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> I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.

It's not a relativism as applied to a specific technology, it's a relativism as applied to development as a whole. The 60s-80s represented a flowering of semiconductor applications, before which we had a huge period of radio and telephony experimentation. Each era had its low-hanging fruit ripe for innovation which became a mature, hard-to-innovate technology in the future.

There's new trends out there now. On the creative side of things, bloggers, artists, and influencers are toppling the old ideas of media empires and stodgy publishing houses. A Soundcloud god can sell out a stadium and virtual avatars are filling concert halls. Non-web-tech fields like climate tech are seeing crazy investment throughout the globe. It's true that webtech now is seen as a safe, stable, lucrative career but there's always something on the bleeding edge. It just might not be your thing and that's okay, that's what the kids are for. Or, pivot your career and try something new if that's what you want.

I would imagine Doom and PageRank was the right person finding the right problem to work on at the right time in the right domain.

If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.

A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.

I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.

> There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.

AI (LLMs) represents a platform shift on a large scale and I feel the environment is similar to that which birthed Zuckerberg type entrepreneurs. I think in the next 5 years Gen Z will have its heyday in terms of tech startups... At least, that's what I tell myself.

Yeah, I agree the Web3.0 stuff was overhyped--not really a platform or thinking shift. There are a lot of black-hat hackers who are Gen Z, because generally only young people take risks like that while simultaneously having the skills to get paid a tech salary.