Comment by watercooler_guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by watercooler_guy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

watercooler_guy

I think the novel and interesting tech is still happening, its just that without the colorful ads for it on TV, and without the software being packaged up and sold with pretty box art that you can physically hold, it doesn't feel as much like a capital-E Experience. It's probably the Internet's fault that we don't do things like that anymore, but the upside is that we now have access to so many ideas and applications from all over, even ones that aren't commercially viable.

Some that look exciting to me are: an AI that lets you animate still photos realistically [1], a simple website that guides you to discover new parks, eateries, and other places near you [2], an AI that colorizes old black-and-white photos/video [3], a Street View style map of the game world from "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", with some 1st person 360 degree photos [4], and a tiny game engine that lets you distribute your whole game physically via printed QR codes [5].

If marketing and graphic design people ever felt like getting together to do some 'side projects', I vote that they should make print ads for apps/websites that they like :)

[1] https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model

[2] https://randomlocation.xyz (https://randomlocation.xyz/help.txt for customization)

[3] https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify

[4] https://nassimsoftware.github.io/zeldabotwstreetview/

[5] https://github.com/kesiev/rewtro

That stuff is cool and all, but revolutionary? Nah, it's all predictable. Doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of the early days of computers and the internet which was opening up the world and changing lifestyles

I think ai stuff will have a similar wonder when it's capabilities for improvising things becomes deeper. The only difference is that now some people are understably scared of the implications of such impacts relative to the internet's growth which was very optimistic.

True, there is a stark difference between the optimism before vs. the more dystopian outlook that a lot of people (myself included) share about it

'A just machine to make big decisions, programmed by fellas with compassion and vision...'

This is just 20/20 hindsight. To most people back then it didn't feel completely revolutionary, because it was still niche and pretty limited in what computers could do.

VR might be revolutionary, but we won't know until after several more years, when it's either gone mainstream or clearly stalled out. I know there are people who will immediately nitpick that VR isn't revolutionary, which is ironic because this happens any time there's a nascent potentially revolutionary technology about: people nitpicking that it's not good enough yet, or arguing that it's not compelling (which is often just because it's not mature enough yet).

You don't know if anything's actually revolutionary until it's mature and saturated the market, but by then it's not really new anymore, so it's easy to dismiss it as old hat. By the time smartphones had percolated down to the point where even working-class randos had them, we'd had iOS and Android for several years, and of course earlier forms of smartphones for several years or more before those.

For a long time they were dismissed as mere "toys for techies" with limited real-world application for the regular person. Which was true, until it suddenly wasn't.

No, it absolutely did feel revolutionary.

People had seen computers running corporate departments and calculating orbits for NASA. Suddenly they were told they could have one too. At home.

The fact that it didn't do much was part of the fun, because it meant you had to master the technology to make it usable.

So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.

Modern computing doesn't offer that. It's all about playing in someone else's sand pit. Whether it's FB/Twitter, the app store, or an Amazon drop shipping business, or an ad-funded entertainment site, or a side project on GitHub - you're working inside an environment imposed on you by others, which you can't change and don't own.

You could say "How is that different to BASIC?" The difference is that using BASIC never felt like being part of someone else's machine. It was your tool, you could what you liked with it. There was no sense of being a cog in a factory which printed money for other people.

> So it was a double pitch - personal power, personal mastery.

Maybe that is how you experienced it as a computer nerd like myself, but that was not the pitch.

For business it was computers for all just like the big boys. For families it was prepare your kids for this new computer oriented world. For us kids it was play computer games at home without having to stick coins into a machine at the mall. But us kids had to play the education angle on our parents who had credit cards. :-)

No, it absolutely did feel revolutionary.

Until then only big companies could afford a computer to manage their data and accounting, etc. Microcomputers changed that and made the hardware available to every company.

VisiCalc on the software side was the killer app that relatively normal people could learn and use to improve their business work. Spreadsheets were certainly a revolution.

On the home front, affordable microcomputers arrived and it was widely recognised that the revolution was here. Computers were the future and every parent should get one to prepare their kids (ok, sons) for it. This explains the marketing around microcomputers being for families.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com