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Comment by tor0ugh | Hacker News Reader

It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated content, curated interfaces - everything that resembles some kind of hardship ironed out in thousand steps of iterations to appease the market which means the lowest common denominator.

But I also see that the people who can create the absolute most and the good things and the working things and the maintainable things nowadays are the people that have gained a tool, but not lost the knowledge of the medium we are using it on because we are tied to this old world so perfectly put under the spotlight in this blog post.

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The financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably.

Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.

In my mind, 'tinkering for fun and knowledge' was never meant to be profitable - if you're tinkering with the express aim of making a profit i'm not sure you're really 'tinkering' so much as you're trying to create a product/service/output for someone else to pay for?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that - I'm just not sure the 'ethos' of tinkering has anything to do with trying to make money and is usually reserved for describing someone playing about with something for their own enjoyment/fun with no desire to make money.

Now, of course some people did find that their tinkerings were able to make them money, but I think at its base it's a term I'd tend to say implies doing something for fun/for themselves, rather than doing it for profit?

In my experience there's still plenty of people out there tinkering just for their own personal satisfaction, but of course there's almost certain a whole load more people out there 'tinkering' to try make a profit.

Agreed, I'd say tinkering for profit has become the defacto optimization and tinkering for its own sake is less fashionable because it commands no attention. and everyone is obsessed with the modern currency: attention.

To be clear, I'm seeing this as an observed phenomenon, not that everyone made up their mind that they hate tinkering and love money. I just think it's getting really really hard to exist in the world as a normal person when the entire human collective is getting pumped commercialized hyper-media from all angles at all times now 100X'd by genAI bots. It's really exhausting and so you either opt-in to the game, monetize your now AI side-hustle to pay the rent, or opt-out and live in the woods. and get packages delivered by Amazon. heh.

> 'tinkering for fun and knowledge' was never meant to be profitable

That's why it's "for fun and knowledge" and not "for profit".

"warm nostalgia" "reformatting C drives due to malware"

Processing error.

hah, that made me laugh. To this day I'm so proud to have learned how to repeatedly just wipe my PC C drive when needed then reinstall XP or whatever. I'm just a web-dev that got their start by googling "how to make a website". As I leaned in there came a turning point where I wanted badly to switch from windows, php, scripts, to Ruby on Rails. But installing ruby at the time just didn't work. I worked up the courage - eventually - to partition my drive and install linux. After that, I got to experience a proper terminal and the rest is history.

The real problem is the philosophy that arose in the 1970s that "maximizing shareholder value" is the point of business. As a society, we've become obsessed with optimizing this one variable at the expense of all others and "growth" has become a religion. At it's core, the most important thing we should be optimizing for is "does this business improve the world while turning a robust and sustainable revenue stream" not "how much money can we make for investors". The latter will always optimize for incredible wealth disparity, enshittification, and mostly useless people like Elon Musk becoming stupidly wealthy because it's basically impossible for them to lose money no matter how bad their ideas are (once you're a certain level of rich, your passive income is just immense). I'm not saying shareholders/investors shouldn't be considered, but it can't be the only or the most important metric. We've completely lost the plot on the social and market purpose of a corporation.

> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile.

We could do this forever.

I think there's a fallacy where someone points out one instance of a larger trend which will, when taken to its logical progression, lead to an undesired effect; and then someone attempts to rebut the claim by pointing out that the trend has existed before and the undesired effect hasn't happened yet, so any concern is nugatory. I'd call it the grippery slope fallacy, complement to the slippery one: we haven't fallen down the slope yet, so we can't fall down it. What if an individual instance of ignorance is acceptable because people still need to have understanding in other areas, but if all understanding everywhere is eliminated then we all suffer?

the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp

ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes

It wasn't all that long ago that automatic transmissions had significantly worse reliability and fuel efficiency than manual transmissions.

Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.

I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.

Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.

My read is that there does seem a clear difference between simple -> advanced machines vs simple -> "smart" machines. Nearly every smart machine is bullshit enshitification-in-waiting. Rent-seeking in-waiting. Smart tvs, smart cars with touch-screens. some would argue apple products. These things proclaim advancements but what they really do is black-box and dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, then quite literally impose control over the air, and shove ads to you.

I'm all for just getting to where I need to go by using the appropriate tool, like a reliable car. But no not if it means foregoing the liberty of other options.

I think the dumbing down of things is a closely related yet adjacent issue. And I too absolutely despise the enshitification you’re describing.

I drove a BMW rental recently, and I swear it felt like I was driving around a toy. Such obvious HCI usability concerns, even my wife (non techie) was appalled and able to call out many obvious and stupid design decisions. It felt like a vibe coded car. A vision of the future, no doubt.

No. No economy ever had essentially every single major company spending a significant fraction of its budget on hiring auto mechanics. Which is to say, for all the changes the automobile wrought, the role of the computer in industrialized society eclipses it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. For an individual in many modern societies, being denied access to a car is already effectively crippling, and the idea of being denied access to computation threatens to be somehow even worse.

I would say you need to read some history.

While the role of computers in industrialized society has been substantial, there's still a pretty good argument that the rise of motorized transportation, refridgeration, electricity, the telegram and antibiotics each exceed the impact of computer technology.

In 3-500 years we might have enough perspective on this to really judge it; I'm pretty sure that all we can say right now is "don't know".

This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.

The scale of it is certainly different, if nothing else

We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift

(in recent memory). Surely the industrial revolution was a much larger disruption.

Maybe? Either way, we're still talking about one of the largest disruptions that global society has ever had

A person dies every 26 seconds in a road traffic incident somewhere in the world. A big part of that is people using machines they do not understand.

In what sense do they not understand it? What could we teach them that they don't already know?

They don't understand the dangers involved because the soft suspension and airtight cabin shield them from it. They don't have an intuitive sense of speed, force, momentum, traction etc. because they never rode a bicycle and fell off.

Almost no part of that is due to people using machines they do not understand.

You mean as a distraction from the point being made?

We are on average losing control, but you individually can choose whether to lose control or not.

Programming languages, UNIX, debuggers aren’t going anywhere. There is more to computing than what your boss demands and what is hyped on tech forums.

In fact I believe the indie/handmade scene will grow substantial if not boom, even if just as a hobby for most. Showing what you have made with your blood sweat and tears will elicit more praise and delight when you could have just asked a machine to do it all along.

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