I think the progress we've made with computing is unimpressive and embarrassing. Phones are also universally shitty, walled garden, crippleware.

Mostly, it's a software thing. Hardware has done great in general (though it's starting to go downhill ). But all the software is just unbelievably bad. I learned x86 assembly in 7th grade, like 15 years ago. I was so exited by how fast computers were and how much could be done with software. I thought Windows 2000 was a little unnecessarily bloated. I was little confused why some drivers were multiple megabytes. A lot of software crashed. But I figured things would get better.

Holy fuck have things gone downhill. Windows 10 plays motherfucking ads in the start menu and it's slow as shit. Wait--you might say--it starts up so fast! It's so fast! No it's not. Consider how many times faster your hardware is compared to 15 years ago. Compare that to have fast software does things now. Then think about the features we've added. Yes, there are some new features. But not that many. Yes it's faster, but maybe only twice or three times as fast. Hardware performance was doubling almost every year for the last 15 years, but has your experience as a user gotten twice as good each year? It's not even close.

The software industry has used the added performance to line their profit margins. They got lazy with fat abstraction layers slathered with pretty graphics to wow users while minimizing programming costs. Phones are basically little profit machines that you do not own. You don't have root privileges. The hardware is super incredible but locked down and the full hardware features are marked confidential and locked in some corporate vault. The companies that actually own your phone basically have full control over it and really, deeply desire to control and profit from all of the software that goes on there and all the information that goes in and out.

Basically, I hate the ever loving shit out of modern consumer technology. Yes, I use it. I put up with it. I try not to think about it the whitelist in my cryptographically locked down BIOS that keeps me from upgrading my fucking wireless card. Or the fusible links that blew in my phone one day to keep me from running unsigned kernels. And I'm doing things about it. I'm involved in the development of some new hardware technologies with applications to AI. Basically, I want to make software obsolete. Yes, AI that you do not program. No abstraction. You're going to be talking to nanoparticles and they're going to talk back.