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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot changed, socially, over that time.

Inflation, crypto, and sports betting removed almost all stigma from gambling.

Being in your 20s with a crippling gambling addiction is just normal now.

The tech industry has finish metamorphosis and is now just another financial industry. No care towards building great products or solving real problems.

Just building great pitch decks and solving for investor attraction.

OAI is the peak example. ChatGPT was the fastest growing product ever and, especially in the early forms, sucked.

Even now, it’s just kind of mid.

OAI seems more focused on regulatory capture and spending on compute rather than innovating.

That’s why deep seek caught them with their pants down.

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I think you're overstating the betting angle. I saw and read about people buying buying lotto tickets long before COVID. Sports betting is certainly a bigger deal but day trading was a big thing in the dot-com era well before crypto.

And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry. There have been shifts; there's a lot more about open source for example. AI is way over-hyped probably but there's still the core of something useful there even if we don't really know how it will develop.

> I think you're overstating the betting angle

My sister is currently 23 and I talk to her about this a lot. At least from what she tells me, I don’t think I am.

I mean… pump.fun exists…

Remember, the 20yo people now grew up with CS go betting, loot box mania, then sports betting, then crypto.

They’ve been cooked wrt gambling their whole lives.

> And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry

I don’t think that’s true, mostly.

Please give me some links. I’d honestly like to see where.

I feel so down on tech right now.

I feel like all I do is work on money making machines without solving actual problems for people.

>> And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry

>I don’t think that’s true, mostly.

I mean there's all the work in the cloud-native space. Fusion and quantum remain speculative and probably relatively long term but you can't say there isn't a lot of innovative work going on there. Lots of little things in the Linux kernel and elsewhere in open source even beyond cloud-native. AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.

> the cloud-native space

I'd argue that a big chunk of that particular space is sales innovation rather than tech innovation. But I'm admittedly pretty jaded and cynical of all the bs at this point.

I guess when I say “innovation” I’m not talking about advancements in science or incremental improvements to existing solutions, but using those advancements to solve real problems for people.

It feels like tech lost the plot. (This was most apparent during the NFT craze)

We advance technology for the sake of it, assuming that solutions will be found using this new technology.

There’s no focus on people anymore, just technology in the hopes that one will be a jackpot.

> AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.

I think we’re on the same page here and it illustrates my point.

Innovation still happens, ofc. I think AlphaFold is a major innovation, for example.

I just feel like it’s no longer the focus of the industry at large

I’m quite curious what you consider innovation (and not)?

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