I say "old age" in the title of this post, I am still in my 30s, and I don't turn 40 until next year, but I have grey in my beard and I have definitely paraphrased "back in my day" more than once. Admittedly it is mostly to my children, so they can learn a little bit about what it was like growing up in the "late 1900s" not being surrounded by technology and the internet every second of the day.
My daughter asked me whether it was better growing up as a kid when I was younger vs now. Obviously I am biased, but I think we did have it better as kids.
Yes there was less choice when it came to entertainment and toys but abundant choice isn't always a good thing. Certainly in the UK where we only had 4 TV channels, with kids shows limited to a few hours each day, everyone watched the same thing.
We were all exposed to the same adverts and ended up playing the same games and getting the same toys at Christmas (or wanted them). To be fair thanks to reruns, I watched some of the same cartoons my parents watched. My kids however are only vaguely aware of who Bugs Bunny is, the horror.
I find myself getting more nostalgic for the technology that we had growing up as well. Like many my age, my first phone was a Nokia 3210. I still have it in a drawer somewhere. It still turns on, the battery still lasts a week.
The next phone I got was a Nokia 3510, bright blue and orange and had a colour screen and polyphonic ringtones. Yes it was only a 12 bit colour, 96 x 65 pixel display but it was exciting.
With every new release the technology got noticeably better, sharper displays, better sound, better camera. It made sense to update your phone every year or two as the next release was going to be twice if not 3 times better than what you had before.
Now the difference between releases is marginal.
Between the iPhone 16 and 17 you have a slightly bigger display, 10% faster chip and a better front camera. The only time I upgrade now is when the software becomes so bloated my phone struggles to cope or the battery dies.
It is not just physical tech but software and games too. I have 292 games in my Steam library most of them I bought from Humble Bundle or Steam sales. I am very aware that in 10 years time or less most of those games probably won't work.
Most of them need an internet connection to the games servers and Steam to work. Even consoles are no longer coming with physical media anymore and the ones that did still required you to download a large amount and create an account before you can start playing.
It didn't use to be like this. PC games came on floppy disks and CDs. Consoles had cartridges that you could plug in and start playing. No internet connection needed, no account needed. Yes the graphics are better than they used to be, but are we really much better off?
Maybe I need to start buying my games from Gog so they would at least be DRM free or just play retro titles from now on. The latter might be the only option unless graphics card and RAM prices drop to a reasonable level again.
Either way I am certainly buying more physical books and DVDs than I used to and buying a record player doesn't seem like a crazy idea right now.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
💻 Programming #
Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls - I shared the other week how all the buttons looked the same. These will certainly help you stand out.
🔒 Security & Privacy #
I’d not buy a LG monitor - In 2026 even your monitor installs spyware on your computer without you knowing. I hope LG lose a lot of customers over this.
🤖 AI #
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop - We may still need to start hoarding old non-fiction text books like this (see link below):
AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale - AI companies are buying books from second hand book sellers in bulk and cutting off the bindings to scan them quickly.
On Making - I like this analogy. If I asked a carpenter to build me a new porch I wouldn't proudly show it off to everyone as if I had built it. However people do this all the time with AI.
It's getting harder to focus every day - Our attention spans were already being attacked tiktoks, shorts and reels. Now we have LLMs to destroy what little concentration we have left. It is almost as if this was all planned.
2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026 - From my experience with LLMs 2x seems realistic. This only covers the initial creation of the code though. I think if you factor in maintenance and bugs on a codebase you no longer understand then it will be less than that.
🏢 Tech Industry #
If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? - Even before AI software was getting worse but I think it has definitely accelerated the problem. As I mentioned in my post, software had to be meticulously tested before being released as there was no way of patching it once it was out there. Now companies will release software full of bugs and worry about it later.
🎮 Gaming #
Playing the Games We Have - I have been enjoying emulated games a lot recently. The Steam Deck is great and can play everything from SNES up to PS3. You can play them all offline too. I even spent an hour the other day playing the GameBoy colour version of Tetris. "Back in my day" I only had the black and white version.
🧠 Miscellaneous #
Why I Stopped "Creating Content" - I am not a big fan of the word "content" either and generally say I am recording a video or writing a blog post.
The Beam Engine - I love all the illustrations they have put into this explanation. If only all tutorials were this good.
Double your business with companies you like - We all need to do this more. Yes it is cheaper and more convenient to buy a book on Amazon than the independent book store you like to look around on the weekend. However, that independent bookstore might not exist without you buying something but Amazon is going to be fine without your sale.
If you are ever near my neck of the woods in the UK, Store 104 in Rochester and Harbour Books in Whitstable are both very good.
It Seems a Lot Like Dead Internet Has Actually Come True - This is certainly true for all the main text social media platforms. X, LinkedIn and Reddit I am pretty sure is 60-80% bots at this point. Once video generation gets better and cheaper it will be coming for the other platforms too.
Apple should be ashamed of its hostile App Store rating system - My app HabitTed only has one review on the AppStore which basically makes it invisible unless you search for the exact phrase "habitted - habit tracker". I can see why people end up paying for fake reviews.
💬 Quote of the Week #
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk,” said the Cat.
From "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll.
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