Ask Lemmy

Japan mostly skipped PCs (outside of offices). Since their phones were ahead of the curve, a lot of stuff was designed for them. That means that a bunch of stuff is either exclusively done through some shitty mobile app, fax, or in person. There was a brief phase where PC versions did exist, but those are almost all being neglected or decommissioned now. I much prefer to do things on a PC with a nice, clear, big screen, especially if I need to use some translation tool since the text tends to expand (learning thousands of kanji for stuff like legal and taxes is hard).

I do miss physically owning media. A lot of physical media still decays, though, so not a panacea.

Software programs that were much more tested and completed before release.

Software development where we think things through, define requirements, define states, etc. before any code is committed. I do think PoCs are fine to throw something against a wall but, if it works, the proper version should go through those design phases before anyone writes a line of code. Cheap components and fast machines and networks have made people lazy which makes software worse in a number of ways quite often. No vibecoding. No AI/LLM shoved into everything. I think they can have uses in certain contexts (rephrasing questions, generating examples/docs in projects with bad/no docs, etc.), but hate how they are being shoved into everything.

An internet not run by corporations. I think a lot of people do see it through rose-tinted glasses (we still had trolls on BBS, UseNet, IRC, etc. and other bad actors), but a lot of things were much better.

Third spaces. Places where people of different backgrounds would interact in some common way. Sure, some were echo chambers just like online communities today, but many were not and let people interact together rather than just being othered to the point of fear and reviling.

I much prefer AD&D 2.5 rules to anything around today (and TSR still existing, but that ship has sailed).