I suppose I better start with what I've done.

I've been fascinated with computers ever since my family's first computer, which sadly I do not recall the model of. It was a generic enough Windows XP machine, that's all I can remember. But it was more than enough to get me hooked. Here was a machine that could do many, many, things, and my child mind was determined to know everything about it. Many a night was spent poring over menu options, trying to find every little thing I could learn about. Broke the thing, a couple of times.

I pored over that machine, hoping that I'd be able to understand every little thing about it. Granted, I wasn't suddenly going to grasp the intricacies of networking, or operating system design, or hardware architecture, especially not by just clicking buttons in a Windows XP install. But it did leave me with my main hyperfixation: All things computers.

I began to program when I was in third class, when my teacher at the time recommended CoderDojo to my parents. I played around with some Scratch, which was fun, plugging together little games, I did a bit of HTML and CSS, which wasn't really for me. I wanted to know more, though.

I started to read a bit about programs I used and games I played. And one day, I found something really interesting: The source code of Quake III Arena. It was my first time looking through a codebase of that scale. I glanced through it, until I came across quite a famous function. Fast Inverse Square Root. I was utterly mystified. This was the kind of thing I was enamoured with. A solution to a problem that was a mystery itself. "0x5f3759df"? "Evil Floating Point bit level hacking"? It was from there I knew I wanted to work with computers, in any capacity possible. (It also started my love of arena shooters, because who looks at the source code of a game without playing it?) It was also there that I began to learn about Free Software, as the GPL was what allowed me to have my little revelation. I saw how people could collaborate, improve on each other's work, and create something together. I steeled myself, sat down, looked up some programming tutorials, and dove in.

At this point I made a pretty big mistake: I started bouncing around languages, depending on whatever mood took me. I never got any further than implementing something trivial for a few years. I still regret that. I should have realized that I wasn't really learning anything new, or developing any useful skills. I finally dug in, and picked C to learn "properly", with the goal that it would help me understand "what's really going on."

It did that, somewhat. I tried to learn some x86-64 assembly, to get an even deeper look, and was scratching my head at the sheer size of the instruction set. But then I finally made my realization: modern personal computers are far too advanced for one person to understand, fully. You can understand the general concepts, even know a few "secret sauce" tricks, but at the end of the day, you can't truly understand everything. Not for lack of trying: even if you were a genii, you'd have to work at numerous companies to gain access to the documents and designs you'd need to do so. Bit too much of a time-sink, even for the most dedicated individuals, for what is ultimately a child-like goal. I could try to develop my own operating systems, but the GPU that's sitting in my PCI-e slot is far beyond my capabilities to work with. I wouldn't ever understand every instruction that my CPU could run, nor am I meant to. No matter what I wrote, I could never be sure that I was in full control.

Granted, I could do a project like jdh's computer and graphics card from scratch, but that's an altogether different goal. (That can be found on YouTube) Designing a computer isn't the same as learning everything about a computer you have, though it is perhaps just as or even more impressive. It was somewhat possible in the days of 8-bit home computers to understand everything about your computer, not easy, but possible. At the end of the day, I have to concede to trying to understand quite a bit about my computer, which just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Sometimes I wish I did grow up in the time of the 8-bit home computers, and to be able to have my child-like wonder satiated by manuals, schematics, and software, to explore and squeeze every last bit of performance out of one of those little machines. To this day I'm still fascinated the demoscenes of devices like the Commodore 64, or the ZX Spectrum, and have often considered trying my hand at them, but ultimately, I've just never gotten around to it.

I hope that in the future, both libre hardware and software will be able to create a new useful computer that I can fully understand, but I'll have to wait and see on that one. It's simply a fact in our complex, modern computers, that there's too much for one man to know.

Then again, maybe it's me that's not smart enough.

For almost as long as I've used computers, I've had some form of Internet access. From a USB mobile broadband modem, to a mobile broadband hotspot, to a terrible copper-wire router with an attitude problem and a tiny data cap, to a finally tolerable router with unlimited data. My earliest memories were of playing random flash games, and very little else. Had I found the right resources when I was younger, I may have been much farther along in my programming journey by now, but that would have been difficult enough. I wasn't too much of an explorer in the early days of the internet, holding myself back due to tall tales of the dangers of the web, keeping under the limited data caps, and most of all, avoiding the anger of my parents, afraid that I'd provoke anger by discovering… something. I wasn't sure what at that age, but I played it safe. My parents were right, of course. There was a lot of stuff I wouldn't have understood at that age and likely would have been harmful.

Had I been older at the time, I would have been able to experience the death of the Web 1.0, and the transition of content to social media. I personally think that this is what made so much of what toxic, harmful design we see today possible. But more than that, this made the internet feel a whole lot smaller. No longer are you able to stumble across niche communities by chance, not with search engines pointed squarely at the landfill of garbage and mind-numbing content perpetuated by whatever platform was "in" at the time.

And that's what I think is sad about the modern internet. Yes, you can find cool sites from time to time, but with everyone's eyes glued squarely to hostile sites designed to grab their attention for longer and longer, these cool sites are cast to the wayside in exchange for the next generic blob of popular "culture." I wouldn't feel so annoyed at this if it were the good content on these platforms rising to the top, like the layer of foam on a soft drink, but it's often the most mind-numbing, low-effort, just-entertaining-enough tripe that ends up the algorithms fancy for the increasingly shortening attention span of the users.

And it's this plainly hostile design that makes me sick to my stomach. These platforms are so clearly designed to create addiction in their users, through slimey techniques like infinite scrolling and push notifications, where systems are built solely for the purpose of maximising the time a user spends on the platform, through the mining of data of millions and millions.

I'm not going to pretend I'm a veteran of the older internet and that I know exactly where it all went wrong, nor do I intend to gatekeep something I have no right to gatekeep. I will, however, say that making content easy to publish on the Internet, albeit inside a walled garden, seems like a great way to allow creative people to do their thing and show it to an audience, but it also allowed people who just wanted to grab a brief moment of fame to trumpet in and throw whatever at an audience to see what stuck to do so. It created a culture of fleeting attempts at striking it big quick, which leads to a deluge of garbage flooding the public conciousness.

But this is just a secondary effect, this dilution of quality and creativity. The primary effect of this transition was taking a decentralized system and centralizing it into hubs, where a singular corporation would have jurisdiction. This makes me angry. The freedom of information that is the promise of the internet isn't possible with a single party in control of said information. Yes, it's more possible than ever to host information outside of these networks, but the network effect is a powerful thing. People don't hear about things if it isn't on their various newsfeeds. It's created a partition between an average user and one which is aware of communities outside of that bubble. It's not the users fault, not at all. Once the right person had the idea of creating that bubble, there wasn't much anyone could do to stop them. Of course people were going to use something that made the hot new thing easy for everyone. Of course buisnesses were going to flock to try and make money in this new frontier. Of course it was going to become harder and harder to find the good from the bad. I speak with hindsight, and I know it wouldn't have seemed obvious from that point in time, but yet I still find myself annoyed.

Yes, that's probably a me problem. I'll go touch some grass, now.

It's easy to look back at technology with rose-tinted goggles. Taking those off for a moment, I remember my first computer being slow and unresponsive. I could stare at the Windows XP logo long enough that it would leave a ghost image on my eyes afterwards. I'm rather surprised that I managed to get anything done on that computer at all, a younger me having much less patience. Thankfully, now in 2022 I have a reasonably powerful computer, so all my applications should run quickly and snappily.

Right?

Not a hope in hell. Somewhere along the line, computers became powerful enough that optimization was not the be all and end all. Of course, I can't hold that against anyone. Not everyone is going to be the super hacker that does pico-optimizations to save a grand total of 3 CPU cycles in a massive application like a CAD program or a web browser. But it seems more and more like modern programs do everything BUT optimize themselves.

I think the biggest example of what I mean comes from Electron; a nice idea in concept, by allowing web developers to create native applications with the languages and design capabilities that they're used to. Certainly, it's easier to theme and design than something like GTK, that's for sure. But it comes with the trade-off of running an entire browser engine to use your application. At that point, I'd rather just run your application in my actual browser. I think the most egregious examples come from applications which require you to be connected to the internet to use anyway: for example, chat programs. However, the one that really took the cake for me was Balena Etcher; an image-writing program that uses Electron to provide a pretty GUI. Not the worst goal, but to run a browser to copy some bytes? Really?

And if you ask me, optimization is even more important nowadays. I don't want to be wasting cycles to display an application that could be native when I'm on a machine with a battery, whether that's a phone or a laptop. At least offer me the option to use a native window toolkit or other solution, or if you're running a service, to be able to use my own client.

But I'm sure it's just me that needs to get a better computer. Or I just need to update for the 50th time today. I'm sure whatever "various bugfixes" have been done will solve all of my problems!

Privacy is something that's important to me. Do I have things to hide? No more than any other person. I don't want people to know things like my bank account information, or the amount of times I listened to the Wrath of Khan theme loop in a single sitting. But what I don't understand is the reaction people give when you tell them you'd prefer not to be tracked by gigantic corporations who log everything you do on your devices and on the internet.

Suddenly, you're accused of being some kind of conspiracy theorist, or you get a response along the lines of "But why would they want my data? Who cares?". The simple fact of the matter is they do, and they use it specifically to try to manipulate you, either through ads, or as we found out about companies like Cambridge Analytica, manipulate your political opinions to match whatever the highest bidder wants.

And so, as I began earlier, most "free" services you see on the internet aren't free at all. It's a transaction. "Let us track you relentlessly in order to learn as much as possible about you and the people you connect with, so we can sell that data and manipulate you, and you can put funny pictures over your face and send them to your friends." Sounds like a much worse deal now, doesn't it?

And really, it is becoming worse and worse. With the advent of machine learning and related technologies, who knows what fun new ways to track and analyze us corporations are working on? How much can you manipulate a person by knowing how their eyeballs move inside of a VR headset, for example? There are people who likely have a highly paid job right now to figure that out.

As a rule of thumb, if you or that computer-savvy friend you have can't find the source code somewhere for whatever service you're using, or the Privacy Policy reads like Finnegan's Wake, you're going to have to do a lot of work to not be tracked. If it's not critical to your life, I'd say drop it, or start researching how to minimize the collection of data from that service. It's incredibly fortunate that there are dedicated people who develop software to help with things like that.

Or, I suppose, you could wear a tinfoil hat. I'm sure that'll be just as effective.

To be frank, I can't change all of this. This is the route that design has gone down, and after a certain point you can't really fight against the tide. I will, however, try not to worsen the problem. And at the end of the day, it's still really cool, and I'm still going to try and learn as much as I can.

Just because you can't know it all doesn't mean you get to throw in the towel, and so I'm not going to. I'll just write my programs, and hopefully, they'll be useful to someone.

But all the while, I'll feel the want of a more limited computer. One that I can understand, fully, top to bottom, back to front. One that is not limited in usefulness, but in design sprawl. One that I can run software on that doesn't trample over my privacy or pin my processor to 100 percent.

Or I could scrounge up a fortune and become one of those diehard Amiga fans.