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Comment by conartist6 | Hacker News Reader

Does it really keep rising? Many of my fondest memories of technology come from times past...

I interpret "keeps rising" negatively. Changes keep getting made, certainly. The AIs will perhaps never fail to fulfill your feature request. But there's no overall plan. It's just undirected, cancerous growth. It's Homer Simpson telling a team of automotive engineers to add feature after feature.

The tower is not about fondness, its about growth

Is growth enough if technology makes our lives worse? Is a tower the pride of the civilization if a strong gust of wind could bring it down? It is before the gust, when all that matters is that the tower is tall rather than strong. After the gust, things are a bit more nuanced. Fingers are pointed.

The tricky part here is that you can't tell if a once-topmost part of the tower is sturdy until a great deal more tower is resting on it. Well, now a lot the economy is resting on little other than AI dreams. Your move, rational people.

Cancer is also growth.

This isn't really a good way to judge things. In the future, the fondest memories someone else has about technology will be about the present. The past is not better, you're just nostalgic for it.

Every time I think the past was better, I think about how terrible ksh scripting was in 1995. And look at how great peoples' bash scripting is now compared to when we though bash had reached its apex in like 2009.

Conversely, Rexx scripting on the desktop was glorious in 1995.

ARexx on Amiga was way before 1995. And it was glorious.

I used to want an Amiga. they are probably still for sale on ebay. Like in 2010. :(

lol I was actually kidding. The past was way better, almost always (it isn't just nostalgia). I think my enjoyment of tech actually used to sort follow a wavelike pattern. Then, it sort of became a straight line a few years before COVID, and I worry that AI is cementing people into an always-forward mindset that removes the enjoyment from just about everything.

I mean, yeah, hobby coding is not going away, but the feeling of exploration for me is totally gone. I don't dislike tech, I just don't see anyone being the way they used to be. People in tech are different and too many people are in tech.

Probably only part of the joy will ever be there, now. Which is weird because I did my own thing with computers til college, and don't consider myself a super sociable person. I just used to know that it was there, and now it isn't.

There's nothing quite like the empowerment of discoverable user interfaces devoid of dark patterns.

> Many of my fondest memories of technology come from times past...

Is that because of the technology or because of who you were at the time?

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