Comment by ud_0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ud_0 | Hacker News Reader

It took myself a while to admit, and I get why this is an unsatisfying take for a community as heavy on creatives as HN: there are digital native makers and digital native consumers, and the latter is utterly dominating the young population to the point of relegating the makers to the fringe.

The age of making tools and coming up with workarounds in the face of limitations has come to an end as a mainstream computing activity. A person using a computer in the 90s had to know a lot of technical details and was far more likely to need this knowledge in order to accomplish something. A person growing up today does not, in general, have this need: they can go their whole lives without ever needing to know anything "technical" by virtue of never brushing up against serious limitations that seem surmountable with personal expertise.

Before judging what's good and bad about this, other people have rightfully pointed out the exact same shift in other technology/tools sectors, such as the car industry. The most positive way I can frame this shift in respect to computing is:

In the beginning, the tool itself mattered the most. Its composition, its setup, its ever-evolving but inspectable properties. For many, the tool itself was the purpose. Overcoming its limitations and improving it was the purpose.

By now, the tool itself is no longer relevant. It only matters what you can do with it. The works made with the tool are center stage. Whatever limitations the tool still has are accepted as unchangeable and/or not worth contemplating. Spending time on the tool itself is considered, at best, a weird hobby.

The knowledge of making and maintaining these tools is still incredibly important and should be handed out through generations (while also inventing innovations to make more efficient and powerful tools).

But what many older generations in tech who constantly lament about the “new generation of tech-illiterates” ignore is that there are actually quite some people (both old and young) who understand this and are actually dedicating towards learning, teaching, and creating low-level mechanisms and systems (such as the people in the Handmade Hero Network, the young new Linux hackers contributing to the kernel, and hobbyists creating their own game engines). And it’s a grave disrespect against them to say that nobody actually cares about anything. If you really are worried about this, don’t just complain and cry about it, be the change you want to see in the world.

I was starting to write a reply about how much I agree with you, but then I came to the second half of your post.

> And it’s a grave disrespect against them to say that nobody actually cares about anything.

I think you might have completely misread my intent. For starters, if you're a HMH watcher, I invite you to tell Casey how much society cares about software quality, you're probably going to trigger a well-deserved rant.

When I say as a society we now have less low-level tools developers per capita, that's not supposed to be an insult to you personally, nor is it necessarily a lamentation on the state of affairs.

> If you really are worried about this, don’t just complain and cry about it, be the change you want to see in the world.

I have no idea where this criticism connects with what I wrote or meant. I did not mean to "complain and cry". My GP post was set against the backdrop of the article, and my disagreement was specifically with the article.

Sorry about this, my intent for this criticism was not towards you, it was towards other people around HN who generally go around and generalize the young generation for being ignorant.

Maybe I should have written this in a different place...

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