Computers Aren't Fun Anymore (2020)

And then a bunch of complaints about building web-apps.<p>SIGH.<p>Why doesn’t the author try many of the other areas of computing?<p>Game engine development, live coding environments, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, Theoretical computer science and algorithms, embedded hardware and low energy computing, mobile development, compiler design, FPGA development, computational finance, distributed computing frameworks, blockchain development, automated theorem proving.<p>All of these areas are super interesting and fun,<p>The author saying “Computers aren’t fun anymore” and then whining about web development is like me proclaiming that Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom.

Once upon a time I though my job was gonna be &quot;programmer&quot; and I&#x27;m really glad it ended up being &quot;artist&quot; because even when I&#x27;m grinding on something I&#x27;m not into (and I do generally put some energy into avoiding that), I get to laze about a gorgeous tropical city sitting in parks and cafes drawing stuff. My computer&#x27;s a tool that lets me <i>do</i> something fun, not an end in itself.<p>I spend a significant portion of the time I&#x27;m using my computer in Adobe Illustrator, drawing stuff. It is my magical assistant that will tirelessly do a lot of tedious work for me if I know how to tell it what to do. It makes it incredibly easy to do art in a fraction of the time it would take to do it with traditional media; I can, and have, drawn entire comic books by myself in less total time than it would take for a team of a half dozen people to do the same amount of work, because Illustrator lets me take some very different approaches. I still take longer because I am a slacker who considers it a great day if I have spent four whole hours working.<p>Right now a lot of my work in Illustrator is commissions for some delightfully absurd porn. These jobs largely come to me over the Internet, along with non-horny work. I regularly find myself <i>laughing with delight</i> at what I am being <i>paid</i> to draw.<p>But on the flipside I get the impression that Illustrator has <i>never</i> been a prestigious division of Adobe, and I&#x27;m sure that maintaining a thirty-year-old codebase is very not fun. I&#x27;ve been asking them for the ability to rotate the preview display for a <i>decade</i> and they are only <i>vaguely</i> beginning to work on it now, with a lot of lengthy excuses as to why this seemingly-simple task is hard. Being a programmer seems to have a lot of ways for it to suck like that. Some of y&#x27;all get paid a lot more than I probably ever will unless I stumble into a ludicrously-high-priced gallery art career, but you also have to go live the Dilbert life every damn day. (And as a side note, if any of you folks making ludicrous FAANG money happen to need some weird art to give you something to think about to help you get through those long days of bureaucracy and worrying about your next performance evaluation, my commissions are currently open.)

You know what&#x27;s really not fun? That font and color against that background.<p>If computers aren&#x27;t fun for you anymore, at what could reasonably be described as the apex of what&#x27;s ever been possible with a computer right now, it&#x27;s not computers that are at fault here, it&#x27;s you.

&gt;&gt; Of course you have an extensive list of things you wish your phone&#x2F;computer&#x2F;most-used apps could do; everyone does. You know the majority of it will remain a wishlist; there’s almost no hope of the feature you really want being implemented7.<p>I am the exact opposite of this. I honestly don&#x27;t have anything I would <i>want</i> my phone to do but doesn&#x27;t. Quite the contrary tbh. Why? Because I know anything I install on my phone or PC is most likely tracking me, and my data is getting sucked away into a third party black hole to be sold to shay marketers for pennies on the dollar.<p>Likewise, any time I <i>do actually think</i> of building an app that could solve a problem I have in my personal life or work process; a simple google search will confirm that apparently a few hundred other people had the same idea 3 years ago and here&#x27;s ten apps that will do what you were thinking of building.<p>I don&#x27;t want MORE tech, I actually want a lot LESS in my life.<p>Like Jack Kerouac once said, &quot;If you own a rug, you own too much.&quot;

There is a nice saying in german: &quot;In former times everything was better, even the future!&quot;<p>I think software development and UX have improved a lot in the last decades. Build tools are sometimes really annoying, but does anyone remember how life was without them? Does anyone want to pull a GB of libs from the web by hand? (Obviously nobody would do that and prefer to reinvent the wheel with help of the &quot;XY Cookbook&quot;). The author also criticises &quot;flat UI&quot;, but does anyone remember the ugliness of UI&#x27;s in the nineties with all their borders and pseudo shadows?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;83.133.184.251&#x2F;winworldpc.com&#x2F;res&#x2F;img&#x2F;screenshots&#x2F;30-da78050b4fccfee8c90c3977721c37ba-Corel%20Draw%203%20-%20Paint.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;83.133.184.251&#x2F;winworldpc.com&#x2F;res&#x2F;img&#x2F;screenshots&#x2F;30-...</a><p>Or think about IDE&#x27;s! Does anyone want to change IntelliJ for JBuilder?<p>I think, what the author really means is the move from solo inventors and hackers to a complex and more or less mature industry. Not everything is fun in this industry, but it also not as bad as one could think after reading this article.

I am rewatching Star Was and it amazes me how interoperable their technology is. R2-D2 can just hook into the Death Star and begin reading data. There&#x27;s even a funny scene where C3PO tells him to hook in to a port, only for R2 to be electrocuted. Their power ports are the same as their data ports, crazy! And Chewbacca, not exactly a paragon of intellect, is able to reassemble C3PO after he had been blown apart. And although his head is on backwards, he seems to be about the same as he was before being disassembled.<p>All of their technology is so advanced, and yet so... analog? It&#x27;s beautiful, they get to just live their lives; they don&#x27;t have to fuss about with documentation, closed source, outdated libraries, missing binaries, copyright, etc.

Very light grey text on a white background is not a very readable color scheme :(

For me, early days of computer = the computer was mine and what I interacted with on it was largely mine.<p>Now : constantly opting out, denying cookies, blocking ads, installing piHole, blocking scripts, filtering emails for spam, ticking or unticking that tickbox, opt-out etc etc.<p>And I haven&#x27;t even touched on the straightforward malicious stuff. Scams, phishing, cryptobombs, dodgy links etc.<p>And more and more of our lives rely on it.<p>End result = More angles to guard, stakes are higher.<p>This feeling of being &quot;on guard&quot; all the time is fatiguing and does drain some of the fun from day to day general use computers.<p>[edit: snipped examples, reworded bits for conciseness]

This seems to me like an apples-to-oranges comparison, and reflects the transition of computers from a niche field dominated by curiosity to a mainstream business asset (one facet of which is the focus of the article). Many people today are still having fun with computers and I dare say that the people who had fun with computers in previous decades would have fun with computers today as well.

I&#x27;m just one small voice but I still have fun with computers on the web.<p>Every day, I build <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinopio.club" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinopio.club</a> and enjoy it. Maybe that&#x27;s partly because experience has taught me to deliberately&#x2F;conservatively pick the technologies that I build with (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;how-kinopio-is-made.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;how-kinopio-is-made.html</a>).<p>Basically, I avoid douchebag tech.<p>I&#x27;m not a gifted coder. My only real talent is a strong bullshit detector.

While I agree on some of his points, I cannot get past how the author focuses on how the web functions. The mainstream internet is absolutely less &quot;fun&quot; but it is also more accessible to the common person. Look at Reddit for an example, with its UI and policy changes it is starting to remind people of Facebook, and that is what they want. The web (and computers) are no longer exclusive to those with an education or the creativity to use them.<p>However, the more fun aspects are still there. You can still make a app or service yourself to complete tasks and it may take some fun out of it but there are libraries full of tools to make it easier. If this is a &quot;CRUD SaaS app&quot; you should look around for another service which has the features you want. If you can&#x27;t find one, there is probably a market for it.<p>The hard part for me has been knowing where to look to find the fun. Some of the smaller reddit communities I used to frequent have grown and no longer look the same. Discord has proven itself many times over, there are public channels for virtually any hobby.

Hi there @feifan, to inspire you to expand your definition of fun, check out stuff I made with my computer in 2021 so far, had a lot of fun creating it :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dialectic.design&#x2F;project&#x2F;genuary-2021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dialectic.design&#x2F;project&#x2F;genuary-2021</a>

I think personal computers are still in transition, perhaps now entering their third generation. In 1980 they were toys of exploration used mostly by hobbyists and early small business adopters. In 2000 they became our portal to the world via web, social communities, and messaging. In 2010 they migrated onto mobile devices, but largely offered the same services as before -- at most generation 2.5.<p>Having been there and done all that, the question now is, what comes next? But no Next Next Thing is apparent, especially for those who live to be wired. Personal computing has become a flat level playing field that extends to the visible horizon where the cutting edge user is no closer to the vanguard of tech utopianism than the Everyman who lives only within Facebook. And what fun is that?

IoT programming on the ESP8266 is really fun. The Arduino library ecosystem abstracts away the details of WiFi, HTTP servers, etc. The Arduino IDE abstracts away the details of getting your program onto the microcontroller. You can set up a web server to control a GPIO output pin from your phone in about a page of code. From there, it&#x27;s a short leap to something practically useful.<p>Arduino is already a common choice for fun-oriented programming, but adding onboard WiFi takes it to another level. Using a web server for the UI also makes it more accessible, because you don&#x27;t need to build an assembly of switches and indicators to get information to&#x2F;from the user.

Fun happens in your head. That said I have been feeling much like the author in recent past even though I know in the back of my mind that this is not based in reality.<p>Too much interaction with frustrating or dull technology (business software) or consumer-oriented software leaves you feeling disengaged and in the shallows.<p>Perhaps the author needs to look for communities that engage in the more imaginative and creative pursuits like demoscene, emulation, esolang or nixos :P Can&#x27;t rely on cool things falling right in front of your doorsteps anymore.

It is evident that the author has not done anything with microcontrollers. All the fun that ever was is still there, with new fun rolling in all the time. The first time you see a physical object move because code you wrote changed voltages on visible output pins, you will know what I mean.