why do computers become obsolete? why isn't your mid-00s single core athlon 64 collecting dust in your loft good for anything anymore, despite being capable of running older versions of everything we use today?

the answer is they're too slow to cope with modern web sites and online services. old software also doesn't support the cryptography used to secure websites now. this is why just about everyone who's into retro computing and doesn't live under a rock uses a modern computer as their primary machine.

but now, the web is being absolutely obliterated by capitalists seeking to squeeze out every last penny they can, con artists pitching ai rubbish to investors who think everyone and their dad wrapping some crappy service around chatgpt is somehow worth millions of dollars. examples include, but are not limited to:

• google search can't find anything anymore, and they intend to show you more ai results and less of the web
• youtube is experimenting with curbing ad blocking
• twitter, on top of everything that's happened to it, has now become a big walled garden, preventing logged out users from seeing everything ever posted on there
• netflix has nothing worthwhile, except evangelion, but they took out fly me to the moon, so it's bad. also i 100% guarantee they'll have ads in all their paid tiers some day.
• facebook is just your racist uncles posting sideways laughing emojis
• reddit is killing third party apps in favour of their ad-laden mobile app, and they now talk about their community in terms of being a "data set"
• medium is flooded with low quality blog posts trying to get your ad clicks
• cnet tried passing off ai garbage as legit articles, and we'd be fools to think it's going to stop there
• not a website, but showing the general trend in tech: microsoft has stuffed windows with bing crap (i did a whole post about this) and now they're apparently talking about chromeos-ifying it entirely.

i could go on and on, but the trend is clear: everything that is holy will be destroyed. this is not limited to large american companies either, i've heard worrying plans about my own workplace, and the problem is so pervasive that even resources like mdn, a documentation site run by mozilla that i use all the time in my work, is now generating ai nonsense. most of the unique sites and communties out there disappeared with the consolidation of the web in the hands of a few giants, and what's left is now disappearing under a sewer of ai generated shit. the web as a useful source of knowledge and connections is being eliminated, and incentives to create are being ripped away when tech companies just reach for some llm that eat your hard work and churn out facsimiles of human expression.

eventually, the bigwigs will realise none of this shit has a profitable future and pull out. i am currently looking into alternate career paths, because i don't believe there will be a usable web in the future.

so going back to the beginning of the post, if the web is completely fucking useless, then there's no point in owning a computer newer than circa 2005. you can put a cheap ssd in your old xp machine and it will fly. xp has no telemetry, no bing, no cloud desktop crap, no updates, no dark patterns trying to get you to sign up for onedrive or a microsoft account--compared to what we have now, it's really quite pleasant.

"but i want to chat with my friends" <-- that's the genius of irc gateways.

"but i'm a web developer and i need docker" <-- you won't be for long

"windows xp isn't retro" <-- it predates 9/11

"but what about games?" hello??? there's no shortage of great games released in the xp era, they have no microtransactions or online drm (except spore lol), and you can get a geforce 8800 ultra for like a dollar to enjoy them with maximum fidelity. we already see games suffering at the hands of insatiable profiteers, and you have another thing coming if you believe steam won't suffer the same fate as everything else.

to sum things up, while i'm sad about the web and the career i built on top of it, i'm excited to leave the hellscape it's become. my beige boxes have been waiting for this moment.