💾 Archived View for park-city.club › ~invis › phlog › 032-endless-updates.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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was chilling in the chat and my friend asked:
a shark scoli: do you think about updates and why they happen
InvisibleUp: in what context?
a shark scoli: like, is there a point when we'll stop updating? when we've reached the pinnacle of everything that can be in an operating system? or software? hardware?
a shark scoli: or will there always be updates
InvisibleUp: now that's a good question
a shark scoli: seven billion people, we've all got different criticisms of a os or software, but who makes it? only a small fraction of that
a shark scoli: like, we don't need updates for everything else. not for every other piece of tech. only computers
.....yeah that's a really good question. Why are we still making software? I'll completely and 100% admit that I still use 20 year old software on a regular basis. (Microsoft Office XP, Photoshop 6.0, Illustrator 9.0, just to name a few) Granted, that's because I'm too lazy to pirate new software so I just hit up abandonware sites because heck it it's good enough..... but also because yeah, the old software is good enough! Sometimes I even like it better.
Technology moves at a breakneck pace, and for a while it was understandable. From 1990 to 2000 we went from monochrome displays and beepy speakers to multimedia PCs with internet access. Software needs to be written to keep up with that. But now is today. Hardware has barely changed in 20 years. Okay, sure, we have faster multi-core processors and crazy fancy GPUs now. But there's nothing new that it allows us to do, besides play prettier video games and do multimedia stuff a little better. I'm sure the science people like the extra processing speed, but the average home or even business user would be perfectly fine with computing stechnology from 2000 or so (assuming web servers and such were equally antique).
The demise of boxed CD-ROM copies of software has led to the pressure to constantly update. Some updates are needed, but others feel pointless. If Discord or Firefox or Krita whatever never got another update, would that be okay? Sure, we'd be missing out on features in the future (especially in Krita or Blender's or etc.'s case, which still has room to add new things) but it's not as if software stops working.
If you really wanna get into Marxist theory of labor talk, software is *weird*. It's a thing that costs no money to duplicate, takes no resources besides the minimal costs of electricity, and somehow produces almost infinite value and wealth. Most of the hot-shot startups and the modern monopolies are tech industries! And they constantly need to write new software, put out new updates, make new things, to keep the economic machine going. If I wanted to be a *real* cynic, I'd even say that the "Learn to Code" movement is all about driving down programmer wages so that this process is even cheaper.
Maybe, one day in the future, you can treat your 30 year old computer the same way you treat your 30 year old screwdriver. Sure, it doesn't have all the newest bells and whistles, but it does word processing and digital art and spreadsheets pretty well still. There's sort of that TARDIS element to it. The TARDIS is an obsolete hunk of junk, but it's still pretty dang cool. You feel a personal attachment to it. I mean, that's already how I feel about my HP-48G for example. Slow, 26 years old, but it does calculations pretty dang well and the battery life is *excellent*.
I honestly wonder, if there wasn't pressure to keep making new things constantly to keep up in the race against the competition... would we be okay with old tech that works well? I think so.