It seems like a lot of this boils down to people getting stuck in a local maxima. If someone isn't used to zooming out to the big picture, are they more likely to solve problems in isolation and end up with layers of dependencies, npm installing all the things? Resulting in an unstable stack and less predictable ecosystem at large.

The other personality deals with abstractions, analogies and top-down thinking. When faced with an issue they'll start by defining goals and values. And it's easy to be blind to the details when you're thinking of the big picture and ask for things counter to the laws of physics.

Even if you're a two-minded kind of person and can deal with both generalities and specifics, it's incredibly hard to deal with both at once and quite a task to switch from the one mindset to the other.

Studying the history of CS and following it to its roots has been simultaneously invigorating because of the elegance of the fundamental ideas, but also disappointing, because of the line I can trace from the hopes and dreams of those pioneers to the current state of computing.

I'm hopeful that a new wave of software is just over the horizon. Perhaps I am naive, but I'm holding out against pessimism about the future for as long as I can.

I recall a few times driving out of state where I’d miss an exit, be unable to figure out my way to where I needed, pull over at a phone booth or public business, and start calling to see who was home and could run mapquest for me to get me back on the road. Don’t miss that.

FWIW, I don't care about the details, there are plenty individual examples of bad design today and slower software. I disagree completely with your larger thesis that things have gotten worse, and with the title in particular as a summary of your point. Why do you feel it's completely valid, and what does that mean exactly if you agree that many of the supporting examples are wrong?

And I also disagree with characterizing people who disagree with you as "Computer Person Thinking" and "Stockholm Syndrome". That charge seems doubly ironic, quite hypocritical, given the content of your tweet-storm, but I understand if you're feeling a bit attacked or defensive about this discussion. It's okay that it wasn't all true, and if this causes discussion that seems annoying, at least it's a discussion. We can continue to improve software and hardware and UX, and it's good to discuss it. It's just not true that it's gotten worse, and you don't really need to crap on today's software or the people who disagree with you to prove the point that we still have room for improvement. There's always room for improvement.

Anyway, computing is objectively faster today than in 1983 (I was there), and not by a little, by orders of magnitude, especially if you are fair and compare functionality apples to apples, but even if you only tally wait times for activities that seem similar on the surface but are completely different today (such as in-memory queries vs internet queries).

I don't see much objective data or measured results in your UX argument on the whole. Arguing that function keys are intuitive and that the mouse is useless is pure opinion based on what you like and being used to something, not something that can be shown by any large scale user studies to date, and history has already somewhat demonstrated the opposite, that many people prefer mice navigation to keyboards, and that function key workflows are for experts, not Twitter users, by and large.