Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

308 pointsdvh1990358 comments

I grew up a millennial tech geek, spending my days lurking on Tom's Hardware, playing and modding video games, tinkering with code and watching Star Trek. Wherever I looked at the world's problems, more technology seemed to be the answer.

Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur. At best, technology bores me. At worst, it terrifies me. Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable. Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

We seem to be experiencing diminishing returns on tech for the past few years. More tech is no longer necessarily better. Is this just a phase before the next big industrial revolution?

When did this start, and when is the drought going to be over?

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It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality - dreams usually don't. Or at least, not as you expect it.

Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago. But we have so much of it and it is everywhere, that we re-calibrate and think that all this amazing, cool tech is boring. You can get a 3D printer for a few hundred bucks, build it yourself, build a better 3d printer, get some awesome tech for a hundred bucks or so, and then build a really cool robot. It's the tinkerer's dream right now. But because it is everywhere, we think it is boring.

It isn't! I'm Gen X and, if you let yourself, you can get re-engaged. We're the ultimate generation of apathy, so if I can do it, you can do it ;) Make sure some lifestyle choice isn't messing with your curiosity and excitement, though. Bad sleep, missing exercise, doom scrolling, too much booze or other recreational drugs, all that can suck the joy out of life and tech.

In the early 2000s, right after the Dot Com Bubble burst, I had a tech friend tell me, "I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now." That was in the web 1.0 days, before the web as we know it now existed. Before rockets that land on their end, before smartphones, before Deep Learning, before all this amazing stuff that exists now.

Oh, and you've just gone through a couple of churns of software ecosystem, it can seem same-y, but it is actually great in the long run. New situations mean old ideas that were discarded can become valuable, which can be odd. The complexity sucks, but ... shrug.

To your point about 3D printing and robots, we haven’t really moved the needle that much. We’ve made it easy for anyone to print a “cool” robot, sure, but it isn’t necessarily a _useful_ one.

As a former “maker” and electronics hack I think lot of maker stuff has devolved into “cool” stuff that consists of wire hangers and servos with RGB lighting and very little actual value. But coolness doesn’t really mean much when everything is hyped as such.

Being a maker isn’t about creating “things of value” or being “useful”.

That same mindset is ruining many a good hobby. Astrophotography is going down a shameful route where the only thing your peers want to see is the misery of all the debt you have to out fancy someone else.

as for 3d printers.. they have come a long way and have become a core part of creativity and engineering for programs like First Robotics.. hardware is improving, safety is improving, reliability is improving - so much so that if you give up on the creative aspect you can just print away and get started with little effort.

For some reason I feel the need to weigh in here. I love photography and astronomy but I see no point in mixing the two. We just spent $10 billion to send a fabulous camera and lens into the L2 Lagrange point. Not to mention the over 30 year old Hubble which no amateur has any hope of matching despite decades of advancements in amateur tech (and to be fair to the amateurs, they can do remarkably better than their peers of 30 years ago). But I already spent my money (in tax dollar form) on the best scientists in the world to go and take pretty pictures which also sometimes provide great scientific input.

If people enjoy astrophotography then that's fine, but the most magical part of Astronomy to me is seeing Saturn (easily the visual crown jewel of our solar system) through the telescope with my own eyes and realizing that it really is hanging out there in the sky for all to see.

Citizen scientists do make discoveries - we often discover NEO's, comets and supernova to assist scientists who have limited capacity - I've seen some great work here and lots of technology + telescope convergence of being able to scan thousands of plate solves a night using GPU to find near earth objects. This part of citizen science is doing well...

but astrophotography, it used to be able the wonder of capturing it - regardless if you prefer visual with your eye or assisted seeing with a camera. There used to be a aura of DIY - find a camera, adapt it, take some photos, share them, have people say good job.

Now its really about memes, trolling and who can get the most Instagram's.. and that's kind of depressing.

The people doing citizen science are way outnumbered by the vocal ones comparing their debt, their investment and their preference of equipment as a superiority complex and social media feeds into that and supports it with the algo favoring the controversy and the fights

It was a bitter sweet day to sell off my remote observatory and get my nights back...

but the passion for the heavens is still there

however, that "eyepiece vs a camera" thing is very much part of the problem with the hobby... it just shouldn't matter.

I think this would be helped a lot if the maker community immersed itself more in industrial engineering.

Like you mentioned, its hard to go from "hah, I can make a cool thing" to "Let me make this super useful mechatronic contraption" but this is the bread and butter of industry.

You see production lines and they're just a long string of such contraptions working in unison.

Makers nowadays have amazing resources that were previously reserved only for industry so heck yeah, maybe go make a fish fillet machine or something just for kicks but also maybe a brand new small business

Huh? I don't follow. 3D Printing and robot are moving far faster than ever before. Sure, you aren't going from "no 3d printing" to "3d printing", but that's like complaining about food today because it isn't like when you were a kid and got McDonalds once a month and how awesome that was!

Part of it has, but then there are those guys working on 3d printing houses.

It's definitely an age thing. Don't get me wrong, I know OP feeling all too well. But, it's like complaining about how the music I grew with was the best music. It's more likely the curiosity in you die, rather than the world running out of stuff to be curious about.

I don't think so.

There are waves throughout history where, at times, it's the Wild West and the opportunities and possibilities abound. One such time was when the Internet had become a global backbone, hardware prices were racing to the bottom, we were seeing new display (LCD) technology, battery tech....

But then Corporations happened.

Ads moved in to dominate the web, dollar-chasing sites (also often corporate) drowned everything else out. Search engines too started directing you there — toward the mainstream, dollared sites. As other posters have noted, the devices themselves locked down. Hobbyists go pro?

It's difficult to imagine something like the BBS culture taking off now. But I do believe these things are cyclical, so I am still going along for the ride, hoping to find the fun niches (Raspberry Pi perhaps?).

BBS' -> tildes, Gopher rebirth and Gemini.

Part of it is also just the field maturing. For a solid generation or two car tinkering was accessible and widespread. American culture still has a lot of influence from this but as cars matured and became more powerful and reliable, the need to do it and the threshold to get anything out of it changed. I think the latest new "niche" in that domain is the import tuning scene, decades old at this point.

Some tinkerers do it because they just enjoy the tinkering but for most I think it's a combination of enjoying it some while also getting some tangible benefits out of it. When any device you could easily DIY is available off the shelf, the cost-benefit changes. You have hard DIY left, but not easy tinkering for moderate gains.

I don't think it's an age thing, there were plenty of old people dreaming along with us.

Are you sure? I'd like to hear the take of someone in their early twenties on this. My feeling is that a lot of them are terrified by it themselves too.

Terrified of it? If it is terrifying, it is hardly boring, it would seem!

I'm 22. I feel like there hasn't been any major technologcal shift since ~2014. Phones have gotten faster and more capable, but are still mostly the same. Social media has gotten bigger, but hasn't innovated in a meaningful way. "AI" has gotten better which is fascinating, but in the end it will most likely just be used for manipulation, surveillance and manipulation. I can't really think of any technology to look forward to, that would improve my life or change the world (in a positive sense).

Autonomous cars, AI/ML, and fusion are three things that will significantly change our world in the next decade or so. There will absolutely be downsides, but that's how tech works! And this doesn't even get into biological spheres of tech!

Also, remember, people in 2005 had same thoughts as you're having right now! Throughout my entire life, people have been saying that tech and science is basically done. They've always been wrong, and I don't see an end in sight.

It's the nature of exponentials. They seem slow and then suddenly the world changes. Only a handful of people actually can see that it is going to happen. We're just linear creatures with no intuition for exponential growth.

Imagine sitting in a dark room and someone about to turn on a switch - up until the switch is flicked, it doesn't seem like anything is going to happen, and then suddenly you are reeling at the brightness. That's how tech innovation happens now. I bet in a decade you'll be looking back saying, holy shit, I did not see that coming about something! "Remember when we used to drive gas vehicles?" or "Remember when we thought fusion was impossible?" or "Remember when nobody owned a robot?" Who knows what it is, but there will be something!

In 2014, almost nobody thought about having an app on their phone to summon a car to take them somewhere. Now it is everywhere (and struggling!). In 2014, speech recognition was awful. Now we have an automated robot lady that will answer spam calls for you!

Autonomous cars and fusion are very different creatures than the growth of the internet or computers in general. The latter was widely distributed and had low hanging fruit that just about everyone in society could pluck and have fun with, the former is something a handful of companies and a few hundred researchers will get to develop while the rest of us will have to have our creativity satisfied with the fulfilling act of paying for it. (Even ML to an extent, since it's so data and compute expensive - generally far from a low hanging fruit -, though less so.)

The internet took decades to evolve and was heavily funded early on by government. It only became low hanging fruit once it achieved a high level of maturity -- largely until the WWW had a graphical browser.

Private space travel is exploding. In 2016 Spacex had captured 30% of the launch market. They've doubled that figure since. The space shuttle cost $50K per kilo of payload. The Falcon 9 brought that down to $3k. They're hoping starship can bring that down to $10! Imagine buying a burger for $5 and sending it to space for another $5. This is already bearing fruit of cheap, global satellite internet access.

99% of smartphone innovation over the past decade has gone into the camera so "influencers" can post better pictures.

mRNA vaccines for novel disease being developed in days doesn’t do it for you?

I'm 24, I still feel that tech is very 'cool' and exciting. Yes, there's a lot of stuff that sucks, social media is probably doing more harm than good and the direction that AI research is going in with increasingly larger models that can't reasonably be replicated.

But on the other hand, space accessibility is quickly opening up, it's very likely that I would be able to take a trip to space in my lifetime too, maybe even Mars. VR has opened up an amazing new frontier for hanging out with friends on the other side of the world. Medicine is opening up all sorts of scifi technologies, gene therapy with CRISPR, massive strides in protein structure prediction, mRNA vaccines. Synchrotrons and particle accelerators are starting to improve all sorts of observations. Fusion energy is making progress, quantum computing is just getting started. We even took a detailed image of a black hole millions of light years away just a few years ago!

Yes, specifically computer related improvements are starting to slow down a little, but with costs only getting lower, there's so much room to bring computers into, so many things that can be automated! AI research has generally stuck to certain niches (basic medicine, basic physics, vision), there's so much that can have breakthroughs at the level of the protein folding model.

I think with diverse enough interests, it's hard to say that things are slowing down, they're only getting faster as computers, software and AI mature and dramatically increase efficiency in other fields.

I agree that it's partly an age thing, but I also agree that the times have been more exciting in the past technology-wise.

I grew up as a eighties tech geek kid. I learned BASIC on a SHARP programmable calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403), then moved on to an Atari 800, then to an Amiga, and finally to a PC. Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. Well, that didn't quite turn out the way 20 year old me imagined unfortunately. Of course, technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago". SpaceX rockets look practically indistinguishable from rockets that flew 50-70 years ago. Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). Same with self-driving cars and other potentially exciting stuff.

> Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays.

As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on.

> Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together.

There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.

> Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle").

The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.

All sorts of cool things that we’re now getting back to with Starship 40 years later… sounds like the very definition of a dead end to me! No one took Shuttle and iterated on it. It had a bunch of impractical ideas combined for primarily political reasons that resulted in actual shuttle flights being incredibly dangerous.

It delivered lots of pork, but at the cost of actual progress.

> As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factors. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on.

He talks about functionality. Not power. Yes, computers are more powerful now. But the point is that old computers were way more flexible and "powerful" in an usability sense. New computers are full of arbitrary (and natural (1)) barriers to stop you from having full control of your pocket CPU.

(1) The natural additional barrier is also complexity. Early computers were simple. Some hobbyist could write a system from scratch just by having some knowledge about computers and electronics. Now you have a lot more factors, an OS, a plethora of drivers and a browser that's closer to a VM than a HTML parser.

> There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.

You are right. But that kind of connection is disappointing to our 20 year old geek self. We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.

> We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.

Arguably, we got both. Even basic computer literacy is a huge value added right now. Journalists are telling coal miners to "learn to code" if they want a job, and being told to "learn to code" in return. Tim Apple is expressly saying that every kid should learn to code. This is astounding from a 1980s and 1990s perspective.

> technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago"

In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automated which wasn't feasible for a hobbyist before.

TL;DR The modern equivalent of a programmable calculator is an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi not a smartphone.

What microcontroller are you thinking of?

Quite a few of the following options would give a 386SX from 1992 a run for its money in terms of raw computing power:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon...

To compete with a high end 486 desktop from 1992 you might have to pay a bit more than $1, particularly if you want floating point.

Not to mention the lack of memory on microcontrollers.

ESP8266/32 is slightly over a $1 but still within the spirit of “more like $1 micro”.

Confining more strictly to $1.00, STM32F030F4P6 (48MHz 32-bit M0) is in spitting distance to a 386 or 20MHz 68030 for some workloads. (50 MHz 486-DX2 was introduced in ‘92, but the typical desktop PC of 1992 was much lower spec.)

It was indeed the ESP8266/ESP32 I had in mind. The ESP8266 is slightly over $1, but not much! (e.g. available here for $1.17 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32651747570.html)

MSP430 g series are under a dollar depending on what package you get. The DIP package is a little more expensive than the Smaller TSSOP but they are incredibly powerful.

A typical desktop PC from 30 years ago had at least 2MiB RAM. There's no cheap microcontroller with this.

I guess not, but you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero with 512MiB for £10. That's not $1, but it's definitely still "within relatively easy financial reach of a kid" territory

Are you crazy? I'm from '79, so probably a bit younger than you.

We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed.

My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especially all the robotics and drone stuff. Plus, the amount of info on the internet is amazing and quickly accessible anywhere.

I agree that the old days were a lot of fun, but if I had to choose, I would want to be 13 nowadays instead of the 80s or 90s.

Well yes, but flying drones are not exciting when everybody can build/buy one.

What's interesting is not having a drone, but what you do with them. It's like saying photography is not exciting when everyone has a camera.

It kind of isn't. though.

That's so subjective. My photography is interesting to me, and draws admiration and interest from almost everyone I share it with, even though they themselves have phones with cameras.

You shouldn't derive whether or not something is exciting to yourself by its exclusivity. I can't even begin to state how wrong that feels.

So you're not interested in tech but in tech no one else has.

The novelty factor IS important. Back in the 90s/00s techies were relatively rare. Being tech-oriented, generally smart but also socially awkward and introverted is an interesting mix - you derive identity and pride from the things that make you special.

Was this the reason I loved tech? No, that's the reason I DID tech. The reason I loved tech is because I believed that tech will make our lives exponentially better. And up to a certain point, it did...

Then you were not really interested in Tech. Just in being in some pseudo exclusive club. I definitely think building your own drone is very exciting.

Ask the military planners of the world how exciting drones are. That one little device being dismissed so casually has changed warfare, for all time.

Those people were probably just as excited when NSO's Pegasus became commercially available. For the rest of us, that wouldn't be the case.

what a ridiculous statement. it also shows why the whole premise for this post is so misguided.

Drones have so many applications! I know a guy who builds drones to map out farmer lands. So many applications, so little time.

Just want to chime in and say there's nothing wrong with finding excitement in doing something unique. That drive inside of you has taken people very far I'd imagine, with the obvious tradeoffs.

Don't give up on tech and keep an open mind. It's true that flying drones are not exciting to you, but flying a drone could be a first step in finding something more interesting to do with drones.

Boredom is functional. It can be a guide towards more interesting things so as long as you don't let it run the show. Tolerate it and follow (intelligently) where it takes you, don't avoid it.

I don't know how helpful this will be to you, but it bothered me to see people dismiss your interest because you value doing something unique. Those same judgements held me back for years.

> We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone.

I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago, there just hadn't been that wave of marketing around microcontrollers as a hobby that happened around the time of Make magazine. $2 for a PIC and $45 for a programmer, maybe? Waiting excitedly for the next issue of Nuts & Volts? Idly flipping through the Jameco and Small Parts catalogs? Toolboxes filled with TTL?

The internet is certainly an advantage, but it also ain't too new.

edit: randomly posting the Small Parts catalog so we can reflect on and celebrate what was lost https://web.archive.org/web/20160323004150/http://www.smallp...

NO MINIMUM ORDER

Also, a shout out to American Science & Surplus, off to the suburbs after 84 years.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/10/13/american-science-sur...

No? Not even remotely. Even besides buying the parts (which were more expensive and, literally, exponentially less capable), the knowhow and training needed wasn't something you could find on the Internet. Drones didn't exist then, that was a fantasy in 2002. The Internet of 2002 was far, far different from what we have now.

True, the choices were more limited, but there is still a trend in that direction again. If you associate tech is with Apple devices for example, you are probably not one dabbling in tech, you are the passive passenger. Doesn't have to be the case, but there is a hype is more about consumer solutions instead of tech itself.

AS&S is, in a relatively literal sense, next door to me. Fun bunch of folks whenever I stop by.

But as a late 70s Gen Xer, I would never trade living through that transition period from pre-Internet to Internet. You can't pay to have had that experience or perspective, and what transpired through those years from BBSes to pre-Web to Web adoption, from technological and sociological standpoints, was _insane_.

Drones only became technically feasible on the shoulders of the mems development for cellphones, so, no. The Lego-if-I-cation of digital hardware is a relatively recent thing.

(Yeah, there was radio shack and Heathkit, but the barriers to entry are MUCH smaller today)

> The Lego-if-I-cation of digital hardware is a relatively recent thing.

That happened in the 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms

I was unclear, you’re not wrong, but I meant getting a $5 cpu and a $6 WiFi module and a $5 humidity sensor and a $2 power controller and a $10 lipo battery. The components are like Legos.

Those bricks used to be a discrete components, maybe an op-amp, or a 7400 series chip from TI with maybe two or four logic gates, and they were sold in individual units on peg-board racks at your local Radio Shack.

Sure, we didn't have "drones" in the 80s, since the battery tech and digital integration wasn't there yet to make it feasible. There were radio controlled cars with digital PCM signals, servos for steering, and heavy 6 or 7 cell NiCd battery packs. There were also radio controlled aircraft, but they were generally using an internal-combustion engine, unless they were gliders. These ranged from toy to rather extravagant hobby depending on the size and capability. My neighbor would fly his glider, which had a roughly 2-3 foot wingspan, for what seemed like hours on thermals on a slope behind our houses.

Edit to add: I don't remember the details, but I believe that he told us the radio control was the most expensive part and not much different from what people used in the fancier car kits. The rest was cheap and easily replaced, which was necessary to be light but also to be able to repair after inevitable crashes. Think of a vacuum-formed plastic skin filled with expanded foam, a bit like the structure of a surfboard but with much lower strength.

> I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago

As a kid I sometimes went to a RC airfield here close by. Those things were crazy expensive. And then we're not even talking about model helicopters yet. Those things were not on batteries but on gasoline. As a kid I dreamed of having one, but those were just too expensive to give as a toy to a kid. Nowadays? Buy a drone 'helicopter' for $20. It's really crazy if you compare this to the 90's.

Drones that self hover were not even remotely possible. Or at least not as far as I know, unless you know more than me. And drones with camera's? No way!

> The internet is certainly an advantage, but it also ain't too new.

I remember when as a kid I got stuck programming. No internet, no StackOverflow... Good luck! In a sense it was cool to find solutions yourself, but it definitely wasn't quick! :)

No, you definitely could not do it 20 years ago with hobbyist grade parts. The software basically did not exist and whatever tech there was was strictly hidden behind government arms control restrictions (ITAR) because of fears that the tech could be used in ballistic missiles.

I don’t know about your experience, but I grew up during the same time period. Tech was decidedly uncool, at least among my classmates. I don’t think tech became cool until the early 2000s when smartphones took off (specifically the combination of smarthphones and social media/communication). Now these things are so common place that I think they have ceased to be cool. It’s like considering a rotary or push button phone to be cool in the 1980s.

I agree with this. I’m a somewhere between generation X and millennial, and for some reason tech was uncool in the eyes of my peers. Suddenly many of them are talking about decentralized this, UX that, and the whole space is slowly losing it’s “coolness” to me.

I’ll admit I enjoyed the exclusivity that my interests evolved into, but I definitely wish I had more people around me to share my interest in technology when I was younger.

In a way I think I grew into this expectation of exclusivity, as that was the only way my adolescent self could tell myself it was a cool hobby.

Age might play a factor in this equation, as others are saying. I say this because I have found enjoyment in simplicity more than complexity these days, and I’m told that’s something that happens with age. Writing a website that runs purely on html+ css, text based communication (as in not slack or discord), and things that I can work on for a few days and complete. I’ve taken a recent interest in sailing. My former self wanted to take on massive undertakings of complexity that required months or years of planning and doing to accomplish. To go on a bit of a tangent, I remember having an idea years ago to find a way to build a computer into a boat which would take real-time measurements of the water and weather conditions. These days I’m interested in reading my surroundings to understand the environment.

I might be wrong but it sounds like what excited you was seeing the progress of the tools, not necessarily what YOU can do with the tools. If that's the case then yeah, it's probably getting harder to put your hands on tools that are orders of magnitude greater than what you just had. I'm learning guitar, all the tools I can get are all very exciting because I haven't seen them before, and I could acquire them a lot faster than I can improve my abilities. But if I don't put in the time to advance myself along with the tools they will quickly become "boring", but only because I'm not able to use them effectively.

Tech was nerdy in the 1990s.

By the 2010's there is a totally different culture. Call it 'All Birds' culture.

1990's there were a lot of weird folks, hippies etc.

2010's 'All Birds' is more commercial, fashionable, a totally different kind of culture.

1990's tech was about tech, it's upstack now, so more like tech applied to classical business problems.

AirBnB isn't really a tech company, it happens to be because other, more established companies were not able to integrate tech quickly enough to develop those kinds of markets, where you want to have strong tech / IT instead of relegating them to the back office.

Even Facebook, it's a social media company really. Which is different than Oracle, Sun, Microsoft.

There are more "nerdy", non-boring tech people, but you are correct, you won't find them at AirBnB, Facebook, or Amazon. So don't go there if you want to find it. There's a place in my town that uses drones to inspect Air Turbines - I can guarantee there are more interesting people there. Go into small, crazy businesses that exist to do cool tech. "Cool" people, in my experience, are pretty dull, at least for the societal definition of cool. Find the nerds and geeks, they are still out there, but they still aren't the cool, in group. They are weird and thorny and sometimes smell a little. But they have really fun ideas!

My fear is that the 'All Birds Nerds' exclude 'Nerd Nerds'.

'nerd nerds' don't know what they are doing in terms of presentation or communication.

If 'nerd nerds' are 'hip' it's completely by accident.

I also think 'nerd nerds' just say whatever, meaning that occasionally they will say something un-PC, or lacking in empathy and be 'pushed out' for that reason.

There was a time (and some people are still like this) where utterances didn't imply an ideological alignment, it's just something that's said.

In 'All Birds Culture' everyone is careful how they communicate.

I'm sure there are some nerd nerds at AirBnB and frankly not everyone in All Birds Nerd culture is the prototype either but the 'mainstay' at AirBnB would be All Birds Nerds.

Someone who wears a 'Metal' T-shirt, completely un-ironically, because they like Metal, and wore it 5 times without washing it, because they forgot, and have disgusting greasy sideburns just 'because they like it' ... and an article of clothing made out of snakeskin ... that's probably a nerd nerd.

I suspect, with no evidence, that the distinction you are making here can be described as neurotypical nerds (what you call All Birds nerds) versus neurodivergent nerds (autistic, adhd, whatever you want to bucket them under)

Neurodivergent people tend to have a bit less of a social filter, they are more direct and honest, often to the point of bluntness (leading to the 'just say whatever' behavior you mentioned)

They also tend to be pretty unfiltered when it comes to their passions, and hyperfixate on them to the detriment of other areas of their life, like laundry.

And yes, these people are often excluded basically anywhere they go, and they have to mask their behaviours to appear more normal to get jobs. In that respect, the All Birds culture has absolutely pushed them aside, or pushed them under.

This is just my 2 cents, attempting to put some definitions around the All Birds and Nerd Nerds groups you described. I could be entirely mistaken.

I think you’ve done a good job of summarizing the landscape – it matches my experience.

The progression seems to be the decline of the nerd-nerd monoculture in the professional tech environment. With some irony, the increase in diversity is from the non-neurodiverse. Product managers, engineering managers, vertically integrated teams.

I believe on the most part this creates healthier productivity for the business – but likely at the social expense of the neurodiverse. Their technical skills can be more readily exploited by the hustlers.

I think part of the problem is that we haven't moved from the "nerd nerd monoculture" to more diverse cultures. What has happened instead is that we've adopted an MBA, Agile-driven monoculture instead. That culture is honestly pretty hostile to neurodiverse people by forcing them into marching orders and restricting their freedom to be themselves.

At least that's my experience.

Neurodiversity is probably aligned with that but I suspect a lot of people are just not self aware, never learned to communicate in a political environment.

A neurodiverse, even introverted kid who went to private school then Ivy League, and had 'a lot of money / no fears' growing up ... probably will have been socialized in the political sense.

Grow up in a small town or the burbs, people are 'judgy' about some stuff, but not anything complicated or nuanced.

I'm not in any camp, but really not until I was 30 did I notice how much stock people put into small signals. Like 'likes fishing' or 'football' etc..

Especially in such a competitive environment, people are I think looking for flaws.

Torvalds, James Gosling, Wozniack, Sergei Brin - those are nerd-nerds.

(I once saw Sergei Brin walking down the street in what looked like a back brace and mime outfit. Serious. WTF? Middle of the day.

Sundar is All Birds Nerd, but he's a business guy anyhow.

I feel a lot of YC culture errs on the side of All Birds Nerds.

> Torvalds, James Gosling, Wozniack, Sergei Brin - those are nerd-nerds.

Remember that college educations, especially highly skilled STEM ones, were very rare for their parents' generation (born in the 30s - 50s)

Torvalds - Father was a politician, grandfather a famous statistician

Wozniak - Father was an engineer for Lockheed

Brin - Father a math professor, mother a NASA researcher

Gosling was the only one in this bunch who really just came out of nowhere. I agree with what you're saying about Nerd Nerds and All Birds Nerds but the founders of Silicon Valley were always well-heeled. I think the culture changed for rank-and-file engineers mostly because of the money in the field. While founders would certainly make it big (Moore, Gates, etc) the average engineer was payed well but not fantastically.

One could feasibly work in other white-collar fields (law, accounting, airline pilot, etc) to make similar money and those who were interested in the largest pay packages and large amounts of prestige went into fields like finance or medicine. Folks who went into tech typically chose tech because they liked the problems that you could solve in tech or liked the people who chose to go into tech (often somewhat neurodiverse). Nowadays tech salaries are insane and most people who enter tech are doing it for money and prestige foremost. These folks are going to be the All Birds Nerds; smart folks who are more interested in making money and rising the ranks rather than playing around with tech.

For sure, there is boatloads of cool tech out there and the barrier to entry is lower than ever. Btw, I think an overlooked part of the OP was:

> Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur.

Doing anything as a job is an excellent way to kill your enjoyment of it as a hobby. Subconsciously, you start looking at projects in a business light ("can I turn this into a side gig", "will this advance my career", etc) and that kills off a lot of the excitement that comes with doing things just because you want to.

Oh for sure. I tell my nieces and nephews and now my son that the best way to kill something you love is to get a job doing it.

I personally disagree. I'm a software dev and software is still exciting to me.

What kills enjoyment it's not proffesionalism but efficiency. You stop exploring new things and start doing things the fastest and least effort consuming way. You stop wondering what new cool things a technology could offer and start thinking what's the shortest path to a functional product.

Being playful is the opposite of that. Being playful is about going out of your way to explore a new thing, setting your curiosity high and your expectations low, and coming back with a new experience. Let it be a spark of excitement or a total bummer because that new thing turned out being crap.

But don't expect that to happen in your job. Any company will always optimize for profits over cool tech. Even if you only have 1 hour a day to spend in a tech hobby, that hour will be more exciting then the previous 9.

Another problem is that, when you have a solid knowledge about the foundations, there's a tendency to disregard abstractions or quality of life advances. If for every new language you say "It's slow and heavy compared to C and its advantages are crap" well, you are killing your excitement yourself.

There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity, and is built to push ads/subscriptions/in-app-purchases.

But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or Win3.1 to Win9x - those were serious upgrades.

But going from a PS5 Pro to PS5, an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 13, 1080p to 4K, an i7 to a 5-generations-newer i7, or a GTX1080 to an RTX3080 - they're nice incremental steps, but not revolutionary leaps forwards.

> There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity

But that also creates an inherent opportunity for open, 'hackable' versions of the broken, locked down crap. You can see this in much of the embedded ecosystem, where much stuff is unusably locked down simply out of short-term laziness and convenience but many of the most popular products are open.

> But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more.

John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books.

I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something the masses didn't have access to when Windows 3.1 or the C64 landed.

Gone are the days of decades of behind the scenes R&D suddenly landing in our laps to amaze us. We now watch the R&D unfold in realtime.

self driving tractors have been around for years already. The guy operating usually just chills there listening to the radio and occasionally engages to help with precise turns or whatnot.

Yes, but the new sensor pack to remove the rider is a huge upgrade. Like going from flipping toggle switches to Windows 95 kind of an upgrade. The previous commenter was amazed by the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

But, again, it's boring because we watched the development of those sensors as it was happening. In the past the masses would have been unaware of the development going on. But nowadays we know what's coming and it seems old hat by the time it hits the market.

You are contradicting yourself. A self-driving tractor that requires an operator is not fully self-driving.

funny that you mention John Deere, the company who is/was facing farmer revolts because they removed the right to repair and locked down the ecus.

Get into VR and the game modding world there. My son is having tons of fun in that world, and it is progressing the same as original Playstation 1 era consoles and PCs, imo.

I personally found the improvements between the original iPhone and iPhone 6/6s or especially the X much (of course it took 10 years so I’m stretching it a bit..) much more impressive than the step up from an Symbian/Windows smartphone to the original one. It was basically a feature phone with a nice screen and great UX. Stuff like 3G and third party apps were a result of an incremental updates.

> Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago

I think a huge factor I haven't seen mentioned is continuous delivery. How often were new operating systems released? How often were new products announced? When you bought software, the devs would be hard at work working on the next version with the incentive to make it good enough that people would buy again.

Now software is continually released. "Major" updates are expected every year, and they're often free and people are expected to upgrade. Subscription models have rolled out, so while directly interacting with your customer probably leads to a better product, there's less incentive to re-invent the wheel - you don't need to upsell all your previous clients.

I would assume that all of this is leading to better products, but all of the baby steps make it all seem so lacklustre.

For example, compare the iPhone 13 Pro's camera to, say, the iPhone 8's camera. Had Apple waited 5 years to release the upgrade, the new camera would have blown. peoples. freaking. minds. However, since it's been getting slightly better each year, we instead have people complaining about how the only difference is a slightly better camera.

I am skeptical that, particularly in software, rolling releases are a net improvement. If users are locked into subscription services or monetized via data collection, version N+1 no longer needs to be better than version N for the company to keep making money. (In fact, it can be worse, if users are sufficiently locked in via network services or app/plugin ecosystems.)

I think you're right. A decade ago the hype behind the self-driving car made it sound pretty cool. The closer we get to having them, the more boring the idea seems. Each new model with improved driver assistance is just a small improvement over the previous model. When a true fully autonomous model lands, it too will just be a small improvement over the previous year's model, which will be almost fully autonomous. The day you can go down to the dealer's lot and buy a self-driving car for the first time will be a fairly uneventful day.

Like you say, in the days of yore the product cycles were long. It was many years between updates. The innovation that took place over that long period was significant, so it was much more wowing when all that behind the scenes work appeared in view.

>It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality - dreams usually don't. Or at least, not as you expect it.

Every generation is doomed to discover that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc

I disagree that it's just an age thing. At least Software is moving steadfastly to a dystopia. This wasn't yet apparent 15-20 years ago. Watching Software is just depressing where it's clear it casts quite a large shadow over Humanity.

Dystopia how? Social networks and their ilk are something that we are struggling with and has impacted society, definitely, but it isn't dystopian (not that it won't go that way). But "software" in general? I don't see any indicators - what do you mean by that statement? Have any examples?

I have a few examples. The loss of ownership over Software. The blatant privacy violations. Free Software + ads combination. The consolidation of vital pieces Software into a very small set(sometimes singleton) of companies. The loss of user agency in Software. Literal killer autonomous robots.

Part of what you describe is monopoly. That's not new. That's what capitalism tends toward.

The other parts you describe are all about connectedness. Or side effects of connectedness. Largely due to the Internet and partially to cell then smart phones. Those are new tech that humans haven't quite made peace with yet.

That happens with all tech changes, belive it or not. Over a century ago electrification was jarring. All sorts of magical devices [1] used electricity. And electricity was dangerous! [2] There was also the less obvious danger of con artists, who with sufficiently technological-seeming devices are indistinguishable from magicians (apologies to Clarke!). And the whole thing was such confusing upheaval to society that Rube Goldberg [3] helped people cope by laughing about it.

[1] https://www.announcingit.com/invitations-blog/what-came-firs...

[2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questio...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg

None of my points are about connectedness. Not sure which points you are talking about. Only thing you might link to connectedness is loss of privacy. But you can leave privacy perfectly intact with full connectedness.

I also disagree with your point that such thing happens with all tech. Electricity didn't take away the agency of humanity. Electricity doesn't go out and kill a person based on what electricity judges to be worthy. Such answers are a copout.

I had a thought the other day. Our house didn't have a fridge, so we had to buy one when we moved in. We plugged it in one day about 7 years ago and haven't touched it since. So here's a machine that has been keeping our foodstuffs cold with 100% uptime for 7 years, and we just don't even think about it.

I'm also old enough to remember when cell phones became a thing, and then when smart phones became the thing after that. The fact that the thing in my pocket could simultaneously emulate several copies of the computer I had as a kid, while running on a battery? And I can talk to people and access the internet from anywhere? This is amazing stuff, and again we just don't even think about it anymore. Like, I fiddled around programming with my TI-84 and TI-92, but that's nothing compared to the capabilities of this smartphone.

And, speaking of which, don't even get me started on the internet. The fact is that I don't even remember what it's like to not have a thing in my pocket that can answer pretty much any question I have, whenever and wherever I have it.

I'm still mad that we don't have flying cars ala "The Jetsons". But then again, I think "auto" accidents would become horrifically worse if we did, so there's that.

I watched news reports of the moon landing in 1969 as a kid. I played with tech throughout my youth ... converting a small, unused closet next to our garage as an electronics lab. I started with breadboarding (and occasionally, wirewrapping) 555 oscillators, and 741 op amps into weird circuits I'd read about.

About 50+ years later, I still build my own machines, albeit at the subsystem level versus the power supply and chip level. I am looking forward to working on automating image capture/processing for a telescope I bought last year.

I don't have a flying car (thank a deity), but I have an 8 inch telescope with automatic location and calibration. And a helluva lotta processing power, storage, and networking to do things with the images. I'm not saying I will run a 10/40 GbE optical fibre out to the deck where the telescope will sit ... but I'm not saying I won't. And yes, its nice to have 40GbE networking in my house (basement).

I've always viewed tech as a means to an end. I'm a scientist by training, a technologist and software person by choice. I've been an entrepreneur and many other things in my life. I see the tech as a way to do science more quickly, more accurately, and I really enjoy that it is an enabling function.

I got my start in HPC and supercomputing precisely because my simulations were taking too long on the workstations of the late 80s and early 90s. I stayed in HPC to build better/faster/stronger supers, and take advantage of the technological waves. Simulations that used to take a powerful (for the early 90s) supercomputer several hours, now take about a minute, on my laptop. Which has more processors, memory, and storage than the old super.

I think of technology as a wavefront that enables one to do more, better, and faster in its wake. Some people love the building of the tech, and designing new tech. Some like the applications. If you are bored with the building of tech, think of the applications that you could try, to help improve something real.

It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality

This is a tangent, but I've heard that children who grew up in the "space age" after Apollo thought we would be on Mars right now, or colonizing the solar system. It was their childhood dream.

Hence a lot of men (especially rich men) in that era are interested in flying planes and going to space. Bezos was born in 1964 and Musk was born in 1971.

On the other hand my first memory of the space program was literally the Challenger disaster ... that's when the myths started dying down, and when America stopped going to space very much. I never really had that dream, and it feels like many/most people my age and younger don't.

This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species.

Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.

Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.

The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.

> I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now.

This reminds me of a half-joking quote I think I saw on HN years ago about CS being mostly completed by the 80s.

you think it's boring* y'all oldies speak for yourself, the future is now, hell my friend is a vertual reality designer making 6 figures. Kids who grew up with modern tech are really only just starting to hit the market

> "It's an age thing - ... Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago."

1. How can one possible claim that tech is cooler now than is was in the 60s when we were racing into space, developing semiconductors and transistors? Or the 70's when we were rapidly developing integrated circuits, computers and languages? Or cooler than maybe the coolest tech-time ever, the 00s and 1910s when we were simultaneously perfecting bicycles, developing automobiles, powered flight, electrical power networks, and mostly in folks garages or barns?! "It's an age thing." 2. Tech is always cool. 3. Don't let anyone else tell you what is cool, including me.

For me it was when tech no longer served me and my interests. Anything tech does for me these days is usually just a means to get me to use it so that someone else can collect data, push ads, or control me. There's rarely a product or service that doesn't have some hidden cost or give someone else power over you.

Cars have internet, but track your location, can listen in on your conversations, and optional features or the engine itself can be remotely disabled. Phones are powerful computers in our pockets, but are mainly intended for media consumption and data collection. They are also heavily locked down and controlled. Updates are automatically pushed to our devices and software with no notification of what's been changed and no way to decline anti-features and user hostile changes.

I still have some hope for the future of tech, but we need to find a way to get tech to work for us again instead of also being used against us. So far things look like they're going to get much worse before they get better. More spying, more restrictions, more consolidation, fewer choices for consumers, less ownership, fewer customization options, less access and less accountability for companies when data gets leaked or people get hurt.

Agree. Luckily there are projects to FOSS the newer stuff. Like pinephone, framework laptop, and actually getting Linux to run on cell phones. To me, at least, that kicks up the old tech interest “feels.”

I have always wondered at the difference between how computers used to be all about computation and now most CPUs average like 1-3% utilization or something. If it’s pegged it’s often something nefarious, even.

Definitely feels like tech went from a cool way to do new things to a curated garden with hidden mics and surveillance.

Not totally on point but I still would like a computer display headset with a couple transparent screens built in. Seems totally do-able with modern tech but nobody’s doing it.

Edit and of course there’s all the bad faith to propagandist uses of tech discussion still ongoing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30997666

Edit-typo

Does anyone remember what it was like growing up in the 90's when people would pay $100/month for television that was 33% ads? Life was miserable before most of us had Internet access. I think there's simply no comparison. Also does anyone remember what it was like back then trying to sell software? I remember back in 2003 whenever I wrote a piece of software, for every guy who paid me $20 via paypal for it, there'd be ten guys on cracker forums geeking out trying to unravel my protection schemes like a puzzle to be solved. I'm honestly shocked tech has an economy at all considering our industry gives everything away for free. Think about how much leverage industries like health care hold over people's lives, cause bankruptcies, and then compare that to tech products collecting usage analytics. Once again, there's simply on comparison. The tech industry is absolutely the most benevolent force for good these last few decades. And for what it's worth, there's always FOSS which is not only free but maximally respects your privacy even more. Support the people building it. These are all choices we simply didn't have in the past.

> The tech industry is absolutely the most benevolent force for good these last few decades

I'm not sure I agree with that. You might be right, but it is definitely souring as companies get better at turning out daily lives into a consumerist panopticon.

It feels like every single piece of tech I might want to buy and bring into my house nowadays wants to spy on me. Or rather is spying on me.

A basic tv that I only ever use to play games on, wants to show me advertising. It wants to spy on the games I play and the shows I stream and show me ads. How sick is that? That's certainly not a benevolent good, by any measure.

Maybe we're at a crossroads where we could choose to be better, or choose to make more money. I think we passed the crossroad a while back and we're at least partway down the ugly path of tech. Maybe it's not too late to turn back.

> The tech industry is absolutely the most benevolent force for good these last few decades.

It's hard to agree with that statement knowing that Facebook allowed genocidal rage to fester on its platform, ultimately facilitating the Rohingya genocide[0].

The tech industry may be the most force for good in your life today, but when you take a step back to read about hardware manufacturing in China, state/privately-sponsored social media psyops, the industry's pushback against pro-consumer policy like right-to-repair, etc., etc., it's really hard to take a statement like that seriously.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

While I would love to work for Meta due to engineering challenges & caliber of their engineers but sometimes I wonder if I would be able to sleep at night.

Makes me wonder if those engineers who worked for Nazis through IBM felt any remorse later, or if they were able to compartmentalize their work from their personal lives.

convenience is not all there is to satisfaction....I feel that you are comparing convenience vs satisfaction.

people are not satisfied. they are convenienced.

I remember when cable first came out and had no ads at all. That was its major selling point besides clear reception without rooftop aerials and rabbit ears. Then ads came showing you what you was going to air later on the same channel, then ads came showing you what would air on other channels, then finally came the ads for cars and laundry powder. Cable TV started out as a great deal, but it became another tech disappointment with animated station logos, spying on what you were watching, and pop-up ads covering 25% of the screen during shows.

> Think about how much leverage industries like health care hold over people's lives, cause bankruptcies, and then compare that to tech products collecting usage analytics.

Well... healthcare bankrupting sick people is a uniquely American failure, tech being used to spy on everyone allows for far more control over people's lives. Look at china and their "social credit system". America already has it's own version of the same only instead of tracking how good a citizen you are it tracks how good a consumer you are. In china your social credit score could get you banned from trains and planes. In the US your Your consumer credit score determines how companies treat you, what they'll tell you their policies are, what services you get offered and how much you pay for things.

The effects of surveillance capitalism on our everyday lives is expanding all the time, but you're not allowed to know about it. You just see the bill from your insurance company, you don't know that you're paying more this year because people in your zip code spent more money at fast food restaurants. You just see the rejection letter from a job you applied to, you don't get to know that the company reviewed your social media accounts and recent spending habits and thought you spent too much money on alcohol. You just get to wait on hold while calling for service, but you aren't allowed to see that you've been moved to the bottom of the queue because they've used your cell phone number to see that you make less money in a year than the other people calling in.

Benevolence is not a feature of tech, it's a feature of people and so far they've mostly decided they want to use tech to control you. FOSS is the best hope we have right now, but it's still running on locked down hardware and processors that are controlled by a very small number of companies which have been backdoored and used to collect data on us as well.

> growing up in the 90's when people would pay $100/month for television that was 33% ads?

At the same time, thanks to these ads, I remember spending a lot less time in front of screens compared to current kids/teens.

Yeah this is the big thing for me. Technology continues to excite me as the tools to create continue to become better and more accessible, both in software (for music/photography/CAD/etc) as well as in hardware (3D printers/CNC/microcontrollers/SBCs). It's easier than ever to get started making things, and we're seeing a really inspiring explosion of creativity as a result.

The tech industry on the other hand, is increasingly a source of disillusionment. Over the last few years we've seen so many of the exciting companies that emerged in the early 2000s drop the facade of user-centricity and switch from providing value to extracting value at the expense of users. It's gotten to the point where I feel deeply uncomfortable depending on closed source software (and SaaS in general) for anything important, as it feels like it's only a matter of time until the users get screwed over.

There's a good Douglas Adams quote that explains this;

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

I like pithy quotes like this, but I can’t help feeling we over rely on them/take stuff like this too seriously.

There is no rule that everything has to get boring after 35. If you think like that it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

I can’t help feeling we over rely on them/take stuff like this too seriously.

Douglas Adams wrote comedy books so I think we're safe.

But the quote is being used as an explanation and not as a joke.

It's an observation of human behavior, not a rule, and noticing it makes it easier for us to do something about it.

I think this is it. While things have changed in the last couple of decades (how could they not?) - it's still largely a matter of perception. Personally, I'm still excited about tech, even if I'm probably in the same age range as OP. Is there a lot of work on "boring" things? Probably, but what may seem "boring" to you can still be really amazing to somebody else. Not to mention all the ongoing work that I think almost nobody finds boring in areas like AI and robotics. And everywhere, really, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in tech. At least to me.

I dunno I'm only just 30 and I am way less excited by tech than I was 10 years ago. Less and less of it is stuff that caters to me... For example I got one of the second generation kindles and it was fantastic, and after that finally died I got a Kindle Voyage because it had the page press pseudo buttons. I'd have preferred actual buttons but better than nothing.

Now I am terrified about what happens when that Kindle Voyage dies the only option I have for one that has page turn buttons now is the Oasis which only has them on one side, which doesn't sound too bad, but because I'm left handed I am more capable of using both hands for stuff than most people so when reading with a kindle I pass it between hands all the time. Sure I could do that with an Oasis, but I'd have to rotate it 180 degrees and wait for the orientation to change instead of just passing it across.

I know this is an incredibly nit picky complaint, but it's an example of a category of tech gadget I feel let down by.

Phones are similar, Samsung's new flagships don't have SD card slots or audio jacks AFAIK, meaning they are following a trend away from the things that made me go with them in the first place.

I can't remember the last time I saw new bit of tech or device and thought "wow I want one" really and it makes me really fucking sad. I have a good job now, I can actually afford enthusiast level tech... but now I don't want any of it really and whenever I buy anything I feel like I'm choosing the least bad option instead of buying something exciting

> Phones are similar, Samsung's new flagships don't have SD card slots or audio jacks AFAIK, meaning they are following a trend away from the things that made me go with them in the first place.

If I had to get a new phone today I'd be looking at this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Xperia_PRO-I

It has SD card support and a headphone jack. I've got a Samsung device now, but they aren't very trustworthy. My first Samsung phone shipped with a keyboard that was logging what I typed and sending that data to a 3rd party whose privacy policy said it was used for things like market research and to make guesses about my cogitative abilities. My second one was filled with so much spammy garbage (like pre-installed facebook) I had to spend a long time disabling stuff using ADB commands before I was comfortable using it at all. At this point I'm not even mad that Samsung is moving away from features I depend on; I'm ready to move away from Samsung. I can't promise Sony is any better, but I'm willing to follow the features I need to give them a shot at disappointing me.

And the updates keep reinstalling things like facebook. It's awful. One of the updates actually uninstalled the facebook messenger app for some reason, no idea why it did that.

EDIT: sorry I forgot to say thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out

This absolutely describes me. Except coincidentally, the things invented after I turned 35, like NFTs, actually are stupid and against the natural order of things.

In my impression it really accelerated after the '08 financial crisis (+- a few years for all the people who left wall street and went to HBS) after being an ibanker was no longer cool or well paid and the people who would have gone there decided to come to Silicon Valley. That's a huge mass of people who are grinders who just want to make money and quick and have a totally different mindset than the people who wanted to build cool shit that solved their own and others problems. In my mind these are the people who did GSB/HBS, Google PM, failed at a startup that raised a bunch of money from their friends and network, and then became a VC. Not that these folks were all bad, they probably did help professionalize the tech industry and focus it on solving big problems (unfortunately imo that was overindexed on potential returns rather than potential positive impact) and brought huge amounts of capital to bear on the industry. But yeah, I left SF after the millionth pitch I heard of people who were going to build a world changing product and it ended up being on-demand laundry service or 10 minute grocery pickup while being in a city surrounded by homeless tent camps and people in such mental anguish that they would be screaming in the streets in broad daylight.

Slightly off-topic (but related to your comment) - do you know of any company or organization that's truly for public welfare? Or, any VC that cares more about society than a super-high rate of return where such a society-focused company can be launched/funded?

I think lots of nonprofits have public welfare in their mission but I think by organization you mean for profit entities? In that case my answer is the same as to the one for VCs in that there are lots that care about society and specific sectors and have that as a thesis with returns being equal (or perhaps secondary for a select few); climate tech startups and investors for instance or companies making alternative proteins (although maybe that's "animal society" not human that they care about)

Mackenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), although her approach is about as far removed from traditional VC as one could imagine.

MITRE maybe? They're a US government-supported non-profit R&D company.

Kind of but they're really a government agency in essence, no? I mean that's like calling In-Q-Tel a nonproft, really it's just the CIA's venture arm in a nonprofit shell for legal/management reasons

Wikipedia, EFF, Gnu

What are GSB and HBS here?

I think it means Standford Graduate School of Business, and Harvard Business School.

Sorry, yes, QuantumYeti is correct; specifically talking about MBA programs at Harvard and Stanford

Economies of scale ruined it.

Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did, back in the day. Your 'kind of useful but fun/dirty' hacker project either becomes ad-infested to survive or is too-useful and gets copied by a big-company. If your problem is cool enough and you can solve it, investors will throw millions at you in hopes of making a global success. Hard to say no to that.

There is no moderate success anymore. Economies of scale end up being all-or-nothing style situation. Just as local mom-n-pops places have gotten replaced by much cheaper national chains and building your own house is now a thing of the past because the costs for getting past regulation only make sense at scale.

We still get indy games year over year that take the industry by storm.

factorio, stardew valley, undertale, don’t starve, super hot, goat simulator, cup head, rocket league, kerbal space program and so many others.

heck steam, Sony and Microsoft are competing to distribute this IP and open it up across platforms and it’s never been better.

Your point kind of proves the point of the GP: there is almost no middle ground. The differences between rates of success are orders of magnitude. Order N doesn't break even, N+1 almost makes you a millionaire and could effectively set you for life.

Some of the examples you give also had quite a history of a backing in some form, which is a totally different animal compared to a "I wanna make a game!" indie developer today with zero network and zero funding.

There are a ton more games out there, i just know what i know and what i've played. I'm an old fart that remembers shareware and buying floppy disks with trials and getting on BBS's to download more... the entire experience of gaming has never been better. I have GamePass today and can play many of those titles on PC/Xbox and the developers seem to be doing well.

All of those games you've mentioned are at least 5 years old now, many coming up to a decade old if you count their early access.

There was a golden age of indie gaming 5-10 years ago, but it does feel like that has passed somewhat.

Golden age was more around the time of Thomas Was Alone, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac etc. There was a low barrier to entry, but also a low saturation. One good piece of polish or gimmick was enough to hook people. This was also around the time many of the titles mentioned by GP got initial backing and before people got extremely skeptical of crowdfunding games.

Since then the market has gotten way more saturated. Games have gotten way higher demands on all three fronts of polish (gameplay, audio, visual). If not a roguelike / player-generated content game / simple loop, lack of content is even more killer (which is why so many indies are either arcade, sims or roguelikes, compared to AAA games). Even several of the titles mentioned in the comments would rather come out with sequels building upon their success or games highly similar to what they made before, than experiment. Most indies I checked who deviated too far from their big hit (devs from Castle Crashers, Deathroad to Canada, Binding of Isaac) had nowhere near the same level of success. Not too bad considering they can coast by just off of their main hit's success, but it does illustrate the lack of moderate success.

Or you can try make a big hit with a meme game (anime optional) and be forgotten in the next 2-5 years.

Games nowadays are often updated for a long time (e.g. Factorio), so the initial launch date is less relevant. I would argue that indie games are doing really well right now, and the AAA gaming companies' reputations are in the gutter.

EA, DICE, Take Two, Ubisoft, Bioware, Konami, even the once vaunted CDProjekt Red's reputations are in tatters (of course, they still sell tons of games). Gamers are tired of copy and paste money grabs, full of bugs on launch and overhyped to the moon.

The accessibility of game development tools to almost anyone globally, the pandemic, and the relative ease of digital distribution is a boon to indie game makers (Steam, Epic, Itch, GOG, Indiegala....).

Valheim, Among Us, Project Zomboid (launched 2013, becoming much more popular recently), Escape from Tarkov are all examples of indie games doing well. Check out /r/patientgamers and related subs and you'll see more examples.

>Gamers are tired of copy and paste money grabs, full of bugs on launch and overhyped to the moon.

If this was actually true, the companies you mentioned wouldn't be selling a ton of games and gambling gimmicks didn't need to get banned for companies to stop putting them in their games. In reality, successful companies are better off iterating on their existing games and systems a few times until the sales die down, then maybe release a few later for nostalgia and move on. It's much less effort, less risky, and it plays better into the expectations most people have.

This has been going on for well over a decade. It's not like people haven't had the chance to see the trends yet.

That's just all i could think of.. there are many more out right now

Great list. I would add Hades and Slay the Spire.

I would be reluctant to refer to a team of 20 developers working on 1 game for 3-ish years full-time as 'indie'.

That being said, supergiant is a rare gem. Shows how effective lean organizations with narrow concerns can be without needing to be abusive.

There's a distinction between something like gaming or a mom-'n-pop restaurant vs. business software or building your own house. The first category still exists much more than the second; I think the difference is whether taste is the dominant feature of the product.

Indie games aren't being regulated out of existence, and they don't need much scale to survive, compared to something like a five-and-dime shop; they're almost purely about taste.

Building your own house is partly about taste, but there are a ton of physical constraints and different specialized skills involved in making it work (plus the regulatory concerns), so generally taste takes a back-seat, and the beautiful houses are old ones that were grandfathered-in.

An independent restaurant is somewhere in between; you have to meet health department standards, and you have to make money in order to keep it open, but past a minimum bar of safety and comfort, your customers care mainly about the food and atmosphere and are willing to pay for it. If it were all about scale, McDonald's would be the only thing left.

> Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did

I just read "Masters of Doom", and this struck me as wrong. People tend to only remember Carmack and Romero, but Doom had a team about as big as Super Mario World, another AAA-gamechanger. So I looked it up.

15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.

The crediting of Super Meat Boy is more complex. If you exclude the guest artists who did one-off pieces, then the original Windows version comes in at 7 people. This balloons to 48 when you include the guest art, XBox port staff, and localization staff.

All numbers from MobyGames.

> 15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.

While Super Meat Boy was mainly made by (AFAIK) two people, the original DOOM was made by an id software that had just 10 employees - this is mentioned in the Doom 3 manual. But this also includes everyone on id, in an article about Quake some months ago Romero mentioned that "We got Doom done mostly with only five people, and then we got a sixth person during the last few months. With Quake, there were only nine of us, but by that time everyone on the team was awesome".

However it isn't just the number of people but also how long it took to make the game. Doom was made in less than a year (or about a year if you include the engine research that went into Shadowcaster) but Super Meat Boy was made in a bit less than two years (and that was with already having Meat Boy as a template).

Heck the original Meat Boy flash game was basically just two or three people. And that alone was enough to get everyone interested.

> mom-n-pops places have gotten replaced

This is demonstrably false in my metropolitan area, we even have a few which are supermarket sized. They're often ethnic. Read an essay somewhere a month or two ago about how the supply chain economics are different, can't find it now. Think Zillow vs a guy with a lawnmower in the back of his pickup truck.

Smartphones. Purely consumption devices changed the balance to be more producer/consumer than collaborator.

The world is on board now so rapid tech changes aren't possible to market.

There's still crazy/genius if you look for it, but hobbyist only in most cases. NixOS, Urbit, any DHT or CRDT system, VR, Graal, WASM, mesh nets like ygssadril.

I'd extend that to smartphones, a tracking-based ad industry, and digital media sales.

Digital media sales provided serious, multiply-Apple's-stock-price levels of new revenue into the tech industry. Same with adtech for Google.

The smartphone enabled them to physically target an entirely new population of users.

Then both companies eventually evolved towards the bulk of their revenue, as all companies do.

(The more recent X-for-Y trends were a consequence of money being cheap and startups taking advantage. That will take care of itself)

I would argue smartphones are one of the best all-in-one devices for creating...most people just don't use it that way.

The hardware is awesome, it's the social stuff around them that make them useless.

When I setup a new iPhone, I do not think I am forced to expose myself to any social stuff other than SMS/MMS/Phone calls. And I think those can be disabled too, or at least the notifications.

Is it their fault? The software tries every trick in the book (and some new ones) to steal your attention.

I disagree about the creation utility from a quality perspective, lack of ergonomics while filming, bad mics, etc. But there's no question the availability of the device is astonishing.

The old addage: "the best camera is the one you have with you".

I actually bought cheap modern camcoder and it's obvious that it's descendant of old line of purpose made devices. It does one job but does it very well.

I'm genuinely intrigued, because I seethe with rage just trying to use the keyboard and guestures on smartphones and I can't really imagine trying to actually code or write or sketch on it.

With zero video editing experience, I recently shot and edited a 7 minute video of myself playing guitar, entirely on my iPhone. I was pretty surprised how well it worked. Yeah there were some UI warts (editing text, like you say...), and I wouldn't want to work that way for any serious work, but it really did lower the barrier for a complete noob in a way that finding/buying some PC video editing suite couldn't.

You say you wouldn't want to use this simplified phone-based video editing tools for serious work, but there is an entire industry's worth of livelihoods being made on TikTok and Instagram using these very editing tools. Not saying this to knock down your point or anything, just highlighting the fact that these tools have actually become good enough (sure, no one is editing feature-length Hollywood movies using them) to be qualified as "serious work".

yeah, consumption devices that turned tech into boutique sure put a dent in my care for where it’s going. Some of it has led to improvements no doubt but much of it is just obsession and consumerism i would be happier without.

> Purely consumption devices

I don't understand how this sentiment is still so common on HN. It's plainly false.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the vast majority of computer-aided personal creative work happens, in whole or part, on a smartphone—it's just that most of it's audio-visual and largely for personal wants and needs, so HN doesn't think that counts, I guess?

I only have a smartphone for those things. Do I browse HN and other crap on it? Yeah, of course. Would I buy it if it the only things it could do, aside from calls and texts, was watch Internet videos and browse the web? Hell. No. The GPS, the camera, the mic & speakers (it's my tuner when I play music!), and so on, are what sell it to me. I am 100% sure I'm far from unique in this. It also remote-controls my thermostats, acts as my document scanner completely replacing other forms of scanner for me, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting about right now. It's my still and video camera, for all purposes.

"But using the GPS, tuner, et c. is still kinda consumption!" BS. Tools aren't about "consumption". Not the way people seem to mean it when they sneer at smartphones (and usually tablets, too).

Its always been, you're just realizing it as part of maturing and understanding the world. Technology cannot solve people problems the same way that some silly agile ticketing software isn't going to fix some broken company culture.

There were many silly startups in the late 90's/early 00's. Even the commonly sought after employers of FAANG aren't doing revolutionary things, their cash cows: advertising (F), giant ecommerce store (Amzn), makes phones/tablets/laptops & sells digital stuff (Apple), streaming video (Netflix), advertising (Google). Any cool tech coming out of those companies is mostly driven by them scaling the above named revenue pipelines to the Nth degree.

One could have solid arguments that many things tech has done have made things worse. Is tech/software eating the world driving a bigger divide between the 1% and poor people? You gotta admit tech contributes to that. If someone wanted to run a propaganda campaign about topic X, isn't social media the perfect platform to do it? You can reach millions upon millions of people with a few clicks of clever copy-writing to push an agenda. You can even target them directly.

The wealth divide is a different issue and has always been the regardless of “tech” - a new way to sew isn’t tech as we see it but innovation in looms cost many a seamstress their jobs - ditto with mine improvements, manufacturing improvements and so much more - but at the same time it has improved our lives no longer as we locked in a factory 80 hours a week..

To me, tech has been a great equalizer - and while it’s currently used for manipulation we do finally have to agree that everyone has internet, phone and computers at home when 5 to 10 years ago that wasn’t as true.. hell, we even get homeless people a phone because of how critical and pervasive they have become in society. That’s a good thing they can call for help, refill meds, check on social security, network with peers and friends and such.

You kind of made my point. Not as many people are "locked in a factory 80 hours a week" that is driven by technology (which includes hardware tech).

When a new car manufacturing plant opens and says they will create 250 jobs that is far less than it was 20-30 years ago when a new plant opened. Robotic manufacturing, software, etc. have driven that. Pick any industry and technology will have driven some jobs out of it.

It is absurd that we've somehow managed to create a system where manufacturing is too easy, doesn't employ enough people, and that's a looming crisis. If production per person increases, let's give everyone a couple days off.

yeah, that's what we should be doing...

People shouldn't do back breaking work that robots are better at and going back to treating humans like robots ins't a solution - working less is a viable option and the promise of tech. I'd happily work 20 hours a week to split my job between two people because the diversity pays off in spades and we'd all do better working less anyway

Manufacturing hasn't been automated as much as it's been outsourced to cheaper countries with less workers' rights and union membership. Automation has only really hit a select few industries like car manufacturing and warehouse picking, compared to the number of blue collar jobs that have disappeared.

Partly it's just growing up and having a tech job. You've got less time to play with tech, and learning itself becomes less interesting because you already know most of it.

When it comes to business, a lot of verticals have been monopolized and tech has shifted from making tools that users pay for to weapons of mass distraction where the objective is "growth and engagement".

When I was young, I was really into gadgets, especially Palm OS PDAs. I had the specs memorized on their entire lineup, I was on top of the latest news and rumors, I was plugged into the community forums.

I loved that scene because every new model meaningfully changed the way technology allowed me to interact with the world. Grayscale -> color, adding a camera, adding enough storage and pixels for media, etc.

Eventually smartphones became indistinguishable black rectangles, where a new year's hardware means nothing. Then smartphone software became so mundane that I don't really care whether I'm running the latest OS because I can't tell the difference.

Tech is maturing. We're no longer fumbling around, looking for new local maxima - we're getting closer and closer to the global maximum of what today's technology can accomplish. We're certainly not there yet, but the exploration phase is over until something new comes along to upend the game.

And technology has left enthusiasts behind. Normal folks don't want their smartphone to have an experimental hardware module with no clear use. They get excited that the latest social media app lets them play a better status game with their peers, or that a group scheduling app saves X minutes per week across their team.

I don't think there's a way out. Niche/fringe technologies can still be very exciting - the crypto crowd is having a blast, and PinePhone has some people excited. But if crypto doesn't catastrophically implode, it'll eventually mature enough that all the fun parts have already been solved and all that's left is boring, marginal improvements, where folks try to eek out another dollar.

Oh, this is a question I actually have asked myself before!

The definitive answer is July 10, 2008; App Store opens, and ushers in this new age of garbage software.

The app store wasn't immediately garbage, though. Apps on smart phones started off being inventive or at least interesting. It was when the gold rushers came in after seeing success that the system became increasingly filled with things designed not to help you the user, but to extract maximum profit from you as a customer.

I only disagree mildly; it's a matter of calling the 'start' of a sigmoid curve.

Already among the earliest apps on the app store, there was evidence of the bad incentives (eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich 2008 or https://ifartmobile.com/ifart-debuts-the-worlds-first-fartin... 2009).

Within a couple years of the App Store I remember all manner of Crazy Frog garbage had flooded tech.

I don't know, there's always been garbage software, it's just mass market now.

I also happen to think techies can get a bit snobbish about it all. Techies always just "know" to avoid garbage, but there must have always been a market for it. There's still a bunch of cool stuff you can get buried under free to play micro transactions/advert based games.

One of the things I like about the app store, and a reason I moved into mobile development, is that it's easier than ever to be a one man dev team again, good or bad

Absolutely. A lot changed with the advent of mobile devices, almost none of it for the better. Don't care if it's not in vogue to say it, lowering the barrier of entry to the Internet was a mistake. It was better when it was gatekept and companies weren't seeking to extract every possible dollar out of it.

I am with your position, the way IT has evolved simply appales me. What was once a creative field is now filled with layers upon layers of needless overcomplex garbage, commercialised beyond recognition and used to enslave the user instead of empower him.

I am just waiting for an opportunity to leave my current position to transfer into an non-tech sector as soon as possible... as for my personal use i have found my haven of sanity in the RiscOS community, there, things seemingly move in a very different direction (thanks to the stubborn brits!).

The appearance of "smartphones" and Facebook killed the cool for me. That, and hearing tech-illiterate morons extol web 2.0 with tireless aplomb. It was sometime in 2008.

feel like that time was closer to a golden age if anything

I remember feeling in the mid aughts like a bunch of marketing bros who didn't know shit about tech, were flooding into tech. They were what ruined it imo. They were incapable of having any passion for the engineering because they didn't understand it. They were just there to invent buzzwords and optimize monetization and all that junk and we got Web 2.0 and algorithmic feeds and it's all been downhill since.

Web3 is the new Web 2.0

Replying on my own comment - I just want to add that if one truly avoids smartphones and social media... if one sticks to things like IRC, basic email and snail mail... if one avoids laptops and sticks with large, immobile desktop computers... very little value is lost, and so much of the old magic is still right there at your fingertips!

The cool of the culture died with smartphones and social media for me, but my love for the magic of software and hardware has not waned.

There is a lot of cool tech stuff, just not at your work.

The stuff that I found very cool is found outside commercial space. I have few examples:

- Serenity OS project which builds whole operating system from the ground up

- some guy (I forgot his name) who hooked up his arm prothesis to modular synth and now he is literally able to play melodies using his mind

- completely free and open source Bespoke Synth DAW which appeared out of nowhere after 10 years of silent development

- youtube series about restoration of Centurion minicomputer

- you can change map projection on the fly with new version of Mapbox (see demo - https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections) (this one is actually commercial but very impressive)

Things have stabilized a bit. I think the the 00's were exceptional on many fronts; Mobile phones went from huge phones to tiny feature packed gadgets, many other cool gadgets came to popularity (mp3 players, wireless headphones, portable dvd players, bluetooth headsets etc etc), web 2 and startups in general became a thing, HTML/CSS/JS got decent and took over, computing in general took off like nothing else. On many fronts there was massive acceleration.

I think the slow down start 10's ish. But it's not as much a slow down as more stabilizing. Innovation is still very much happening and much more advanced, groundbreaking and useful than it was, but maybe not as "new and shiny" as for example a motorola razr or nokia ngage. I think contrast is what's missing, from 0 to 100 is much intenser than 100 to 200. You can kind of predict what's coming so even though revolutionary, not as surprising or exciting.

But I still find tech very cool. The gadgets I have now are absolutely mind blowing if you think about it and they are actually useful, I pay with my watch, I have a laptop without fans and with a battery that runs all day, I talk to my watch to turn on the lights, I also work from home for a company in a different country with people spread across the world, I could go on.

It's hard to put a date on it, but tech, and especially tech companies, stopped being "cool" not too long after 2010.

The problem is that the industry has matured. And not in a good way.

Tech used to be largely about discovery and invention and making computers work to make people's lives better. Over the last decade, there has been a very rapid shift to tech being about exploitation and monetization and all the bad things that come with human endeavor.

I don't blame tech people for this. There exists an underclass of people — vultures or grifters, for lack of a better description — who wander from hot thing to hot thing trying to make money as quickly and unscrupulously as possible. I think of them as a collective of shady real estate agents and shadier used car salesmen, who follow the trends from one industry to another in order to "get my share" and destroy that industry as a result.

In modern times, it happened to banking. It happened to real estate. It happened to tech. It's happening in crypto. It'll happen to VR soon. Probably space flight shortly after that.

Tech is not inherently bad. But it's been made bad by the number of people who are in it for the wrong reasons outnumbering the number of people who are in it for the right reasons.

Hard disagree, it's easier now to build cool stuff out. You can download Unity and get something nice going within a couple of months. But it's on you to find what you want to do here, if you're waiting for some form of guide to point you in the right direction, you'll be waiting for a while.

I'm in the process of combining my two hobbies, my love of music, and my love of game design. Here's a music visualizer I'm working on. https://youtu.be/2dv2cjJIh2s

Technology is now in the hands of most people. Most people couldn’t give a fuck about it, they don’t find it fun or interesting. They just want a well paid cushy job, so they keep coming up with “start ups” and new frameworks to generate GitHub stars so they can secure cushier job.

Doesn’t stop you from doing something new. Something hard. Something interesting.

The fact that people take GitHub stars so seriously is a perfect example of how tech lost it's way. What should be worthless Internet Points now is now a resume bargaining chip.

By this logic, a tiny self-bootstrapping metacircular Lisp evaluator is orders of magnitude less cool than Webpack.

The reality is: only one of those projects is beautiful, and actively expands the imagination.

It's right there in your first three words, it didn't change so much as you, "grew up".

It doesn't have to be technology, you could probably say the same thing about most things in your life, "I don't know what happened. I used to like hanging out with my friends, riding my bike, listening to music. But then things changed and now I've got a job, a mortgage to worry about and it's all about money and I never have enough time to do the things that I want to do".

But you have an internal contradiction. You're nostalgically looking back at a time when you optimistically said, "Wherever I looked at the world's problems, more technology seemed to be the answer" but then say that, "Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable.".

More technology is not the answer to most problems and most problems are boring.

I would say with introduction of social media and increase of mobile users. Censorship of Big Tech and most of the social media just leave me disapointed in humanity.

Also there are hardly any revolutionary/significant improvements in hardware, we still use crappy baterries as 10 years ago, they are just larger, I'm still waiting for graphene baterries.

There are no new useful/interesting devices since capacitive touchscreen smartphone, one could actually say we are going backwards with horrible devices like electric scooters/hoverboards and all these companies litering public space with their rental business which has nothing to do with sharing.

And don't get me started on military drones and military dogs, so we can be under even bigger control.

I think I should read again Unabombers manifesto after many years, it's more relevant than ever.

Most of these comments are hinting that it's an age issue. I disagree.

Yes, the upside of what's possible has moved higher. No doubt. But the entry level has moved higher as well. Going from knowing nothing to creating an application used to be much, much easier. And that meant a wider berth of people were trying to create software. People used to create web pages or a MySpace page. No one does that anymore.

You think it's age? Ok, so... where are the hot startups? Where are the revolutionary ideas? Where are the wild, crazy new platforms and programming languages? What are people buzzing about? Exactly. Nothing.

I've been on HN from almost its inception. And I've watched it go from a hotbed of exciting topics and startups and ideas -- to an obituary page, the maintenance documentation, of what once was.

Yes HN used to be where startups would be made dropbox is the perfect example. Its not like that any longer.

Technology looked like the answer because you (everyone does this) overestimated short term change and underestimated long term change.

I used to think that if only everyone had access to all the information, they would make better decisions. It turns out that given access to all the information, lots of people just want to do social things that reinforce their tribal membership. And some people make better decisions, some of the time.

In short, structural social problems are hard.

Douglas Adams said

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

There's a lot of truth in that.

Something I noticed in myself is that I'm weary of consuming content/software/gadgetry and find more of a spark in trying to create it myself these days. Maybe look into the maker movement, 3D printing (mentioned in a peer comment), or Arduino and similar entry-level hands-on stuff. Or at least have a browse through, say, hackaday.com and see if anything there floats your boat.

I think this is not an age thing. Tech really did become less cool and the dangers more apparent. For an example from my own life, VR is amazing and every bit as exciting as my first discovery of tech when I was a kid. AI is still making incredibly interesting steps forward. Much of the rest of the industry has calcified. That does not make the colossus of what we have built over the past 80 year less incredible, it's just old news and there is not much novelty to keep up on. Society as a whole has sensed this and has largely moved on from geek is chic.

The drought is going to to be over when a new fundamental shift in platform occurs which will kick off a new generation of startups, frameworks, applications, wonders and terrors.

Part of the problem is technology evolving from being a valuable tool to being hostile and abusive. For example, you mention Star Trek. One vision from Star Trek which had a big impact on people was the notion that you could talk to your computer and have it answer your questions and do your bidding. Now computers are powerful enough to implement that feature. But we discover that instead of owning a computer we can talk to, we only own a microphone which has a direct subspace link to the Ferengi homeworld, to a computer they own, they control, and which prioritizes their interests over ours.

I think it's because we still haven't figured out how to architect how economy and society properly. We better systems to promote good outcomes.

Technology has always been a means to an end -- I say that as someone which has always been fascinated by tech, due to my attraction to understanding, creativity and invention.

---

I am working with a friend on a system to better reward websites and technologies without requiring advertisements. Think a small payment going to every website you visit, every service you use automatically. You would get some control over how to distribute those payments. Maybe we could set up worldwide funds that reward software based on their contributions to society. You could have local institutions suggesting and supporting funding projects -- distributed, democratic, rational, fair, .

Jane Goodall has been saying all humanity needs to flourish is to get 'the head and the heart' to work in harmony -- which I think means to say we need a society where our work, and our tech, and everything is contributing to make the world awesome -- to promote sustainability, to make healthy happy lives, to make rich amazing existences.

We kind of have the tools at our disposal... this century is a very decisive one, where we show that we are capable of growing and achieving an amazing civilization (and not collapse due to environmental ruin, greed, conflict).

You may have a focus on tech that is too narrow. Especially if you are mostly interested in ad-supported social media driven by Silicon Valley VCs.

Tech is still cool. I'm not young, so I don't think that age is a factor.

Just this morning I while waiting for a call to start we were talking about the tech behind the Russian drone on the news today. I have always had a passing interest in 'Long Range Fixed Wing FPV), which is pretty amazing tech. That is something that is accessible to the modern equivalent of "Tom's Hardware lurker". Commercially, remote operations (including industrial) is cool.

The accessibility of microcontrollers is pretty cool. The languages are a bit old, but how easy it is to do stuff is interesting. Real Time Operating Systems are still cool to tinker with - especially if you pair it to accessible electronics.

Agritech is pretty cool. As consumers, we don't see it much, but what farmers can do with so few workers is astounding.

Energy grids sound boring, but are pretty cool. As we generate more renewable energy and have to match it with substaintial demand, such as EV delivery vehicles, is not a boring problem.

I have customers that do pretty cool stuff at the nanometre scale. X-ray crystallography, CCDs that can detect a single photon of light. I've seen systems that are build to cool to, and operate at millikelvin.

There is so much cool tech! Getting a scrollable feed on a smartphone is a bit _meh_. You need to broaden your definition of 'tech'.

Much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked already, and only more difficult problems remain. This will be true until another major scientific breakthrough creates a new domain of technology with new low-hanging fruit.

> Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles

I wouldn’t say this exactly, though advancements may have slowed due to less or no low-hanging fruit. The trend now is programming languages and frameworks that better control or eliminate effects (and with them attack surface, security vulnerabilities, and undefined behavior).

Rust is probably the poster child for this with its growing popularity and frameworks, though progenitors like Ada, Haskell and others in the ML and functional families count as well.

Then there’s the whole emerging field of quantum computing and quantum computing programming languages. That isn’t practical for garage hacking yet, but imagine when a future Steve Jobs or Bill Gates makes and markets the first desktop quantum computer. We’ll have a whole new field with low-hanging fruit.

This is why it’s critical for societies to continue large-scale investment in high-risk, high-return scientific research, to maintain a pipeline of new fields and their attendant low-hanging fruit for commercialization and innovation-driven economic growth.

you probably need to open your eyes more. Most software has been database CRUD for a long time. However there are always interesting things going on

1) robotics are amazing right now

2) self driving cars

3) satellite systems, like starlink

4) drones and drone meshes

5) artificial limbs/prosthetics, including eyes, ears, spinal stimulation etc.

6) genetics and genetic analysis, protein folding, etc.

7) DIY - 3D printing/raspberry pi/arduino

8) crypto/blockchain and decentralized networks

9) virtual reality

Yeah if you are trying to sell more cheap chinese products or do social media, that kind of sucks.

Add CRISPR to it.

Most things stop being cool when they become mainstream. Tech used to be exclusive to a small group of people who understood it, the hacker counter culture grew from this and for a while gated entry into the tech community. Now tech careers are considered akin to any other good white collar job. You don’t have to have a specific personality to discover it or thrive within it. Its pedestrian now and has be very successfully commercialized.

I feel like this problem really boils down to the fact that now that you are older, you know too much.

Getting a wireless router for the first time was a religious experience for my household. Now I know exactly how it works and what will improve/worsen its service area and reception and it is decidedly less magical.

One of the worst parts of growing up in the tech industry is that very few things are able to surprise you anymore.

As a similar millennial geek who has been making some of the gadgets for the past few year, I still get wicked excited about new gadgets. The complexity and beauty inside is still magic to me. When a prototype comes in, I love looking at the insides and thinking about how much people are gonna love this thing. No me though, since it’s currently a huge garbage fire and nothing works :)

I think that every so often technology takes a wrong turn, and additional complexity is added to try to overcome the fundamental flaws. Much like the laryngeal nerve which controls vocal cords goes from the brain, loops around the heart, then back up to the throat. Made complete sense in fish, when it was a straight ling from brain to gills, but completely wrong in giraffes.

There are quite a few wrong turns in Unix that spread because it was just “the way it’s done”. And HTML + Javascript is a terrible way to make client server applications, but constant additional complexity slowly smooths out the worst of it until nobody really thinks there’s a better way.

There is, but the effort to start over just to get to the current level of functionality is far too much to bother.

But that’s the fundamental difference, in the early days every path was equally available for exploration. Now you’re pretty constrained in how you can do what you want to. Still lots to explore from there, but the complexity of the underlying implementation means it’s not quite so fun any more.

I agree with others that have said that it's a change in you, not in the world.

I'm watching my younger brother get into software right now for the first time, and it's delightful. Every day there's something new that he's thrilled about.

What's funny is that he's having a blast playing with the same types of tech that I make a living using and get bored by. A few weeks ago it was getting his hobby website up on the real internet with his own VPS and his own domain. Last week he was ecstatic when he got MongoDB hooked up properly to back the project so he could save things. This week it was getting nginx configured to properly work with Vue router so that refresh works. These tools seem outright boring to me today, but his excitement is infectious.

It's easy for us to say that tech today is boring, or the barrier to entry is too high, because we're now experts. My brother's excitement in the mundane makes me reevaluate my own nostalgia and cynicism.

Has be ever met LAMP?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

I think Jonathan Blow made a decent argument that we're in a decadent age of software. In a decadent age, the civilization still does and can do the thing, but has started to lose a grip on the fundamentals, so it's on the way out. A decadent age is a kind of end, doesn't necessarily feel like the end, it kind of feels like a stagnant bumbling.

How many programmers do you know that can write assembly code? How many layers of abstraction between a web app and the silicon? Processor, OS, probably a byte-code VM, probably a framework... leaking a little bit all of the way.

He makes a good point--where's the evidence that we can write good software? It seems possible, but it doesn't appear, so really, the feeling that maybe we could is just a feeling, not evidence.

As someone who has been attracted to programming quite young and who now lives off this activity, I have never been hugely attracted to hardware. I didn't like spending, too.

However, today it's worse. I still don't like buying stuff, and I now see hardware as future waste. What changed in me is the ecological perspective which I didn't have that much before. I also see hardware as things that take place in my home. Not attracted at all. I want less things around me, and less waste. What gets my interest now is hardware enabling free software and that lasts.

Still very much interested in things related to programming. Computing also gained a political dimension to me. It's everywhere, and there's this constant fight to keep it non hostile and useful to people. Nowadays I weakly advocate for free software and privacy, including to people who are not especially interested in computers.

I still enjoy it when I can meet it on my terms. I think maybe a factor is whether you own it, or it owns you.

Back in 1980, if you sat down at a computer and did something with it, you were special, because very few people did that. Today, when you sit down at a computer, you are just one of the many suffering multitudes whose time and attention are eaten up by systems that either deliberately or inadvertently own you. It has become a treadmill, and making that stuff has become a treadmill too.

I'm reminded that 100 years ago, there was a huge workforce of "clerks" who were basically human information processors. Tech workers are today's clerks.

In 1980, your tech life wasn't worth anybody else owning and controlling. Today it is.

I can go right back to that world by stripping away the gratuitous complexity and control. An Arduino can entertain me for days.

well people hate 'techies' in San Francisco because they are thought of as transplants wearing northface invading the culture or whatever, also they are seen as the sole source of raising rents and overall gentrification of the bay area. I guess they are seen as unworthy and their jobs just give them tons of money and they dont contribute.

In Mexico/Colombia/South America people are both envious and hate tech nomads, mostly because they have high salaries and can seemingly do whatever they want and afford it all.

I think the association with wealth and marginal taste is the reason people dont like people who work in tech.

When it started was the second tech bubble in silicon valley bay area and the rise of 'digital nomads', alot of it is warranted and alot of it is jealousy.

There is an exact year: 2008. Two reasons:

- Obama is elected with significant help from new social media tactics. Powerful interests realize that tech will shape the future of politics. This leads to less "technology for technology's sake" and more of its use to achieve sociopolitical goals.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/o...

- The financial crash heats up resentment against elites. While it may seem like the East Coast media and financial set are opponents of Big Tech, to the average person, they're both out of touch elites. Tech stopped being cool when it stopped being the underdog.

it may seem weird but your should get visit an endocrinologist and get your bloodwork done or at least visit your doctor. depression is not just a state of mind, and certainly not something you should just power through. one of things that depression takes is your enjoyment out of stuff you used to like.

> Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

3d printing, arduino, nodemcu, rust? I'd say we are at the golden age of gadgets. The stuff we can create today seems limitless.

I still cannot get over how much I like programming microcontrollers with rust. I took it as a hobby and ended up with some real products.

I have some lora modems in my desk that I'm constantly eyeing and I cannot wait for some free time to start playing with those.

The internet has exploded where mainstream is connected. I grew up with IRC, 56.6k modems, trading playstation ISOs, on genmay instead of hackernews, etc. We are still here, there are just more around us where you have to dig a little.

For the tech, I am really excited about VR and brain computer interfaces. Just made an arduino weather station last night with my son and on the weekend made a VR room builder for webxr. I go in cycles though, maybe you are in a down cycle?

Tech reached a pinnacle of excitement for me when I was surrounded by others making progress on things I cared about. Of course, this was during college (and online in the years leading up to it). Now, I simply don't know as many people who still care about the things I do. Those I do know are distant, as am I.

We're out of sync. We're unaligned. We've lost that magic feeling because we aren't consistent.

This lack of consistency seeps into our work and the whole industry loses confidence. Just look at the sad state of software reliability and performance, despite the numerous advancements in hardware.

That's not to say we haven't made progress with technology too. I just don't care about a lot of it. Procedural art is a neat bar trick, but ultimately doesn't strike me as a viewer unless it's explained crisply. Cryptocurrency is a scam at best, or a force for destabilization at worst. Digital currency has been a thing for years, but has gotten slower and more cumbersome in my personal experience recently. Social media is a well accepted problem. Video games seem to be in a rut, as with Hollywood (maybe I'm living under a rock as per usual?). My love for computing hardware has waned; my phones torment me, my USB ports and dongles are duds or act sporadically. Wireless tech is wrought with interference and power issues. Must I continue?

These probably sound like the rummagings of an aging man, grown discontent with the kids these days. To some extent that's also probably correct. But, I think it's worth noting that I do find a lot of excitement in this world still... Just with lower tech hobbies. Ice skating, woodworking, ultimate frisbee, music, and more still dominate my thoughts. As does the horrifying world of trying to date post-college. Maybe, just maybe, it was the hyper-focused tech driven world of the past that was the problem. Maybe, it's this new post-covid era we're entering which will show us that there's more to life than disruption and the "next big thing" every week. I can dream can't I?

It's time to settle in, buckle up, and refine what we know we want, what we have, and what we ultimately need in life.

That's life.

As you gain more experience and become familliar with any system(digital, political, social), you start to recognize the frameworks behind the hype, the recurring patterns repeating ad nauseum and the hidden hands that manipulate spaces. Just accept the fact that life will wear you down and make a bitter old person out of you, eventually.

J/K, sorta. Life is an accumulation of experiences & learning, that changes you & the way you see the world around you. The 'new' things become old and the newest often resembles a rehash of the old. Find your zen wherever you can, there's lots of options.

As always, YMMV.

Most paid software jobs are solving other people's business problems. Most business problems are inherently "boring." This has always been the case, but as a child you don't notice that kind of thing.

1. Tech did not stop being cool for everyone, just you.

2. You are right that a lot of startups are working on stupid "problems", it frustrates me too. We don't need yet another social network / image sharing service / funny face manipulator software.

3. There are an insane number of real problems nobody is solving (yet) with software. People need to find those problems FIRST, not the other way around (have an idea not solving a real-world problem.)

4. In a sense, a lot of problems are solved, yes. For example, the world don't need "site builders" anymore, because of Wordpress and no-code tools.

Look around, we are living the dream. For example: we are streaming unlimited music, tv shows and movies to all our devices. Flying drones for aerial footage. Home automation for a few bucks.

Tech isn't boring, we are oversaturated.

We're not just supersaturated; we're shaped by tech more than we shape it. Tech has become essential and inescapable. You can't fully participate in today's world without a smartphone. That phone and its underlying contacts, media, interfaces and databases are the world. Tech has become yet another necessary mainstream commodity, like electricity or plumbing. Nobody gets excited by those anymore, either.

Today, everyone expects to be able to contact you anywhere anytime. That's an mind-blowingly different way to live than before smartphones. (I'm a mid-boomer. The pre-electronic world I was born into is SO long gone.)

Smartphones are by far a bigger change than the other computer-based tech watersheds that came before -- the arrival of PCs (especially since they weren't networked until 1990), or the arrival of online info (web) which was accessible only by PCs, ca 1995. Only 10 years after that, the arrival of smartphones and social networks changed the definition of "tech" to be a state of mind: "being online, connected, and accessible all the time". Now we're used to it, so it's lost its charm. In fact, it's probably true that tech has become more annoying or addictive than fun. Who wants to dance to tunes dominated by trillion dollar mass-manipulative corporations?

That's why tech is no longer cool. Today's New New Thing isn't changing your life anymore. Not in a good way, anyway.

For me, it's stopped being cool for a few reasons.

Environment. I know most people don't care about the environment on HN, but the toll of consumerism, including tech gadgets, is huge on the environment. I restrain from buying new devices for that reasons.

Profit. It has always been about profit, but never to that extent. It's all about selling new stuff that we don't need, getting our attention, making us addicted. And it's the same on the workplace. I used to work on weekends because I loved what I was doing. Now it's all about trying to pass the next performance evaluation.

> Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable.

I'm going to focus on this, because to some extent this is a real problem. But it's also one that can be worked on.

The thing to keep in mind is that most startups are solving problems that a small number of people can handle in a small amount of time. 3-5 people in less than a year for a pre-A MVP sort of project, 50-100 in 2-5 years with funding before you need to have it cracking.

Now think back to every geek's first or third love, the history of physics. Back in the golden age of experimental physics, the guys all of our units were named after were making their discoveries solo using a length of wire and a homemade battery or a handmade telescope. Now, we have hundreds or thousands of researchers collaborating on nation-spanning super colliders or telescope arrays.

Why? Because anything that two people in a garage lab could figure out has already been figured out.

1990's Google was proof-of-concepted by a team of two. But to build a 2020's search engine you need teams of hundreds, if not thousands. Some of your favorite video games of the 80's were the work of, if not one person, a team you could fit in a small room. Modern flagship games have more people working on hair physics.

As time goes on in any field, the easy problems get solved, and it takes more and more people to do interesting work. Raising the bar like that makes it hard for start-ups, with their limited funding and head count, to compete.

But in tech, unlike physics, hope is not lost for new golden ages: new tech comes along and changes what one developer can do.

Take games -- sure, flagship games might have hundreds of developers, but we're in a golden age of indie games, in no small part because modern frameworks and distribution have come together to let small houses do more than they could before while reaching more customers than they previously could.

If you want to promote more startups doing more interesting things, that is the lever to push on. What technologies are too expensive for a small team to develop, that they could use as a springboard? How could you make it easier for tech startups to get paid?

I think part of it is that when you were younger, tech was a very new part of most people's everyday life.

You grew up through the introduction of the smartphone, social media and digital cameras, as well as the incredible development of computing power. When you were born, the most advanced piece of electronics in the average household might have been a TV. Now, everyone has a little box with a phone, supercomputer and camera in their pocket. That was a huge and exciting change.

But now, much of that burst of transformation has slowed down and any developments in tech are an incremental improvement as far as everyday life is concerned.

But personally, I love learning about the technology in other industries, particularly manufacturing. Look at the everyday objects around you and the process that was used to make them. The sewing machine that stitched your clothes and the mechanism it uses to do it. The machines that produced the yarn and the machines that turned it into fabric. Look at how metals are extruded into a housing for some electrical device or parts of your house. Look at how CNC machining is used to create high-precision parts or how sheet metal is processed to mass-produce low-cost parts.

There's so much technology around us that has been quietly doing its job for decades and even if the change it induced is taken for granted now, the technology itself is still an impressive achievement.

It feels like we had a little golden age where we explored the limit of what connected devices and open information sharing could do for everyone and that was interesting. Now we have seen that can have some bad sides too.

We've come down from that high and looked around at the physical world and technology is not progressing at the same pace, it is a little depressing. Real progress is still being made but we got used to the fast pace of exploring and filling the connectivity gap and it's a rough transition.

I grew up a bit before that. I'm fortunate to have seen society change from mostly-computer-free to folks swimming in tech.

I've also written about half-a-dozen apps that somebody later took and made into a super cool startup. I don't say that to brag. Ideas are cheap. Execution intelligence is where it's at.

I mention the apps I've written because you really have to establish more context if you're going to lament about tech's coolness death. Is tech not cool anymore? Or is it just not cool to you? I feel like I've written a bunch of cool stuff over the years. It's always been cool to me, for whatever that's worth.

Given that setup, I will answer using my own definition of cool. Software ate the world, and that was awesome. It also had a bunch of side-effects nobody wanted to think about, and that sucked. But because it ate the world, ie became an integral part of human existence, tech became incestuous. It's so prevalent in our daily experience that it became impossible to talk about what might be cool or not.

We ended up with a bifurcation. Path A talks about tech only in terms of people creating and sharing content with one another, whether that's a cat pic or instructions to use CPR to save lives. Path B is just concerned with mechanics regardless of impact: how do we set up that identity server template in kubernetes?

I find the endgame of both sides of this bifurcation to be extremely boring. I can solve most tech problems I'm given using tech. Yay. I can explore creating interesting content in various genres given some rando platform. Also yay. But at some point along both of those paths, it seemed like it became a race to the bottom. It all devolved into mindless, manipulative crap. Even if I became a rock star on the tech path or the content path, so what? There'd be a million new folks coming along next year doing it better, and in 50 years nobody would care.

I decided that to me, it was the visceral feeling of integrating tech with creativity that brought the most life satisfaction. That's the feeling I got when I was writing my first apps for a local business at 16. It was the feeling I had architecting big systems that took off and still provide value. You can't separate one path from the other and expect any sort of long-term satisfaction. At least I never could.

When money people came for the money rather than for the tech

So we have bunch of VC funded "startups" burning billions for their own leisure and salary, while butchering the tech

If you think tech is not cool you're looking at the wrong tech.

I'm currently "playing" with openai tools gpt/clip etc... and my mind is blown every 5 minutes

Technology is super interesting right now. Deep learning and computational optimisation in general just unlocked an important part of what was thought to be too hard before, and now we need to combine it with other things in the right way. Of course, if you think you can solve it ALL with deep learning, you will be disappointed. If you think of DL as an additional tool in your box, you just got so much more powerful.

The things you liked are still happening in areas of computing that are not currently respected. Which would be just like the time period that fascinates you.

So if you’re willing to really replicate that, then its blockchain, crypto and various distributed file storage systems.

Fire up an Ethereum full node and contribute to the coding and testing the merge, or any dozen of Layer2’s or completely different paradigms that have scifi goals.

Similar point was made here quite recently and the conclusion of most this was a mere difference between exploratory and exploitative stages of life.

> We seem to be experiencing diminishing returns on tech for the past few years. More tech is no longer necessarily better.

I don't think that's true. It might be true for the richest people in the world, but there are still lots of people in the world that lack tech, either because it hasn't reached them or because it hasn't been developed yet.

I put the change somewhere in the 70s, when NASA made space travel boring. It wasn't all their faults, they had lots of help.

Just off the top of my head:

* Virtual/Mixed Reality platforms pre-mainstream and growing.

* Massive advances in machine learning AND

* No corresponding advance towards AGI

* Huge power and flexibility available via cloud and containerisation.

Tech is as cool and as open to opportunity - using the facilities and exploiting the gaps in things like the above - to the small scale and independent developer as it's ever been IMO.

Huge amounts of venture capital poured into a million nonsense ideas. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but even if a tiny fraction of those startups changes the world, there will be lots of others that are completely nonsensical, or lame, or cargo cult, or clueless, ultimately producing useless products with teams of people who either don't care or can't deliver. Given how much noise the latter group produces, it's no wonder that startups aren't cool anymore. Most of them are incredibly lame, as are the people who run them, who previously went into the prestige career routes of management consultancy and investment banking.

Everyone is a rapper these days, everyone is a rockstar these days, so no-one is.

Edit: Truly disruptive technology will never stop being cool and magical. But there's another clue - even the word disruptive is cringe these days, because it's been abused by the aforementioned horde of muppets.

I think it is because tech has begun to replace things, but we get strings attached making us resent it with time.

tech in the 80's went obsolete....but it didn't stop working because you stopped paying Atari a subscription....and it didn't suddenly decide to censor and block previous content through an 'update' cough downgrade*

Tech is just tech. It's what you can do with tech that makes it either cool or not.

In the past, there seemed to be so many cool possibilities. That coolness infected the tech itself, so the tech looked cool too. But now a lot of those possibilities have been explored already. It's not the Wild West anymore, we've got plenty of interstate highways and railways crossing that space, and we've witnessed the not-cool parts as well.

Fortunately, this also helps us see where we might still find coolness. Just do something cool, regardless of tech. Who cares if your cool project doesn't involve any new tech? Who cares which frontend framework is the best when you're building a tree house for your kids, roasting a steak, whipping up a sexy cocktail, putting up a simple HTML form to help neighbors in need, saving the Earth, exploring the seas, the mountains, and the outer space? There's always more coolness out there. :)

Limitations and constraints matter. Technology is often the most fun when you have to be creative to solve a problem. My first programming was on TI-85 calculator in high school circa 1995 making crappy games. There wasn’t even a proper keyboard, just the number keys and plethora of other scientific keys.

Now JavaScript and other web technologies have made it so easy to build full blown games in the browser. Ironically because it’s less constrained it’s harder to make something good.

When everyone has access to technology creativity matters more. I like Nintendo’s philosophy, find cheap off the shelf technology and make something fun. Because they are not competing in a graphics arms race they focus on gameplay. The goal is “fun” not “technology.”

I echo other comments about age factoring in. When tech is a thing to play with its fun, when it’s work it’s not fun. We all have that inner child inside, the challenge is finding ways to bring it out.

Every technology that was once revolutionary and exciting, eventually becomes mainstream and standard. The first cars and planes were cobbled together by some geeks in their garage, but now it's a pretty boring industry. Every new technology goes through that same pattern, but if there's one technology that has the potential to keep itself constantly renewing, it's software. Because it's much more flexible than hardware. The trick is finding the new revolutionary ideas to keep it exciting, and that's not what most of the Big Tech companies are doing; they figured out what makes money for them, and that's advertising. But there's probably a lot more that we can do with this tech, we just haven't figured it out yet. But figuring that out is definitely getting harder; all the low-hanging fruit has already been taken care of.

The internet had so much potential. All that potential died for me when the Snowden revelations came out. Instead of wonder, it turned to fear. Now that all tech is connected to the internet and can report on whatever we do, it really taints it for me. Instead of a wonderful tool, it's something that can be dangerous.

Regarding programming languages: the majority of programmers work for companies using boring technology, so money is seldomly spent on developing new and exciting technologies that go beyond or above what we have now. It's always just going deeper into existing stuff because it's used and needs to be improved, but radically new languages, compilers, tools, etc. are risky and expensive so they're avoided.

We still work with text files, line by line. Programming languages unspool and lose their state upon encountering an error and deciphering pages of stacktraces is left to the programmer. State cannot really be saved and resumed. Everything needs to be desperately backwards compatible even when that means dragging problems along from version to version. The cool things are mostly academic and don't make it into the mainstream.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

When did it stop being cool to you? Plants are fascinating tech that is really old. There is tons of physics tech that is cool, check out space weather, very cool stuff. My question is "when did you stop being inspired by the world around you?"

I would prefer to inquire as to when tech became net negative for society

Advertisements and telemetry made it so much more uncool.

But you touch on the real thing here.

>Wherever I looked at the world's problems, more technology seemed to be the answer.

The more you get into just what and how those problems are, the less will it seem that technology is an answer to anything. Technology can cure my loved one but I'll lose them some time nevertheless. Give people something to eat yet not solving starvation. Elevated the lives of many yet haven't eliminated even extreme poverty. Technology reshaped the world but we're still the same humans we always were (terms and conditions apply) - and so, our fundamental problem were, are, and will ever be the same.

There's not even a solution to this, as a feeling. You "just" need to move on with life. Tech can be exciting again but that won't come from the outside.

1) A huge chunk of what we know as "software development" amounts to translating solved problems -they were previously solved with pen and paper, and a calculator- into code.

2) Tech is a bit like food. Nutritious food is often perceived as being boring to eat. Profitable software is often perceived as being boring to develop and consume.

3) The elephant in the room is that commercial software tends to run into the same issues: coupled code, slow queries, bad stack choices, etc. Tech debt is endemic in the SaaS world.

As a consequence, there is a high probability you will run into the same problems again and again regardless of switching from some NLP SaaS to a bleeding edge fintech (just an example of two distant exciting fields). And usually you won't be empowered to solve those issues unless you are a staff engineer or above.

If you ask me, technology was always boring and sucked and was a bland expression of utilitarianism. At worst it was even more terrifying, remember when we developed nuclear bombs? Or even just ordinary bombs and tanks and other murderous technology? The fascination with tech is just the bias of youth, when everything in the world seems new and uncharted and full of possibility. You only enjoyed it because you were on the other side, you were the beneficiary, instead of being the one who has to spend your entire working life slaving away to keep it functioning. And dealing with the outlandish demands from customers and the general public who don't understand or care how it works, they just want the latest solution now and will toss any amount of money at the problem to get it.

How in any world were nuclear bombs NOT INTERESTING? Sure they sucked, maybe, even that is arguable. But only a Luddite will say something like ”nuclear bombs are boring”. Tech has always been interesting, and cool, at least since the industrial revolution in modern eras. As Kubrick showed brilliantly in 2001, “technology” is what has always made us different and successful. Brutal, sure, but successful nonetheless.

Well, I personally don't consider the technology to murder millions of people to be very interesting. It's more terrifying than it is interesting. The physics behind it? Sure, definitely interesting.

Looks more like you don’t want to use the word interesting independent of other feelings you may have about the topic. The story of the making of the atomic bomb is one of the most interesting stories of all history in my opinion. The smartest minds ever to live on this planet decided and agreed it was of the greatest urgency to do what they did and no sane person would argue otherwise.

The single greatest night of destruction in Japan during the war was not either of the nukes but the fire bombing of Tokyo. If the Americans didn’t make the nukes, at some point someone else would have. That’s the beauty (and interesting thing) about technology - it’s inevitable. You really can’t pick and choose. You can slow it down sure but never fully stop it.

If you want to understand the world and this topic with more nuance than a teenage hippy sayin “nukes bad Mann” then I will recommend “The making of the atomic bomb” by Richard Rhodes.

>Looks more like you don’t want to use the word interesting independent of other feelings you may have about the topic.

>If you want to understand the world and this topic with more nuance than a teenage hippy sayin “nukes bad Mann”

These comments are incredibly and egregiously pointless, wrong, rude, condescending and dismissive, don't do this. I know about the story and a lot of the history of the war and I still don't find it interesting, sorry. It's just depressing and angering to study, even though it is very necessary to study for a valid historical perspective and even though a lot of it was very inevitable from what the war had already escalated to. That's where you've very badly lost the plot.

Again not sure what exactly are you saying is rude. Just because someone’s offended we need to change the meaning of the word “interesting”?

Nobody is offended and nobody is trying to change the meaning of anything. You're assuming I know nothing about the topic and that's rude and makes for bad discusson. Don't do that.

> Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur. At best, technology bores me. At worst, it terrifies me. Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable. Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

You grew up.

The other part is that we are, in my opinion, coming out of a period of hyper growth and technical advancement where we were picking all the "low hanging fruit" of tech, which was exciting to see.

Now that, to one degree we're "done" with that, what's left is either the commoditisation of all of that (making existing more affordable and accessible) which is much less exciting, or companies desperately throwing shit at the wall to try and invent "the next iPhone", which can be quite depressing.

I feel like tech has gotten to the point where it really does solve most of my every day needs. Take watching movies for example. Growing up when every year brought a number of computers that were twice as fast but it was hard to get a good copy of a movie to watch on it. Or at least difficult to connect it to a tv. Even if you could, the codec was trash and the video was low res.

Nowadays, I got a phone that can just get a 4k or hd copy at speed. I can cast it to my hd tv no problem. Now I can watch nearly any movie I can think of immediately.

Nowadays if I look at a tech magazine (heh) or any given gadget website. Everything is slightly faster or smaller. But I'd say most of my everyday tasks are already handled. Everything is pretty great, but the magic is gone. But that's ok.

It became less cool when it started attracting big money. The VC industry incentivizes exponential growth via privacy intrusion, so that's what most startups pursue. Building a useful technology is only the bait to onboard the chumps (which includes both clients and employees); once enough chumps are onboard the incentive structure changes to exclusively "moar growth, moar privacy intrusion, moar rent-seeking" until the company crashes and burns and then we do it all over again.

I despise the incentive structures modern VCs create. Exponential growth is always inherently time-limited and thus it's fundamentally at odds with building a sustainable company that creates great technology over the long term.

I still think technology is incredibly cool, especially if you follow your interests and curiousity rather than what's popular and going to make you money.

That said, tech companies and most of the people on HN do seem a lot less cool to me than they used to…

I was actually pretty excited about the impact of social media back in the day (2008+). I remember saying, we just need to be loud and things will change. That didn't work out the way I expected it to.

My initial take on social media was that it would be a place for free expression. It took me a long time before I realized that people expect what you say on social media to be consumable by them, otherwise it makes them wonder and that makes them cringe. It surfaced more judgement than anything. Now its just accepted that social media is a cringefest and that type of judgment has become embedded in how we look at everything (not just social media posts).

I agree with your claim to the extent that "cool" tech is more rare these days. It feels like there was something interesting being released monthly throughout the aughts. Pointing to an article posted on HN some time ago[1]; it could be that starting a company, creating a gadget, launching an app has become too easy. When things are too easy, more people do it, yields more noise in the space. Cool stuff is still out there. You just need to dig deep and look at specialized sectors.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483207

I agree with all the comments about this sentiment coming from maturity. That's been my experience. Tech feels less exciting the more I realize its limitations in affecting the human experience.

I would add though that exponentially increasing complexity adds a separation between the ubiquitous tech around us and the hobbyist tech we can just enjoy. It's hard now to find something cool, get your hands dirty as a hobbyist and have it be comparable to the majority of tech finding application in the real-world. The best you can do is dabble in the superficial applications and software abstracted away from the real underlying tech.

> When did this start, and when is the drought going to be over?

It started when we as a society let the tech cos get too big.

...Why does that matter? All the talent decided its better to get paid by the big tech cos and work a job instead of starting their own tech co. In fairness trying to compete with the big tech cos is a fools errand. Right now we're in a weird period of history where it just doesn't make financial sense to go start a novel company when you could live the cushy Big Tech Co life for roughly the same amount of money, yet substantially less risk.

When is it going to end? When a butterfly in Africa flaps its wings.

The market was less established, so there was a lot more experimentation and people just trying to do completely random shit. That's why there are so many cool little tech artifacts from the 60s - 2000s. Now everything is cloud hosted, and web based. We know the form factors: phone, laptop, desktop, tablet. The market's solidified. What will work and what won't is a little more clear, or at the very least that's how people think about it. Nobody's really trying to do some kind of bespoke chip work for a calculator that doubles as a lighter anymore.

Hmmm I'd say after the dotcom bust somewhere in the mid 2000s. That's when new fangled ideas, crazy dreams started getting replaced by making money. Interesting curious what-if sci-fi movies got replaced by sequels, prequels, franchises and CGI.

Yes it's partially growing older on my part, it takes more effort to surprise me now. But I also feel there has been a shift. The good news is everything has a cycle so I'm sure we'll eventually break out of the current rut and get some more excitement into science and sci-fi at some point

I'm also wondering about this myself. I also used to check Tom's Hardware, had a subscription to Technology Review and was amazed by almost everything in there.

In fact I had also been working for some time on actually cool tech and was looking forward to go into the office as early as possible and stay late. But as I "progressed" I worked on more and more boring problems and products. The by far most exciting tech is what I use in my free time.

Also it seems that only a small fraction of tech products nowadays are driven by tech geeks.

There was a time where each month showed something new…ICQ, Pointcast, CuSeeMe…there was lots of new things to play with. Now, there’s still amazing new things, they’re just harder to pull out (I can now use AI to make a title in a video follow my head around. That’s pretty amazing)

There’s also 4 Star Trek pipelines, 5 Marvel pipelines, 3 Star Wars Pipelines and all movies of a certain range have been completely wrapped up in rental fees.

More and more people are all doing more and more at the same time, and very little of it is really new.

Most of the problems we have today are the result of our massive success, which in turn is the result of science and technology. We "made it".

One the one hand, this is great news! We already have all the technology we need to provide for everyone while we stabilize the Earth's climate and start colonizing the galaxy.

On the other hand, this means that our problems are now psychological or spiritual rather than physical. Those issues are less amenable to scientific/technological solutions. (At least so far.)

The commonality of the smartphone shifted the trajectory of consumer tech away from hardware to software. That's step 1 on the route to boring tech, because that software sits atop iOS and Android. You have to play by their rules, and that includes designing to their standards, not yours.

At the same time, hardware vendors stopped taking risks in developing their own consumer products. It was easier to slap Android on an MP3 player or a watch or a TV instead of developing your own UI and interaction patterns.

Are you kidding me? Now is like the most exciting time in tech. 1. You have Dall-E coming out that can draw pictures based on description. Just imagine a AI generated story then followed by AI generated pictures based off of the story aka AI generated movie. 2. You also got Co-pilot by Github with possibility of reducing bug in code and speeding up develop time. 3. AlphaFold for drug development.

Personally, I like where tech is headed. Hope I can be on the frontier of some of these new tech.

As you get older you realize tech isn't the solution to your problems, so you're less likely to think it'll be a solution to other people's problems.

Because it became corporate. It's a standard career path now. MIT -> FAANG internships -> FAANG - start a youtube channel talking about why you quit FAANG.

> More tech is no longer necessarily better.

Welcome to the next phase of a technologists career.

Why do we build so many things if no one’s going to use it. Or if no one knows how to use it?

^^^ coding for the sake of code, for the “flow state” high, is partly why we have a lot of useless software.

When we build these software tools and the tools are useful to build other stuff - application of these technologies is actually really fun!

Until we exhaust that to a good point, more code is t going to do much.

Opinions my own and mine alone :)

The saddest thing of all (for me at least) has been the rise of the "tech celebrity" on Twitter and the other social media outlets.

For context, i'm generationally Xennial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials) and was lucky enough to have access to PC's from the mid 80's.

What makes tech less cool today is the ubiquity. Anything that's commonly and affordably available is almost by definition not cool. Cool stuff is that which is out of reach, around the corner, etc. We still have lots of that too but it tends to be more research oriented or of the terrifying variety. A contributor to this is how quickly a cool discovery can be developed into mass-marketed consumer products.

The iPhone and Android are such impressive tools and so many people have them. Having a super computer in your pocket is the norm. There is more compute power in the average person’s pocket than IBM had onboard the Saturn 5 rocket. It’s just part of life! The norm. We’ve adjusted and adapted (sort of). Advancements beyond what we have today are hard to fathom for most folks but also expected.

It didn't, it's cooler than ever.

You think it's not because of some combination of you getting older, accepting the cultural zeitgeist (currently very negative in general and anti-tech in particular), not paying attention to things, not learning new things, etc.

It's extremely hard to look at recent advances in space, neural networks and robots with fresh eyes and not be dumbstruck by their awesomeness.

> When did this start

Somewhere around 2008.

> and when is the drought going to be over?

Sometime after we stop bailing out the economy. When money is easy, people take the easy route. When money is hard, people have to be inventive.

If you're old enough you'll remember that is hardly the first time tech has stopped being cool. It always stops being cool when there is little incentive to build anything cool.

When people made enough money and stopped having problems they needed to solve. When they shifted their attention to bolstering the reign of the incumbents. When they tell each other to job hop instead of starting something new.

There's also this thing that tech is sanitized for "idiots first" because apparently if you don't appeal to billions you're a failure

A large part of the issue is that it is now your job. Instead of doing whatever you want, you do what you need to do, or even worse what your customer or boss tells you what to do.

I love dancing, and I love teaching dancing. But as a job, it really sucks. Customers and bosses ruin everything. At least with tech, the job pays well, unlike teaching dance.

Little bit annoyed that your phrasing attempts to speak for the world on the "coolness of tech". I still find it cool. Neural networks that generate art? Quantum computing making meaningful gains? Apple M1 chips are absolutely bonkers... Try to get a little less grumpy and appreciate the amazing things that are happening around you.

>Neural networks that generate art?

Not very interesting. I'd be more interested in what an ape can come up with, since it's a lot closer to humans.

>Quantum computing making meaningful gains?

Nothing I can afford to fool with. I like to tinker. Plus, this will most likely be used to break cryptography, so it's a negative for me.

>Apple M1 chips are absolutely bonkers.

They are, but at the end of the day, my Mac still does the same shiz it did before the M1, the fan's just don't come on. Don't get me wrong, I hate fan whirr, but it's not the same as say when average / affordable hard drives went from 40M to 540M overnight.

For me it was realizing that the "cost savings" my employers were providing their customers came solely from the staffing costs they were able to eliminate by laying off their workers and extracting more productivity from their remaining workers with our technology. My fat salary comes at the cost of several others'.

What is the alternative?

Solving the world’s problems is not the mission of tech companies, it’s to make profit, so yeah that is less interesting.

We've allowed high finance to build tech behemoths that swallow up smaller, innovative companies and build powerful barriers to competition. We've also outsourced our manufacturing capabilities to other countries, partly induced by, and partly inducing, a race to the bottom for cheap devices and frivolous gadgets.

* Today's heavily publicised, heavily shared startups solve boring problems.

You're only looking at the surface.

This kind of boring stuff has always been around. As has the pursuit of money and the use of tech in that pursuit.

Tech is more accessible now, and thus you will naturally get more noise.

It does not follow that there are fewer signals, just more noise to filter out.

What killed the fun for me that these days I have the feeling I am fighting tech rather than use it and enjoy it. Fighting includes, fighting how some Genius at a company decided I have to absolutely use the product way X and nothing else, but also just fighting crashes and bugs all the time.

It seems like you're describing fun vs business. Tech stopped being cool when it became your job, when you fully understood that Star Tek truly was science fiction and not a distant possibility.

You can still mod videogames, but I get not wanting to look at a computer after your 9-5 of looking at a computer all day.

After Beyoncé tried Magic Leap and deemed it boring, that was the turning point.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/8/14549342/beyonce-magic-lea...

Sturgeon’s law + survival bias. The future is full of hopes and dreams; the past only remembers the fulfillments of those hopes and dreams. The present contains people working on fulfilling hopes and dreams, plus, in great surplus, a bunch of other stuff that nobody will care to remember 10 years from now.

I've been having this thought quite a lot lately. Computers are stupid and everything sucks now.

I think it has to do with consolidation and greed. Novelties are fun but they don't make you billions of dollars. It's just a constant incremental churn of boring but profitable walled garden junk from megacorps.

While I agree that a lot of technology these days is being used for dystopian/nefarious purposes, if you live in the US, I'd suggest a drive (or flight if too far away from TX) to SpaceX's Starbase rocket launch site in Boca Chica, Texas: it will rekindle that spark you had for technology.

Nothing makes things seem less cool than having to do them to other people's specification, for money.

I think there is a huge opportunity in education right now. I do not necessarily mean only the public education system.

Look at how easily and quickly you can learn something new from a short video that you have free access to. This is only going to improve.

This opens up even more opportunities for tech to evolve.

I agree with other people here that it's likely an age thing. You're maturing and you're seeing what was always the case. The feeling you're having, I started to get in my 30s, in the 2000s. Working at Google through my 40s only cemented it, there's only so excited you can be about moving protobufs from one place to another and then you realize the "innovation" in the tech there comes from the perfection of the execution of very boring routine tasks at extremely large scale.

The "tech" that people get enamored with are sets of tools. What you do with them is the most important thing. They have no intrinsic transcendent value in themselves. There's a part of our brain that is "tickled" by solving problems. But that stimulation only takes you so far.

Insofar as "tech" has changed the world it's really that capitalism has transformed the world in its image, and part of what we call "tech" is the ideological framework that has helped make that happen. Everything from bar code scanners in supermarket checkouts in the early 70s, to the earliest CPUs in the F-14 fly-by-wire flight system (same era), to Uber drivers using an app to manage their gigs -- the development of microprocessor technology was driven by the need for market efficiencies, not the other way around.

There are so many people becoming programmer who aren't passionate and hadn't written a line of code up until in college. Think MBA type jumping into Java and it leads to mediocrity all over -- agile + incremental mindset + do minimum + promotion oriented mindset

I don't think it stopped being cool. If you want to do something cool, level yourself up and start a company or build a product that is cool. Otherwise you can just accept 200k+ offers and enjoy hobbies/spend time with family, and not take tech so seriously.

Tech is only part of the solution. The other part is having an economic/social system that rewards organizations seeking to benefit society rather than simply existing for the sake of return for shareholders. Nothing stays cool for very long under the latter.

When everyone that knew how to access the Settings menu on their phone or power cycle a router are considered geniuses by everyone around them. My point is, tech being used by everyone now, even though they are just using the product instead of creating them.

I'm GenX and I don't think tech was ever cool. I have always liked engineering but I never thought it bought me cool points. Certainly in grade school it was something I mostly kept in the closet among my peers at the wealthy-district public school.

It's the money.

You're just getting old. THere is more opportunity out there for exploring tech than ever before. Being afraid of tech is like being afraid of hammers, war hammers or carpenters hammers can be made. The real thing to be afraid of is humans.

My answer: once technology became part of the establishment and technologists were assimilated into corporations to code the future digital enslavement of our peers for money. What's cool about slavery and no privacy, even if you are rich?

Your premise is just false. People are solving some boring problems, but there are also tons of exciting ones: AI, reusable rockets, life extension projects, fusion projects, VR / AR, genetics research that will feed the world.

Money and power, folks. Money and especially power change everything.

There's always been money in computing, but I'm talking about really huge money and serious political power. I'm talking about nation-state-scale money, elections hinging on social media meme wars, countries creating troll armies as part of new cold wars, etc.

When the stakes go up, the fun goes away. Serious players get involved, not to mention lots of hard-core psychopathic types that are not fun at all to deal with.

There's no better place to see this than the computer underground. Hacker (pop culture sense) culture used to be fun, exploratory, and cool. I was really into it as a teen. Now I wouldn't let my kids near it. It's loaded with serious and dangerous criminals, incredibly toxic ideology, real prison sentences if you get caught, and actual harm as opposed to pranks and exploration. Today's "hacking" (black or grey hat) involves destroying peoples livelihoods with scams and ransomware, attacking democracy and civil society, and even killing people.

Guns, armies, and serious crime have come to what was once a neat little bubble of pure thought and exploration.

Dude.

Bitcoin, Electron, Web3, CGI/Real time 3D keeps progressing, latest Macbooks have 120hz, etc.

The tech that you know has changed. We've moved well beyond programming languages and frameworks. Once you adapt to the frontier, your eyes will be opened to the revolutionary technology being developed right under your nose.

Tech is ubiquitous. Ubiquitous, by definition, isn’t cool. There is an edge and a thrill to cool. Cool inhabits the fringes with the young and its cyclic. Look at the return of albums and turntables, funky old phones, ….

> Tom's Hardware, playing and modding video games

I think there's your "problem". There was a time (I'd put it 94-2004ish, but only because I'm too young) where there were major shifts every year. So if you were interested in that space... 286 - interesting, 486 - interesting, the first Pentiums - eh, kinda interesting ;), 3dfx - VERY interesting, and so on.

You could replace your hardware every year and the latest games would hardly run on a 1-2y old model/gfx card. Now compare it to "today". I last upgraded in 2019, from a 2012 CPU (with a 2015/16 gpu) and it was mostly "eh, about time, this is one of my main hobbies" and not because it was strictly needed. Now the machine is 2.5 years old and I can run everything I throw at it at 2560 with max details and I think this will hold up for a bit.

TLDR: If you're thinking about the same timeframe it was just a weird outlier of tech breakthroughs in the narrow field of personal computing/games every year. +20% more CPU performance is simply not exciting if the game already works.

What you are experiencing sounds fairly typical. You are just maturing to a point where you are not so easily entertained by the novelty of it all. Instead, you are craving for something more reliable, longer lasting.

It's never going to be over. All the easy interesting problems were solved years ago. Now you have to work really hard to come up with something technology related that hasn't been done before.

When computers stopped being computers, tech, cutting edge; and simply became part of the landscape. Now they're part of everything and everyday life. But being a programmer can still be cool.

It was boring when you experienced it the first time, and also was going in a terrible direction.

The difference is, old people are the only one who knew it at the time. And now you are old. Congrats!

When technology bores you is the exact moment it becomes exciting. Reality sets in and now you can change the world with your boring solutions to boring problems.

Welcome to the real world. It sucks.

Who cares what others are doing? If nothing is left from your perspective, pick another field/hobby and use your knowledge to automate things and build your own interfaces.

"Great Surge" model of technology deployment https://i.imgur.com/BLVTqo2.png

It never stopped for me. It never will. Interesting things come out roughly every month, whether people scream about its privacy or not it can still be an innovative device.

When the pretty people arrived to join the bandwagon. You know, all those who previously worked in investment banking and other sectors that had little to do with tech.

It's not an age thing.

People born today aren't going to see the leaps in technology that you saw because we're approaching the physical limits of transistor size.

To be blunt, the change is in you and not in "tech". It correlates with you becoming an adult, and your perspective on technology and society changing.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but my story contradicts yours.

I started developing S/W professionally in 1986. It was cool for more than a decade. Then around 2000, software shifted to web dev and mobile, and I lost interest. Before 2000, we wrote code largely from scratch. After 2000, coding increasingly became copying-and-pasting from some ginormous S/W framework written by a committee. (That's why AlphaCode works.) The coder becomes a user. Don't write a function, call somebody else's function. That's programming by proxy.

Tech has changed. To me, that style of programming is a lot less fun.

I think saturation is a big part of it too. I feel almost overwhelmed when I start researching a new tech these days. I agree, I get a little bored now too.

I don’t think it was ever cool & it’s kind of always been a low status job as far as white collar stuff goes. Lots of negative stereotypes about us.

Stopped being cool after the 2016 US election when it's downsides became clear.

It will become cool again when it produces something that teens find cool.

Just about the time of arrival of node_modules, why?

When advertising took over. Once something starts to be about making money instead of the thing itself, it ceases to be "cool".

It became an TV show. Anything that reaches the point of become a meme for TV shows is already past the end of its road.

> Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable. Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

I'm guessing you have become numb to what is exciting - we're advancing majorly in energy storage, virtual reality is still growing, the M1 chip is freaking amazing, GPUs are getting insane, the watch on my wrist has an EKG, self-driving cars, drones are a commodity these days ... What did you have in mind?

That all says nothing about mRNA vaccines and other insane medical tech that has sprouted up in the last decade.

Probably when it became your day job.

There is plenty of great tech today. You're either not working on it or not aware of it.

It started in 2011 and probably won't end until we become a fission-powered civilization.

When we shifted from a culture of results and ownership to woke fantasies and entitlement.

Nah dude, its you. Nothing else

When it became mainstream and old. Popularity and age kills all things cool.

Any hobby that becomes ones 9-5 would suffer from that effect I’d imagine

When tech people say things like "most problems are people problems, not tech problems", showing that their field are already fully understood and they are just there to talk to a machine and not to build new things.

About five years ago when the mobile revolution ended.

If you feel like you’re in a drought, look for a source of water.

This is mine -> https://www.monero.observer/

When the money replaced the talent and curiosity.

just go back, car cdr your way into happiness.

take some wood a 2" display and pi zero and build something

tech has never been a solution to anything

Or “When did I grow old?” ;) I feel you :(

All the easy problems were solved, and the hard ones don't offer a good return on investment so they are only achieved by academia/serendipity.

It changed about the time I turned 28.

I'm joining a protein folding AI startup next month. I think it's awesome. Being on the cutting edge of our civilisation.

For me it started with having to write unit tests and acceptance tests and integration tests for the stuff I make.

Incredibly real challenge. There's a ton of other factors, but to me there's one big shift that has savaged tech's ability to be cool.

We have replaced personal computing with ultra-scale industrial computing. Instead of soft, flexible systems we can play with & explore, we have hard, fixed, far off & remote inflexible systems that we are end users to. We're all just chumps with some tiny slice of the mainframe, again.

Computing needs to get back to "soft"-ware. We need to make things malleable & flexible, need to allow people in, let them play with the technology more freely. We need to put actual people back at some kind of helm, let them free, let them explore & learn & fiddle/tweak & build. We have diminishing returns because it's only giant companies exploring & trying things.

We need a new starting place for liberatory/libre technology. Open-source is still kind of stuck inbetween the old FreeDesktop / personal-computer world and the new all-connnected networked age. We haven't really got many future-facing architectures or practices for what software might look like when connected. We have lots of toolkits for building client-server systems, for making ReST & graphql & other... but this kind of software tends to be much harder to run, less hackable/free in form. It risks granting us connectivity, but at the mortal cost of being "hard" not soft, & of asking a lot of our users.

We need both lightweight & fun & hackable, AND connected. How we make connected & hackable viable for end users, how we make it so people can easily get/create persistently available online connected systems- which are the table stakes these days- is very much up in the air, is unknown. More radical p2p is probably smarter/better/essential, for availability & resilience & connectivity/networking reasons. We have some interesting p2p, but it's still so To-Be-Determined what software architecture we'd use in these worlds, it's still so new.

To be honest, the One Laptop Per Child's DBus-over-XMPP system (Telepathy Tubes) is one of the most visionary & still promising interesting dots there is on the grid, to this day. There was a lot of research interest in the past in "mobile ambient" computing & mobile agents... this was one of the easiest to author, most "normal" paths I've seemed that semi-matches up, that was semi-pursuant to what seemed like a clean logical/conceptual framing for online computing.

Personally, today, I still see ActivityPub & ActivityStreams as the thing that's slowly opening the door, that's re-enchanting us & opening possibility. The aughts were a buzz of APIs and connectivity, but the tens were a massive undoing, a collapse, with so much diversity & vanguard efforts falling, collapsing, being rolled back. The internet hasn't had new internet shit in a long time. Getting people connecting with each other in new interesting ways, finding new basis for interoperation, interconnection, internetworking is 100% necessary to break us out of this take-over-by-the-giants, to create something adoptable & growable & enriching again. We need some basis for value creation, and right now, we technically don't have that: everything is hard set, hard fixed, gelled into place, inflexible. New protocols, new systems can help untie us.

But that's just the start- making things re-hackable, making it all soft, making online systems as personable as the personal computer was... that's the real challenge. We need a shared base, with well defined possibility & potential, and we need a landscape of tools/systems/implementations that makes covering this terrain fun & interesting. A new cyberspace will emerge, again, once again connected, but this time not ran/hosted entirely from inside the firewall.

The world was already full of appliances, but computing, for a time, was different, was more engaging: returning to something in which we can genuinely engage & immerse ourselves, learn of it & mold it: that is key. The way we do software right, alas, is focused on corporate platforms for building consumer applications/appliances, and that has made tech uninteresting, uncool, has reduced it to the level of toasters & bread slicers.

Never

You thought tech was cool?

if everything bores you, the problem is usually in you

Maybe it's just your outlook. VR is progressing rapidly. Electric cars can drive themselves. Rockets land themselves. We can output MRNA vaccine's in days that solve major issues. 3D printing is getting really awesome and cheap. You have access to more compute than ever. Deep learning is solving vision and language.

What's so boring?

When it became reliable

* algorithmic timelines circa 2009

* bitcoin price jump in 2017

it won’t be over, the cat’s out of the bag

you're just creating your own inner narrative

I remember being in a computer store in 1993 and we were lamenting that CD based multimedia was kind of unexciting and burning out as a trend and wondering what would be next. Tech seemed to be getting boring at that point. This was right before Linux and the Internet came in the scene of course. Before that software development sucked. Most algorithm libraries cost money or even had royalties and a lot of devs implemented them from scratch because of that.

Things were awesome in the 90s though. Computers really doubled in speed every two years or so. It was incredible. The internet was new and totally anarchic. Linux kept winning and winning. Little sites could get to the top of search engines. Google and Facebook advertising were super cheap and effective. Things got better every year.

After 2016, probably because Trump won and tech got all the blame, things started to go downhill. Trump winning was like the tech version of 9/11 to the people who like to take the fun out of tech. That's when all the tech censorship and heavy political scrutiny started. Things had already been deteriorating for some time, but all the Stallman hacker ethos free speech energy started quickly draining away and getting replaced with fear of saying the wrong thing. That's when code of conducts started showing up and you had the woke invasion of all the big open source projects. Tech, which had previously been an independent island above politics, now had an influx of gatekeepers and paranoid "ethics" enforcers. People were scared that tech was too powerful and could do too much.

There's still crypto at least. Anything that has a heavy top down control element in crypto just falls flat on its face because the community rejects it. That's where the next Linux and internet will probably emerge from. That's the only thing these days that feels like the early BBS and online days in the early 90s currently. The people making things suck are always watching though. For example, consumer 3D printing is likely about to get killed in its infancy because of ghost guns.

August 12, 1981

Diminishing returns? Covid vaccines that can be developed over a weekend due to computing power don't sound like diminishing returns, more like we are just getting started.

I think one main factor is privacy first thinking. Obviously security is important, and we should make software secure, but todays coders would rather just not have certain things at all(Like smart devices) than try to secure them.

The other thing is smartphones. They are better than any old gadget. But they don't have the cool factor exactly.

SaaS is the other thing. SaaS might be practical but it is never "cool". It goes away when the internet does, and can be cancelled at any time.

The other thing is set and setting, and tolerance. I know basically nothing about drugs, but any material thing that gives you a dopamine hit is often thought of like a drug.

We don't remember the amazing quality of video games, even though that was better too. We remember split screen multiplayer, staying out to get stuff on launch day, lan parties and the people we went there with, and all kinds of other stuff.

If I was into HAM, I think I'd be in it for field day, conversations with the elmers, learning about history, maybe vague ideas of preparedness, etc.

The current philosophy of products in general is minimalism. We have elegant restaurant focused entirely on the food, not rainforest cafes.

We focus on things by themselves, as isolated standalone things, trying to build the platonic ideal of a chat app or a text editor.

But... tech and food and money and drugs and clothes and everything else like that is just kind of OK. Context is everything as far as emotional impact, and it has a role in practicality too, the most useful software is often not a pure ideal of some function, it's designed around a common real world issue.

Tech is now advanced enough to do things entirely virtually. The setting is gone. You don't haul a box to a lan party.

Also, saturation and competition.

Tech used to seem like something where buying some gadget made you able to do things nobody else could. If you got a camera, you were a photographer, because they were expensive and hard to use and there was no Instagram.

The high barrier to entry made fame and success seem like it was a matter of dedication that you could achieve by saving up and studying some books, rather than random chance, being good looking, or being born with world-class talent.

You could still do something new and interesting without spending ten years and 100k on it. 99% of the startups these days seem to be an existing thing, but worse, with NFTs.

There was also almost no true clickbait. Much more of the internet content was made by users.

I believe the "Golden age" was probably from about '83(Just a guess, I wasn't here yet), to about 2006, with the transition completed by 2010.

Once endless scrolling and phones all day took over... Where's the market for any other tech? Only a few specific things are still relevant in a world where life is mostly on a screen, with just ten minute long interludes in physical space.

Everything becomes less cool once you know it.

Since you mentioned Star Trek, I've been a lifelong enthusiast of Trek. The new stuff (junk) notwithstanding, I'm totally over Star Trek. I've seen every episode who knows how many times. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.

Tech is no different, or at least specialized facets of tech are no different.

This is exactly why I have recently pivoted from web development to working on a hardware project and using C++. It provides that same excitement I had back when I was first learning to code. Though right now it's just my own thing, I'm solving a tangible problem and get to learn things like writing native code, designing circuit boards, working with a microcontroller, using OpenSCAD, and so forth. Even if it goes no further than a toy prototype, it's been a lot of (albeit expensive) fun. Just the moment of receiving a shipment of PCBs that I designed, that were now manufactured at a factory, that actually worked upon assembly, was an exquisite feeling.

Tech is many things. I think if anyone is bored and there's nothing like family obligations holding them back, they should consider branching out into something else that might satisfy that itch. If you've just stuck to things like JavaScript and Ruby, don't think that you can't do something like program microcontrollers with C++.

On the other hand, I really do think that the concept of "web scale" has made the field far less fun. We all love to scoff at buzzwords, yet we are the greatest purveyors of buzzwords and cargo-culting technology.

Kubernetes or GTFO. Rust or GTFO. Who uses Wepback anymore, bruh? I think my grandpa used AngularJS. Aren't SPAs a thing from like 2006? There's no way a Rails app can scale, bruh. Do you even BDD, bruh? Who seriously doesn't use Typescript nowadays? Every successful startup uses blockchain now with AI. Microservices are pointless without microfrontends. You mean you're not even using LiveView?

It's like we no longer believe that you can just write something however you want and then do the work to scale them up if the time ever comes. Everything needs to be shiny new cool-tech out of the gate and compete with as much traffic as The Google.

Yeah, it was always kind of that way, but I think it's a lot worse than when I first got into the field.

Oh, and there's also the possibility that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get startups off the ground without already having revenue to start with. What happened to the garage-startup? You don't really hear about those anymore. Granted, I've yet to start a startup, but my impression is that nowadays investors are playing the game so safe that Jobs and Woz might have never achieved velocity.

We need to get over ourselves a bit, which is why I think it would actually be a good thing if the tech world could see another correction. We haven't had a meaningful correction since the dotcom bubble.

There are some improvements still happening - mobile computing (i.e. phones) are going from strength to strength both in terms of raw power/capabilities, but also ubiquity both in the west and elsewhere.

Programming languages are still exiting - say what you want about slow Electron apps and slow ReactJS websites, but I think that Javascript itself is fucking exciting. It is highly performant, continually getting upgraded, has a low-barrier to entry, and is pretty ubiquitous - where ever someone has a browser (in their phone, desktop, laptop) they've got this super-powered javascript engine that they can just jump in and use for anything they can think of thanks to rich APIs available in all modern browsers (and even non-browser runtimes e.g. node & deno still have a lot of APIs they can call on). I am very excited about the future of javascript.

And of course, the more recent (last 4 or 5 years ago anyway) ML stuff is pretty cool. You can just spin up a ML inference model now with a few lines of code and do what would have been impossible just a few years previously (e.g. the classic xkcd comic about the bird in the photo). The shame with ML is that there seems to be a preference to use Python a lot which is a real shame because its shit.

Likewise cloud computing is now a thing - you can just easily spend a few bucks to "borrow" a server for whatever. No sales calls, no minimum contract periods, no paper work - just put in your payment details and you are away for as long or as short as you want it. Maybe you dont even want a server? perhaps you just need to host a single function? Or just store some files somewhere, perhaps run a DB. All doable now. That is exciting and a great liberator to individuals to try stuff out and do exciting stuff.

Finally, Raspberry Pi has been a smash-hit and has transformed kids access and interest in tech. I am genuinely excited for my kids to get into this - Raspberry Pi foundation has been doing absolutely great work - we do loads of work/volunteering with kids using RPis and scratch etc and they absolutely love it. This is really exciting that a whole new generation of kids are growing up learning to programme from an early age. A certain cohort of kids got a similar experience in the early 80s, but there were a couple of decades in there where youngsters were "locked out" of the basics, so it is great to see this coming back. As a bonus us grown-ups can now get a $15 "disposable" well-supported linux computer for any random thing we can think of (put it in a balloon, put it around a cat's neck as it wanders around, hard-wire it into your car, perhaps make a digital microscope out of it, run a web server off of solar in your back garden - you name it)

web3 is cool :)

if you want to indulge in this feeling more, read some Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism, or Ghosts of My Life

I think the question will invariably result in people telling you that it's an age thing. That your interests have changed and that you've matured. That you reached a point in life where you, like many others, can't spend time to mess around with tech, but you just want something that works or you just want to relax after a hard day at work. And that might be all very true. I know I don't have time in day to play 10-12-24 hours straight to finish a game and wait to meet up with friends to talk about it. I know I also don't have time to be bored on day and spend the entire day doing distro hopping for no other reason than to see what has changed since the last day I did that.

Another answer can be that you now see past the veil that technology raises in front of itself. You now know the technical background, you understand the cold hard facts that form the software that you use and consume.

I think though that reality is a lot more complicated. The big reason for that is money and capitalism.

Let's say you are coming up with an idea for something, an app, a movie or book. You now have to get some money to make it because it's non-trivial, but you're committed to getting this idea off the ground. You put in your blood sweat and tears and after a long agonizing period to have something you're proud of which you then share with the rest of us. Here, one of the stories that always comes to mind is the first Matrix movie. I am sure that a similar story has unfolded in a lot of other fields, creative or technical. Now that creation took everything from you and it might yield some financial results, let's say 10% ROI. Maybe more, but let's say it was 10%.

Now in order for you to make that thing, you had to give everything. But what if someone copies your recipe for success and pumps out 5 or 10 similar creations. What if someone decides to make some ripoff or to catch the wave and flood the market with replicas. Or even worse, what if the people that bankrolled your first creation now own the IP for the creation and they decide that you now need to expand or follow up your story. What if your amazing Game 1.0 now is followed by Game 2.0 (which copies most of the same and ads very little content, yet generates a much higher profit margin?). Then Game 3.0. By Game 4.0 they decide to just remake Game 1.0 so they call it Game 1.0 Remastered - All the original content in 4K. Or Movie 1.0. Or Avengers 7.

I think the big problem is that our creative and technological mediums have been flooded by people coming into it for the money. How many articles do you find with "learn to code and make beaucoup bucks!!!"? Similarly, how many new, up and coming directors and actors do you see that create something as culture shocking or defining as American Beauty, Fight Club, Batman (1989 one...)? You don't. Because people join tech for the money, because no one studies creative writing, directing, but our STEM universities are flooded. The humanities are flooded by a different group of people, no longer willing to push the envelope, to explore what makes us unique, crazy, weird and interesting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that money has corrupted tech. It corrupted the creative arts and it has corrupted us. So we have tech that can generate revenue, tech that can provide that ROI and that steady growth. We have "art" that at best replicates a long lost era or a cultural trend to make some quick cash.

Tech will not be cool and will stay uncool for as long as people are in it for the money solely. It will not be cool for as long as a VC expects to get it's money back + something extra. And why is the VC there? Because it's hard to compete against the giants without extra funding...

Sorry for the scattershot post, I am still refining a lot of my arguments here, but I hope the main point comes across...

Money, capitalism, yes.

I'd add the capture of media, politics and justice. While those essentially boil down to 'money and capitalism', they are their own problems.

Steal a loaf of bread? Prison, high bail. Steal a competitors novel tech idea? Well done, aren't you such a savvy capitalist. Your investors must be so happy.

Media, politics and justice are complicit in all this. And that's why tech sucks now.

When Elon Musk

I see this opinion everywhere: “Tech and tech culture is awful now.”

It’s not, it has the same problems that it did before, possibly fewer because effort has been put into acknowledging and correcting them.

Things today are objectively better than what came before. The difference is PR. It’s no longer “cool” to report on technology. It’s cool for people with little to no background in technology to trash technology for the amusement of other, similarly uninitiated, people.

The current anti-tech media trend started with the show Silicon Valley [0]. It exposed some tech non-sense to non-tech people and gave them effective tools to make fun of the nerds they didn’t like anyway. Instead of generating empathy or sympathy for the good people stuck in or trying to change those systems, it made it ok to paint every person working in tech with the same brush you’d reserve for its worst actors.

It’s like Blockchain and NFTs. All the sudden people started getting up riled up about them. But, when you ask them how they feel about the dark implications of HTTP they don’t have much of an opinion. An opinion hasn’t been given to them. You can usually swap out Blockchain for HTTP and their arguments would still make perfects sense.. But then, who’d listen?

It’s hard to become a competent workaday programmer. The people who know how to program are able to generate and accumulate wealth at a rate unattainable by most non-programmers. With the fabric of our society wearing thinner and thinner the gulf between an engineer at DoorDash and a delivery person contracted by DoorDash is widening. There’s something inherently unfair about what’s happening today. We can all feel it. But, the answer isn’t to burn everything down and start over with a NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST UTOPIA. It’s to correct course.

I’ve worked with anti-capitalist people in media. The way they treat each other is shocking, only slightly better than the way they treat everyone else. Instead of seeing laws, corporations, and technology, as how people interact and engage with one another, they see evils that they refuse to master. Instead of empowering themselves by understanding the systems of the world and making them accessible to others, they’ve decided that it’s easier, and more profitable in the short-term, to rail against these inherent evils and their practitioners. They’ve concluded that the system is corrupt, the board needs to be flipped, and anything short of that is heresy.

Hating on tech and tech people is something that the cool kids do now. I’d wager that you feel the way you do in part because you’re being bombarded with messaging about the evils of technology as stand-ins for almost every problem the world is facing. Sometimes the criticism is nuanced and thoughtful. It’s usually not.

[0]: Which is fantastic.

The answer is that capitalism fucked it up, but since we were a capitalist country even in the 1970s to '90s, this obviously requires further analysis.

We didn't "win" the Cold War. Rich people did; working people lost. The rest of us are worse off than we were beforehand, and in the former Soviet bloc this is especially true: the Russian 1990s were even worse than the American 2020s (so far).

I'm no advocate for the Soviet system. It was deeply flawed and its eventual failure was not entirely caused by imperial aggression. That said, the USSR's existence was a boon for the American middle class. Whatever you think of communism, this is an objective fact. One of the reasons is that, during the Cold War, we needed research supremacy.

Both sides of the conflict were so scared of the other, they invested heavily in building a middle class, because that's where most of the research talent is going to come from--even if you're a staunch elitist who actually buys into upper-class meritocracy (a belief refuted, in the US, by any contact with the actual upper class), the middle class is so much larger, so any society that wants to excel in R&D is going to treat it well. Both the USSR and the West deliberately engineered middle classes that they protected from the failures of their systems.

Tech was "cool" because our society gave a certain set of highly talented people R&D jobs in which they could pretty much work on whatever they wanted. You weren't guaranteed to get rich working for DARPA, but you'd have a solid middle-class lifestyle and lifetime financial security, and basically have free rein in your choice of projects. So, there was a lot of innovation, because people could work on things that might not drive revenue in the next quarter.

Of course, we "won" the Cold War in late 1991 and the Soviet Union is no more. The elites of the West no longer need a huge middle class. In the EU, there has been some political resistance against dismantling it; in the US, there was almost none. We had a few good years when we were able to coast, but after 9/11--and certainly after 2008--it was clear that the same people from the First Gilded Age were back in charge. And now tent cities and mass preventable death by infectious disease and even slavery (prison labor) are fully back. Yay capitalism?

So, these days, tech is no longer about expanding human capability; it's about enriching the already rich (and careerist middle managers). Almost all of the money in technology is made in these seven things:

1. Unemploying people (evergreen, alas). 2. Spying on people to unemploy them, or to squeeze more out of workers (also evergreen). 3. Dressing up old rent-seeking businesses as "tech companies", thereby allowing them to run at a loss for ten years (dumping) while they try to outlive existing players. 4. Speculative nonsense investments like badly-drawn pictures of butts. 5. Usury (evergreen) and myriad technologies and tools necessary to support an economy that runs on it. 6. Killing people for the benefit of various private entities (a nation's supposed "economic interests"). 7. Wanton exploitation of tech nostalgia, often through mediocre accomplishments. In the late 1960s, we sent people to the Moon. In 2021, a CEO whose workers pee in bottles spends millions (billions?) to take a piss 70 miles over our heads, and we treat that as a real accomplishment because it's "private spaceflight". SMFH.

These are all shitty, not at all cool, and the culture follows. Consequently, we flooded by the refuse of other industries--the people who fail in private equity or aren't smart enough to become traders all go West and boss nerds around, earning $500k (or more) in jobs that involve teabagging H1-Bs and teenagers with their Agile Scrums.

If we want tech to be better, we have to take back our industry. This will be hard, and we will face opposition--possibly violent opposition, seeing as people are physically harassed and blacklisted even now on the suspicion of union sympathies.

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