be awesome.