So we go from the days when we have to pay our ISP so that we could go to weather.com to see it if it's raining outside, to a future where we have to pay for our ISP, so that we can connect to the AI company who we also have to pay, so that we can have their AI connect to the API at weather.com which we also have to pay for, so that we can see if it's raining outside? I'm not convinced that'd be making our lives better through technological progress.

Not better, just more profitable (for a small handful)

> If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve.

I feel like a lot of new security concerns would be created.

I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.

> Most kids never even knew what BASIC was

Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.

The kids who loved computers were the ones plugging in line after line of BASIC. Well, them and the ones who just really loved games. Games were a gateway drug for a lot of kids because for so long games could really make you work for it. Games had kids making changes to config.sys and setting BLASTER environment variables, connecting to a BBS or FTP sites for downloads, and troubleshooting network issues to get LAN games running with friends. You could get pretty good at computers just getting your fix. That took a pretty strong commitment though because if all you cared about were games, and if you had them, consoles made gaming very simple. Too simple if you valued the sense of learning and accomplishment that came from winning a wrestling match with an unforgiving computer keeping you from the game you wanted to play.

Yeah, I did that too. That's what you did with these machines. Deeply unsatisfying! Like: a real lesson in how gnarly real computers actually were. This is my point. You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything, but it turns out "anything" took on values ranging from "hours to many hours of typing in BASIC listings and then working through inscrutable errors until something showed up on the screen but then crashed". Computers sucked ass!

Until like a year ago.

Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome.

I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.

Did you end up writing a word processor? :)

Haha! I did, but not for a few years, until I took up Pascal and MacOS and then wanted to find a way around the 32k text limit that was a stubbornly difficult problem to solve for a while (and was the original reason that BBEdit became so popular).

Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.

>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..

Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?

For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...

In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...

May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..

I don't know probably because I was eight years old.

Good point - what might become fun and engaging at 10 or 11 could be more frustrating at 8, especially on your own.

Figuring out inscrutable errors seems highly educational. I guess I don't have enough data to determine whether your bad experience was more or less common (probably less common on HN though). I imagine some (like yourself at 8) found computers frustrating and bad, while others (some peer posters on HN, who might also have been a bit older when they started) found them frustrating and good!

I did come to appreciate that. I was a professional C programmer for a lot of years! A hand tool woodworker, so to speak. It's great. But it's not the same as what I had thought computers were when I was a little kid.

Why would you get a computer in that era if you didn't want to learn BASIC?

Kids weren’t getting computers, their parents were.

Yes, there was no good reason for us to have had that computer. A friend of the family sold it to us. I had no say! I was like 8.

To play the games that were included in books and magazines as BASIC program listings that you could type in and play.

It was probably a function of not just personality type but education. For whatever reason I was taught basic in elementary school as a millennial and it left an impression.

Education has to help demystify computers and give people an idea of what they could do with one. Basic seems like a weird choice for a millennial, but at least it had you actually write code instead of abstracting it away into pushing around icons like some of the systems I've seen for teaching young kids about software or even just giving directions to turtles.

Why is BASIC a weird choice? It wasn't really a choice at all. All the computers in my school ran it until I was 8 or 9 and the school board could afford to upgrade to Windows machines.

If you define a millennial as someone born from 1982-1996, the majority of those kids by the time the had a computer lab (say by the time they were in middle school) would have been too old for BASIC. You are talking 92-06, Windows 95 took over the majority market share by the end of '96, and you are forgetting a whole lot of schools had Apples being pumped in, so a lot less access to BASIC. Unless you were in a programming adjacent class, the majority of millennials weren't learning basic. Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.

In India, I think we still had BASIC taught in schools and private coaching centers in 95-98.

Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP. BASIC wouldn't have been included in XP or 2000, and depending on what exactly they were using, it may have been easier to use something with more features. QBasic for example wouldn't have syntax highlighting. Simple programs in languages like python or perl can be used to teach the same concepts, with fairly similar syntax, and would have been more applicable to software people were actually writing at the time.

When I was in high school we used VB6 and VB.NET on Windows XP. Does Visual Basic not count?

10 print "hello"

20 goto 10

10 print "<brother's name> is dumb"

20 goto 10

s/brother/teacher

> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.

I doubt it. Most people would rather stab at their phone to download an app that just does what they want than explain to a chatbot over a period of minutes/hours and several reiterations to get it to spew out what they want, let alone what kind of software they want it to make for them. Most people can barely articulate what they want in the first place.

The market for applications isn't going anywhere and neither is the OS. I can't imagine booting a computer directly into a chat window where I have to explain to a bot what I wish would show up on my screen, where on my screen, and how it should look. What a total nightmare that would be!

Even if what passes for "AI" these days was as smart and capable as the computers on Star Trek (and it very much isn't) you wouldn't want to ask it for everything. Even the Enterprise had an OS that people interacted with. What they also had though was an OS with configurable interfaces that people could customize according to their current task and preferred workflow.

That sort of thing is maybe possible in the future for "AI" empowered operating systems we might live to see, but 90% of the people using computers aren't going to bother with any of that, just like they've never seen the settings/options in most of their applications or their operating system right now. Not because it couldn't make their time working the computer better, but because they just can't be bothered.

The writer of this piece remembers how, as a child, computers promised to let him write his own software and games and it seemed like there were endless possibilities until the reality that programing takes effort killed a little of that enthusiasm (although not enough that he didn't eventually become a programmer), but many people never see a computer as anything more than a means to an end or a device for mainly passive content consumption.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding in AI circles. The vast majority of people have a personal computer in their pocket and they use it the vast majority of the time to scroll Instagram, play games, and occasionally interact with their bank and other social services. People who have laptops and desktop computers have them for specialized tasks they already do. None of the vast majority of users who buy their phone when the screen cracks and the battery stops working care about the agentic AI world because their phone already does everything they want to do.

I think the rise of Claw's, Grok Bot and Muse is a good counterpoint to this. Yes they are still niche specialized interfaces right now, but they are basically allowing non-technical people to do things that have been easily possible with scripts and cronjobs for a long time. Its basically the Ford and faster houses analogy.

Howl was faster houses, Ford was faster horses.

When I look around me, the only time people get their phone out of their pockets is either for youtube, some social media, or calling/chatting with people. It's very rare to even see them set reminders or use the calculator. It's look like you're in some tech bubble. People outside of that don't scripts or do repetitive and formalized stuff. The people that do create apps and services to sell.

My wife is as non-technical as it gets, but she still spends hours with ChatGPT everyday. Calorie counting, parenting tips, gardening help, fact checks, looking up celebrities, road trip planning, meal planning, health related questions, all with ChatGPT. I really don't think she's the only one. It wasn't the most downloaded iPhone app of 2025 for nothing.

Okay, I went too far with that one sentence. Can we all pretend I have instead said "this model will be obsolete for most, not all, but most productivity apps and most, not all, but most office tools"?

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "don't interact with hardware much anymore"? If you compare modern drivers with similar ones from 20 years ago, for example, you'll find the modern ones tend to be quite a bit more complex.

No directly anyway, for the OS it's all abstractions and isolation. There was a time when the OS could basically see and control everything, but now there are subsystems all over the place with their own memory, their own software, all outside of the control of the OS. CSME runs while the computer is powered off.

telemarketers were a thing before cell phones and they weren't just calling homes in their local calling area. The economics must have made it worth their phone bills. I'm also not a fan of punishing everyone to make things a little harder for a small number of assholes.

> "The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic re-entry debris, and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome... On the other hand, it makes a terrific barometer.”

I'm not sure we're coming out ahead on that one, but leave it to a guy who can detect things light-years away to be able to find a silver lining

> There are rumbles about doing it (anti trust, supporting unions, climate change), but it never _quite_ seems to actually materialize into anything.

There's only so much they can do when dealing with obstructionism, but the party is still putting forward legislation. For recent examples see The American Homeownership Act (https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/senate-demo...) and the Stop Corporate Takeovers of Physicians Act (https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren...)

A few things I can remember them doing are net neutrality, banning non-compete agreements for employees, a DMCA exception for allowing 3rd party repairs to McDonald's ice cream machines, and blocking the Albertsons/Kroger merger.

Multiple attempts at net neutrality legislation have made by democrats, in the meantime the FCC pushed for neutrality under Democrats while republican administrations have a much worse track record of support

You write like the senate and its filibuster doesn't exist. They can't pass legislation without GOP votes. Of course they use the FCC given that fact.

It's not as if democrats are using the existence of the filibuster as an excuse to not even try. Putting forward legislation they believe in, even when the odds of it being passed are slim, demonstrates intent and if the filibuster is used to stop a law that would benefit the people, that means that someone was actively doing something, it's on record, and the people should hold the obstructionists accountable for what they prevented.

Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I just hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on perfect accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.

Any system that can be used to pick those that stand out, will also be indiscriminately used to beat down any nail that sticks up higher than the rest with full intention of doing so by its operator.

Collateral damage is just the cost of doing business for them.

That's not remotely true, you're projecting how you would abuse power. Not everyone is as evil-minded, and I hope they continue to do a great job at keeping your ilk out of the organization.

So you have to be evil to think of what evil can do by the statement you made. Can't you see how this leads to a catch-22 situation where if you get rid of anyone that can think of possible evil acts makes your organization blind and therefor at higher risk of actually committing those acts.

Also, when looking at the people we all vote into power, there is a incredible amount of naivety here. Snowden should have keyed you in on what people in power are doing.

> So you have to be evil to think of what evil can do by the statement you made.

You don't, and my statement did not assert that. You are stretching wayyy too much here to try to get the world to fit your narrative.

People who aren't evil-minded don't go to work for a government organization responsible for constitution-violating surveillance of their fellow citizens.

They do, in droves. It's clear you don't know anything about the entire industry.