Dull?

You can hang the equivalent of an eighties micro on anything you please and record things nobody has ever seen before, download the data en masse to your pocket supercomputer, sync that to an AI and make accurate predictions that can be used to affect real world outcomes.

You can talk to anyone on the planet with minimal charges.

You can take infinite numbers of pictures of everything at insane resolutions, backyard astronomy is unbelievable compared to the Sun era.

Computing has never been so exciting. If you think you missed out because you weren't in silicon valley in the 1980s, the amount of cool work being done everywhere but the valley needs reconsidering.

I've been doing this since the 80s and its never been better than now.

It feels boring because for the most part, we have solved some of the most common problems that we needed computers for. The idea of watching movies, ordering groceries/food, talking to a friend/family 8000 miles away in a second were all interesting and fancy and now it is part of life. So we get bored. Today's personal computers pretty much do everything we need in terms of basic necessities. I was driving earlier today and realized the power of Maps on our phones. Imagine back in the days when you need to print mapquest (remember?) or plain old maps to figure out how to get to the Interstate from this new place you just visited.

Things like VR etc so far (my opinion) have been disappointments for the most part even though we keep trying to innovate. Also, remember 3D TVs ?

I guess we need things like teleportation, real robots (not the one like Rocky IV movie) and some cooler stuff to make it interesting again.

I think there was a lot more novelty and shock/awe in amazing new things when we didn't have youtube channels and social media of every new thing immediately poring over ever detail of it.

For instance, when ID first released DOOM to the Internet and BBSes it was something you discovered on your own and among your local community of people who had network access and a PC capable of running it, there weren't hundreds of youtube channels playing full-1080p playthroughs of the entire game, etc.

Software engineering is no longer considered engineering these days. People mash abstractions together without even trying to understand what's beneath those abstractions. Knowing what you're actually doing seems to be a big deal in software development now.

> Computers as a whole seem so boring nowadays.

For most of us everything becomes less exciting as we get older compared to our youth. Our minds are less responsive to novelty and there’s less novelty to be had. Kids still get enthralled by computers these days.

Sometimes i think this too.

I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like nothing.

If I’m doing something with a load of libraries and feel like a plumber more than a programmer then I find that excitement hard to come by.

Playing with modern day microcontrollers, SoC stuff or building software with hard real-time requirements is still a lot of fun - i just don’t get to do it so much these days.

Computers are boring but system on chips are kind of interesting again now that you need all this compute for AI.

People have made huge mistakes waiting for workloads that have very predictable computation, now with AI we have a need for coprocessors again.

I'll share a controversial opinion: I think computers were always boring, even if you worked for Sun Microsystems, yes even in 1981. In 1981, the Intel 8086 had been on the market for 3 years, and the 68000 had been on the market for 2 years. There were probably a hundred startup companies trying to make a workstation to compete with Sun. If you went to work for one of those companies, you crashed and burned or were acquired, and got to watch the project you worked so hard on become abandoned.

One of the things that drew me to urbit is it feels like when I first started playing with linux. It's fun, but in a way that tackles some real underlying issues with the modern web/computing stack.

The ideas are interesting and whatever happens it's definitely not boring imo: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

It is the paradox of choice or abundance. I remember that in the early 90s getting a bootleg copy of turbo C for my PC was something that I eagerly anticipated for the weeks it took me to finally get the disks. Heck, I was excited to install windows 3.1. To be frank even using debug.com to execute some small snippets of assembly code was terribly exciting. Because there was not a lot of much else to do.

Right, because micro computers have had decades of investment and development, when in 1982 they were like 15 years old (microprocessors anyway (HN correct me)).

Now the excitement is probably something that new or newer.. drones, recent ML, AR/VR/XR, wearable, or something that I don't know what it is. It's gotta be something where most people think it won't even work.

Computers have not become boring. You have become old. Kids these days are having more fun than ever with today's computers.

I think once the VR goggles get more portable, hopefully the size of contact lenses one day, it will make things super exciting once again. I just hope it happens in the next 20 years.

Let me guess, computers were a lot more interesting and amazing when you were a teenager and into your early 20s?

It’s not dull really but I find it laborious and sometimes stupid. The sense of achievement has been sucked away by deep rabbit holes of research required to decipher even the simplest tasks. The retention and value of knowledge has declined due to the transient nature of everything too. Every day is a catching up session for something which is either horrible or will be replaced before you’ve finished the job.

I reserve the label stupid specifically for templated YAML which makes me want to strangle people fairly quickly.