A.B. Murrow<p>I use computers every day and, personally, I wish there were wayyyy fewer of them.</p><p>The issue with modern engineering, technology, and infrastructure is that we have taken all of our hardware problems and turned them into software problems. They are, as a rule, easier to deploy, but much harder to maintain and repair.</p><p>In a reasonable system it should not be possible, to hack a gas pump, or for there to be a need to update your refrigerator's firmware, or for an important component to be decommissioned overnight because a tiny startup on the other end of the world went belly up.</p><p>The value of physical hardware is that it can be directly inspected and manipulated in a way that software can't. It's harder for hardware to lie or cheat or hide anything whereas secrecy is a norm in software. The material of software is capable of misleading and confusing it's operators in a way physical objects struggle to do without a gimmick of some sort.</p><p>Hardware can be coerced to continue running indefinitely whereas old software needs the equivalent of a specially crafted, hermetically sealed life support system to outlive its usefulness for even a few years.</p><p>I'm reminded of when so much of the tools and infrastructure in our lives was stupid, direct, gravity fed, lever operated, simple machines that did one thing and did it well. </p><p>Now stuff breaks because a wildly abstracted system of captured photons that we tricked into doing math decided that just one out of those gajillions of uncountable particles was in the wrong place.</p><p>Don't get me wrong, I enjoy software. It's never been easier to just make a tool to solve hyper specific problems. I guess the issue is that software-centric solutions have just bled into so many applications to the point that it is wildly inappropriate and just plain annoying.</p><p><a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/software" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>software</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/developer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>developer</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/rant" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>rant</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/hardware" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>hardware</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/computers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>computers</span></a></p>