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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Altogether far too much computing happens in far off mainframes. Aka the cloud. Far too little computing can genuinely be engaged with. The potential has been coopted & occluded & we're left chainrd to the cave again, starting at megacompany's shadowpuppets.

It's worth admitting the formative years are often a lot of fun. Some come-down is expected.

But I also believe collective discontent slowly grows in this deeply consumerized computing climate & eventually we'll push for new terrain, grow tired of this technostratifocation.

I don't see this in my work. I've been hanging microcontrollers off sheep for the last 5 years. Sure, some of it is cloud based but a lot of it is visceral, tough, hard to write code that is very satisfying.

Your work isnt cloud but it sounds equally industrial, equally as much as a rebuff of personal computing. Your eork os reserved for & explorable only by a very very very few.

many many people on this site have great & wonderful experineces with computing, are.greatly empowered & do good things. but rarely will our efforts have a tangible output on computing itself, affect the way anyone else computes. the general iniative of computing has somewhat rather stalled, become overexploited for narrow & controlled ends.

maybe, maybe not. I can get VC funding and in 2 months time have a compute cluster with thousands of nodes processing terabits per second of data. Then when my funding runs out I can just shut it all down and not worry about what to do with all that stuff.

Compare that to prior to cloud where you'd need to secure DC space, sign multiple contracts with many vendors. Wait many quarters for all that equipment to land. Hire a small army of consultants and experts to configure all this stuff. Then when the PM team says you know what, what about that new feature...we'll say no as we just made this huge capex purchase.

The Cloud has democratized super computing to the masses. Truly amazing

If you want to make a 3d rendering beyond 1990s Pixar's wildest dreams, the Cloud is fantastic for it. If you want to run protein folding simulations, or atmospheric modeling, it's fantastic. It's also effective if you want an always-on server for video analysis of home security cameras. Even if that could be done locally instead. As a developer, the Cloud is great, because you can rent a server farm instead of buying it. As a user, the Cloud is horrendous, because you are forced to rent software instead of buying it.

The Cloud has hasn't democratized super computing. It just expanded to a slightly larger oligarchy.

VMs as a service are a good tradeoff, since you control most of the software you run (except the hypervisor) and can move it to your local devices easily, which usually also have good hypervisors.

Of course, with VMs you still have the problem of having to be a sysadmin and setup, configure and secure software. I guess that is why SaaSS is so popular.

The Cloud has hasn't democratized super computing.

I, as a hobbyist anywhere in the world and with no company affiliation, can set up a 100 CPU compute cluster, run my own software on it and then shut it down again, all for less than the price of a movie ticket. How is that not democratisation.

That's only an issue if you structure your computing activities around network services. The computer remains as a powerful tool to do whatever you want. Just because the bulk of the public wants to do things mediated by a network doesn't mean that you are limited to the same.

And still printing a web page is real challenge. And if you want to compile a programm you find out that it needs 30 libraries. Some things are better. Most of the things are worse. I have a text editor on my Android phone. It cannot do search and replace.

I don't have any problems printing web pages. Rick click, print, done.

Non trivial programs always required a lot of libraries. At least now you don't have to wait 3 weeks for a tape to show up so you can continue working.

Vim for Android is a thing [0]

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.droidvim&h...

Vim[0] for iOS too

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660

I print articles/pages to PDF all the time to read them on my e-ink. They come out readable about 30% of the time thanks to multiple layers of banners and popups on the average site these days. It's annoying that even (and especially!) Medium/Wordpress etc can't be bothered to exclude them from @media print. I usually end up editing the site via devtools before printing, but that's not always an option (eg. in third party mobile apps for pdf export).

Make your websites printable, darnit. It's very little effort to get 90% there.

Yes, please make your sites printable, with no popups or ads or other garbage!

Also, somebody make an extension so that every webpage renders with its print style sheet, so I don’t need to see the popups or ads or other garbage.

To me, one exciting motivation today in computing is rethinking and simplifying systems.

https://youtu.be/k0uE_chSnV8 https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk

Nice, Jonathan Blow. Although I may not understand the underlying philosophy under which his arguments are made, he's inspired me to challenge ideas that are sometimes given for granted. I'd definitely be interested in working with operating systems or even systems theory, although I haven't put much thought to it.

Printing has been solved a long time ago. Do you remember having to search for/install printer drivers?

Even after a few years, I'm still amazed that I can print from my phone to a wireless printer I have at home, and how easy it was to setup.

My mom’s printer is basically care free.

$200 and she has a scanner/copier/printer and I pay about $60 a year and she automatically gets paper and ink from HP. Most of what she does is from an iPad, which is setup free. The laptop required some minor setup.

$60 a year is great. She dosen't print much.

My mother's HP stops printing completely if one color is down.

She only prints B/W.

(Personally I think printing companies shot themselfs in the foot with chipped cartridges. Instead of printing out willynilly; we, most of America, only prints out what's absolutely necessary. It's a business move on their part I will never understand. They tried to amend there blunder with Eco, but it's a bit too late. We got used to not printing. "Here's a picture of Billy Sue riding her brother's bike." Of course, we don't print it out like the 2000's and hang it on the frig.)

>Do you remember having to search for/install printer drivers?

..yes? I need to fight with weird driver installers every time I connect new device to my Brother printer. (and then you setup scanner and printing stops working, arghh...)

That's my experience. I have some cheap Samsung laser printer connected to my network, and a page comes out a few seconds later whenever I pick "print". It reminds me that it exists when I open the paper tray to steal a sheet of paper for notes and the rollers turn on when the tray is closed. Can't complain.

You weren't paying attention from 91-95 or so, then. You'd run into Sun, SGI, OS/2, 3.1, Mac, NeXT, and DOS everywhere you looked, and might have heard about Linux. New Netscape versions were released nightly. There was no data mining, or ads.

Hacking on my Commodore 64 in the 80s was much more fun than the web app of the week I'm doing now.

Get into hardware. Pick up a micro controller, its all restricted memory, C or assembly, awful tools, big challenges.

Its just as satisfying as an 80s micro and a lot more useful.

Cheap microcontrollers are beefy these days. You can run Python on them; plug it into your workstation, open "code.py" on the drive, write your program, enjoy. Yes, there's the REPL too!

> Dull?

Yes, dull. Technology has been made into a walled garden consumer product. Hosted on remote servers ("cloud") tighly locked away, non-interoperable and no serviceable parts inside as the sticker says. Dull.

Hm maybe you should try Linux.

or maybe like Linux From Scratch, to spice things up :)

Been using Linux since late 1993.

But I'm talking about the tech industry and products.

maybe thats the problem right there.

EVERYBODY is using some unix these days (android, linux, ios, macos) so it's not cool and nerdy anymore, it's your mom, uncle, grandparents ... it's dull.

Or FreeBSD.

Not for me. Anyone can create the future outside of those walled gardens. The price of entry has never been lower.

Computing could be more exciting than it's ever been - were it not for the walled gardens being build all about.

For me, I imagine part of the excitement is applying the art of computer science every day at your job back then. When things are taken care of for you, they become boring. Not because those things are inherently boring, but they're boring because you're no longer thinking about them. You can't get excited about things you aren't thinking about. Many jobs transitioned from surgeons with scalpels to supergluing prefab parts together. Which one sounds more exciting to you? I'd rather be a surgeon.

C'mon over to databases. Computer science is alive and well here.

Computing is less fun exactly because all this is commonplace.

Yes, but the question then becomes, is it more fun and exciting to use those things, or was it more fun and exciting to build the underlying technologies and products?

I agree with you fully. It's just that tech stopped giving the same dopamine boost as social platforms nowadays.

Around about as long. It's been reined in and put to work for real. Whips don't hurt much, for now.

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