I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore | Hacker News Reader

I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore

82mhz.net

74 pointswrxd112 comments

I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.

In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.

I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.

The difference is that their TV wasn't spying them but our TVs definitely are (aka ACR).

My TV isn't connected to the Internet

How do you know? Seriously.

Manufacturers could add modems to bypass the need for a wifi or cable connection, like they do in cars. I would expect by now that's a valid question to ask if I were to buy a new TV.

They all had stories of friends, family members, and siblings who died at young ages from conditions that are treatable with modern technology.

My grandfathers both benefited greatly from new technology of their times like hearing aids and various cardiac interventions.

I don’t like a TV reporting analytics either, but if we’re looking at technological advancements as a whole that seems like small potatoes.

Were they wrong?

Their cutoff point for where technology stopped being good and exciting was prior to when this author thought technology was fun and exciting.

It’s a personal feeling. Once you get comfortable with the way the world is, you start wishing it would stop changing.

It goes beyond that: what we call technology is inherently "abstraction of service", (ultimately all of which is related to boiling water for some reason???) and at a certain point too many layers of abstraction is more complicated than helpful in terms of reducing the amount of time spent interacting with the "work reduction layer".

Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was

1. call milkman 2. get milk & pay for next milk

now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work.

That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.

Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.

Short answer is yes. Most grandparents resisted computers, internet, cellphones or online banking until the network effect left them with little choice but to participate. You also see them glom onto popular platforms (Faceboook, WhatsApp) and not experiment much with alternatives (Discord, Snapchat). Driven by the same effect, they're only there because that's where their families and friends are.

When I was a kid in the 90s, my grandparents never wanted to get cable television, despite watching a lot of local broadcasts. Their children (and grandchildren) thought they would truly enjoy it: more live sports, history documentaries, and so on. They thought it would be low quality trash.

As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)

Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.

So your grandparents were caught in the 'Fox News' bubble and as a result of that you state they became 'isolated, paranoid, overtly racist and [hateful]'. Sounds dire...

Have you considered that it may be just as true that you are caught in another bubble - say the 'CNN-MSNBC/MSNOW-ABC-CBS-NYT-WaPo' bubble or something similarly bent and twisted? That as a result from that you have become in the eyes of those outside that bubble 'naive, gullible, overtly anti-western, suicidally empathic and disdainful of those with a different view', especially given that your grandparents are from a different generation which uses different words (and words differently) and has a different frame of reference? That to me seems more likely than that your grandparents have been turned to the dark side by watching cable television.

Which one is it? Bubbles are dangerous but not the Fox bubble?

I don't see how you get this from what I wrote. The grandparent poster only mentioned the 'Fox bubble', I made clear that this is not the only one and that it is likely he was caught in one of the other ones. I neither stated nor implied that it was the only 'non-dangerous' one, that is something out of your own imagination.

I can see now that my reading was uncharitable. Though I disagree with the last sentence of "not likely". Grandparents becoming FOX zombies is not a rare thing.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

Does not check out. One of the things I was highly excited about was RF communication. It still is. Another thing was LASERs and it still is.

Computers also was one of them. But modern media boxes are not exciting. Microcontrollers though, are still exciting.

Yeah, TV was around long before I was born. It sucks, always has.

I know a tall Asian man, that doesn't mean that the average Asian is tall though.

It may be based on your mental categories.

Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).

What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.

Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.

By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.

Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.

What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.

TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.

But look at the rate of it.

How many new exciting things between 1950 and 1960? Color TV, jet airplanes, transistors, computers, early programming languages, nuclear power, artificial satellites, polio vaccine, credit cards, microwave oven, Xerox, fax machines.

How many new exciting thing between 2010 and 2020? AI, Netfix and crypto? Not sure I should be excited about that last one...

Yeah, but...

Transistors existed between 1950 and 1960. But they didn't really set the world on fire until the 1970s.

Computers existed in the 1950s, but they didn't explode into businesses until the IBM 360 series, and they didn't go into homes until the 1970s, and not in volume until the 1980s.

Xerox existed, but didn't explode until the 1970s.

And so on. It is decades from something being invented, to commercial availability, to widespread commercial use. And only when it becomes widespread does it change the world.

So I claim that the "revolutionary" part is when something already existing becomes widespread and applied. That was (in my previous examples) electricity in the 1920s and 30s, and personal computers in the 1980s and 90s. They already existed. But when they became widespread and used for everything, that's when the world changed.

So, what was that in the 2010s? I would say cell phones. Yeah, they existed before. But now everyone had them, which meant that everyone could be reached all the time, and everyone could take pictures, and read the news, and search the net, and watch sports, and listen to music, all the time, no matter where they were. That changed the world, or at least society, quite a bit.

What is it for the 2020s? It could be AI. That is, plausibly, exploding. If it continues to do so, it is likely to change everything. mRNA vaccines may become a thing that changes everything, at least as much as the polio vaccine, but we are not there yet - at this point it's still a maybe. SpaceX lowering the cost to orbit is a big deal. Starlink may be; I'm in the US, where internet rarely depends on satellites, so I'm not in a good position to judge that one.

OK, but does any of that invalidate my argument?

Don't feel that's it at all. Let's be more specific instead of just "tech" since that can be so many things.

I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.

And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.

What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.

Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.

So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.

> It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future

What new technologies are they excited about?

Telling that op didn't respond to this simple question.

I do agree it feels different but there is still a lot of interesting and exciting tech innovation. OP is about the same age as me so my list will be from my lifetime.

* Lithium batteries. They are one of the most important innovations of our generation. They are so much better than NiCads and lead acid batteries. Much of today's important tech, like mobile phones, wouldn't be possible without them.

* Solar panels went from a novelty to something that we can put on our homes with a positive ROI in a short time.

* EVs. If you haven't been in one go take a test drive. The prices are still too high, at least in the US, but Chinese innovation are pushing that down.

* Driving automation such as radar cruise, lane assist, and other autonomous driving features.

* Digital media, streaming or self hosted. Yes streaming services peaked 10+ years ago but the innovation is there. Having a small server in a closet hosting hundreds of 4k videos is quite an innovation compared to VHS.

* Home automation. It was previously limited to wired devices for the rich. Now anyone can put together complex self-hosted home automation with inexpensive Zigbee/ZWave devices and a Raspberry Pi hosting Home Assistant.

* Hobby electronics have become far more accessible and inexpensive. Arduino, raspberry pi, etc.

* SDRs radically changed radio technology.

* FDM/3D printing.

* Other CNC manufacturing became accessible to hobbyists.

* Bluetooth

* WiFi

* Progress in machine learning / AI, invention of LLMs

I've been playing Project Zomboid with my friends. It's an isometric survival game set in 1993 in a fictional area around Louisville, Kentucky. It has VHS tapes, TV and radio broadcasts, ham radio, CDs, and landlines in it. So far in my playing experience, there's no real internet component.

There's some sort of disease outbreak that turns people into zombies and society starts to collapse. Eventually things like the power grid and water/sewage infrastructure break down. Food rots. Gasoline runs out. It's basically guaranteed that you and your teammates will die in this game.

Even after living through a pandemic and all of the shit that came with it, and despite the grim atmosphere of the game, I still miss the time period that this game symbolized. I know I was only a child during the 90s and the era had its real problems, but there were good things about it and the state of technology at the time that have gotten worse in the decades since.

It was a time when media was a physical good and had meaning, when there wasn't a constant deluge of information, when my attention was less valuable than advertisers have made it today, and there was, at least for the majority of society, a shared informational reality.

That's all gone and there are massively powerful interests working to make sure it stays gone.

I feel the same way. I think the difference is that new tech used to be an improvement to your life. New tech is there simply to suck life (your attention) and money away from you.

There are exceptions of course, But the general trend is worrying.

New tech is so you can do your job more efficiently to get more X for less time for your employer, to satisfy the customer, to pay the share holder.

High quality eBikes are pretty amazing: I have nearly 4000 miles on one of ours, and nearly all of those are replacing car trips around town, including most of our grocery shopping.

While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.

We went from hipsters with tattoos on fixies to this guy

eBikes may be pretty amazing in isolation, but as a pedestrian, I absolutely hate people who ride eBikes.

Do you hate e-bikes, or do you hate city planning that treats e-bikes as second-class citizens, and forces them into direct competition with cars and pedestrians?

The biggest problem I've seen with bicycles is that SOME bicyclists act like they are a car when it suits them and a pedestrian when it suits them, even when infrastructure is properly in place.

> even when infrastructure is properly in place

Is it though? I've cycled in a number of US cities, and even in the ones that have bike lanes, most only have small sections that are physically-divided from traffic, and pretty much none have intersections that bikes can safely cross without using the pedestrian crosswalks.

> People who "almost got hit by a bicycle" are extremely numerous while people who actually got hit by cars remain unavailable for comment.

https://bsky.app/profile/jwbee.bsky.social/post/3mtc2rx7hcc2...

Joking aside, I can see the annoyance, and it's important to have separate infrastructure where people feel safe to ride their bikes. That does not mean a 2 inch strip of white pain separating you from dudes in trucks staring at their phones at 40 miles an hour.

Last year I purchased an e-scooter (Hiboy X300)to compliment my car. I used it so much, I accidentally let my car rot into disrepair. The e-scooter is great, but it is quite limited in what you can carry (only what you can put in a backpack). Instead of getting another car for the things that I can't really use the scooter for, I got an acoustic, belt driven bike :) (the Priority 600). I went acoustic and belt driven specifically to compliment the shortcomings of the e-scooter (other than the carrying capacity, which any bike is an improvement on), in that I don't have to worry about it failing in any weather that I throw at it, rain, snow or shine. There is no battery to get too cold and no electrical system to get too wet.

Had I known I were going to be getting rid of my car, an e-bike would have definitely been a better value. I feel lucky that things worked out the way that they did though - having both an e-scooter and an acoustic bike has been great!

My eBike comes with a big basket and a bag that slots into it that can carry a ton of stuff. I do most of our family's grocery shopping with it. A huge upgrade from a backpack.

I am not part of the group being polled (firmly ensconced in middle age), but I feel the opposite. Yes, the AI roll out has been shambolic to say the least, and it can also be annoyingly intrusive. On the plus side, AI is allowing me to take on projects that I would never have bothered in the past because the learning curve would have been too arduous. I am currently reverse engineering an embedded system going in there with a multimeter and logic analyzer. It is a lot of fun and I am learning a ton. If you told me five years ago that I would eventually be taking on such a project, I would not have believed you. On the job side, a lot of what I do involves troubleshooting (e.g., looking at reams of logs), and there too AI has been a boon. So, yes, actually excited about where things are going (with some misgivings).

I still get excited by the sheer power of current and upcoming tech

It may be the same stuff we had 20 years ago, but the specs!

What was a supercomputer before is now just a component in a datacenter, one of 72 per rack.

What used to be a super computing center now fits in my pocket and runs on batteries. I haven't tried, but I'm reasonably sure my phone can emulate a Cray-1 at faster than the original.

A Cray-1 had 180M flops. Your phone can emulate it as speeds many times faster.

I used to be like that. I would pore over feature matrices in Computer Shopper ads and pick out stuff I couldn't afford and wasn't going to buy.

Then, about 7 years ago I realized that for the first time, I was more or less happy with the tech in my life. My computer was good, I liked my phone, my tablet, and my ereader. I had a good TV and stereo I used all the time. The appliances in my home are reliable and work well. The tools I use in my garage and yard are all fine. With Android Auto or Car Play (I've used both) even my car felt like it had crossed some threshold of being good enough that I didn't really have the itch for something better.

I had been working full time for 30ish years and had accumulated a lot of stuff that makes my life better and there really isn't much more that I want and certainly nothing that I need. When Christmas rolls around and people want gift ideas for me, it's hard for me to think of things. My favorite thing in the world is to have a few days off and no plans or commitments and I can sort drill bits, change my guitar strings, watch a movie, or take a nap.

Echoing others here, but I think part of it is that a lot of the new tech is designed to make things worse.

If I think about new tech, all the examples that immediately spring to mind are negative ones: surveillance cameras, AI-enabled spam & propaganda, autonomous weaponry.

The less flashy advances tend to be harder to get excited about, and they're also often negative. My computers get more expensive, but they also collect more data on me, and it's harder to get one without a bunch of unwanted features.

People used to be excited about new tech because it was exciting and aspirational; I think we've lost a lot of that.

Cheap radios are in everything now.

Think about all the fun wifi, zigbee, matter devices that you can play with (if you are inclined).

Meshtastic and LoRa is a great toy to play with.

The kitchen is full of interesting things, Sous Vide is great, the air fryer is... interesting and useful.

Lots of people love their robot vacuum

LED strip lighting has gone from nerdy to high design and has interesting features now.

Those "VCR" and "iPhone" moments are rare. There is a lot of practical innovations that make my life better and I would be hard pressed to give up.

The cheap radios boggle my mind a little bit. I can order a wireless transmitter for an electric guitar for cheaper than the cable next to it. How is this possible? $18 ESP32 with a camera attached and WiFi for an instant cheap IP camera? Crazy!

Those kitchen advances never feel like advances to me though. Maybe I'm over simplifying it, but I'm tired of "needing" yet another box that gets hot. I am pretty sure an air fryer is just a small convection oven.

You can take my panini press from my cold dead hands though.

>But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.

i'm 24. I think that improvements in tech nowadays mostly involve the hobbyist of any niche, while the general public is ever more satisfied with what already exists.

sd to hd to full hd was cool, full hd to 1440p i can see the difference, at 4k yes but it is not so big. Miniled is something people won't really care about imho (and they can already go very bright, i'm only waiting for more minileds to be integrated in monitors before changing mine).

Audio, well, most people will be satisfied with cheap razer/gaming/bose/whatever headphones are there. Sure anc is cool if you're in a noisy environment quite often

Bikes, well at 24yo i'm not really knowledgeable to say whether a bianchi that costs more than a motorbike is worth the upgrade from an older model... but ebikes are kinda nice even for people outside of the cycling world

However, what has happened with audio and video - and a change that i can perceive -, is the prices of things (not cpu/gpu related, for obvious reasons) coming down. oleds were so espensive ten years ago, now they are not. 4k minileds monitor are as expensive now as my regular non miniled 1440p va monitor from ~4/5 years ago. Hifiman has (permanently) slashed the prices of its headphones more than once over the years. It is not exciting as new tech but it is "just" nice

p.s. wifi printers are a pain in the ass much more than cable printes, and for llms i am kinda happy with them, i'll give you that, they're a godsend for studying; i'm less excited about the idea they'll replace most workers

This is good because there are much better places to find fulfillment.

It's like when you get a new smartphone and you baby it for those first couple weeks until, bam, it falls and gets a ding in it. Then after a brief sense of loss, you suddenly see it as a tool with utility and a lifespan. I think that's where you want to be with material things and technology.

The last technology that truly excited me was the ebook. I truly believe is one of the greatest gadgets ever invented. It's just fantastic the disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package.

>disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package

After a while, It turned out that none of these mattered. And I am back to paper books..

> If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.

I’m 29 so I guess I just barely qualify haha. But overall, I agree with your writing and can say as a technologist myself, I also rarely get excited about new technology - nor do my peers.

There are occasional exceptions though. Near the beginning of this current GenAI revolution, I was frequently excited. Watching that SpaceX rocket land back on earth had me on the edge of my seat. I also recently bought AirPods and found the conversation awareness feature to be incredible. Similarly, I got my first fitness tracker and find it mind blowing how much it can measure by just zapping my wrist with light.

As I've aged and grown as a data engineer/scientist, unsurprisingly, it has become much rarer that I encounter something new that seems like magic (ie is something with functionality that expands my understanding of what is possible), but through new hobbies or explorations into new fields, I continually discover new and exciting uses of technology that adds neat functionality to my life.

For example, maybe a year or two ago, my wife started getting into bird watching, which introduced me to the Merlin Bird Id app [0], which (using my location, the date, and audio from my phone's mic) identifies the birds around me on walks. I can walk around and get mostly accurate identifications that help me better understand a complex and rich facet of the world that I had mostly ignored before! Super cool!

Another tech thing I recently learned a lot about that got me excited: I was playing around with a personal project to produce safer bike routes and I finally dug into OpenStreetMap [1, 2]. I had been aware of OSM for a long while, but taking this project on led me to look for a source for freely available route segment data that I could collect and use to build upon, and I found OSM was perfect for this. Digging into the source, I discovered it's essentially a Wikipedia-esque project (a triumph of the human species) where anyone can contribute edits to maps and they're immediately published worldwide! I was and remain very excited about this project.

When I just stay in my technical lane, I get desensitized to the cool stuff people are doing (which becomes hard to find in our ecosystems that have sold our attention to the highest bidders), but when I go out looking, people are still doing exciting stuff.

[0] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org

I am a bit over 50. Most new computer tech doesn't hit me like it used to but occasionally I still get hit with wonder. I got that feeling trying the Apple Vision Pro in store demo. 50-something me still can't believe I have AI at my fingertips.

For the most part though it's not that new tech isn't cool but as I get older, parts of life which seemed mundane as a kid or young man aren't quite so mundane anymore. As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background. With years I see those moments with loved ones as precious, finite, and what it's all about. Tech is neat and sometimes very neat ... but it isn't what it's all about.

>50-something me still can't believe I have AI at my fingertips.

You don't.

> As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background.

So true. I even thought family was annoying. Now that most are gone ( some dead, some barely keeping in touch ) I understand, too late, they were what it’s all about for sure.

Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich) has this idea about the two watersheds of new technology.

During the first watershed, it solves an actual problem + improves the lives of those who adopt it.

During the second watershed, it gets institutionalized and the technology shifts into something that requires people serve it rather than serving those it’s intended to help.

His examples are all old technologies like modern medicine, non party line wired phones, the radio, etc. but the ideas fit the shape of the technological advances we’re seeing in our lifetimes as well.

Recently, I took an intercontinental flight, and the plane had complimentary Starlink internet and Live TV channels throughout the whole journey for all cabin classes.

I know the technology has been around for a while but watching a World Cup game in real-time whilst soaring at 1000kmh/35,000ft over the Arabian desert sounds like science fiction decades ago.

That's just one small example. I think that the hedonic treadmill is hitting people at a much higher rate than before.

Consider that it's probably not tech but rather a cycle of aesthetics you're experiencing.

Just like films, music, or even sports, there are eras of a certain paradigm or aesthetic. What we consider the 'peak' is always evaluated in retrospect or in comparison to a previous peak. Neurologically, humans are naturally predisposed to evaluate the world in terms of "how much pleasure" an activity gives, and when you experience "more pleasure" (for example, riding a fast rollercoaster vs. a slow one) then the previous experience is often discarded or treated as inferior. In some cases that's true, but, by and large, these comparisons are again purely psychic in nature.

What you viewed as more exciting was an age where advertising didn't cheapen your experiences. Overexposure/stimulation as a means of advertising, co-opted with combining social media with advertising to a startling degree is the true culprit behind what you're seeing, and as a captive audience, like the prisoners in Plato's cave, you are unable to look away...

It might be due to a combination of a few things:

1. The compounding acceleration of tech has numbed us to the marvels that are happening around us.

2. Big Tech, and Capitalism in general, has been getting more and more extractive than innovative for a long time, which has made us cynical. (Or maybe it's always been like this, we just notice it more as we age.)

3. New form factors excite us more than new capabilites because they're much more tangible. Things like CRISPR and GLP-1 are basically miracles but don't impact our day-to-day, whereas the iPhone revolutionized how we interact with the world on a daily basis.

4. Movies and TV have portrayed science fiction and futuristic technology so convincingly for so long, that when those things actually come true we don't really notice.

I think these explain what's happening with the current AI revolution. The technology, if you think about it, is objectively insane. It fills me with excitement and dread.

However we've seen countless variations of AI in popular media for decades so it doesn't seem "new." Worse, GenAI was introduced to us as a chatbot, a form-factor even more underwhelming than the mostly useless Siri and Alexa, let alone humanoid robots or holograms. And to top it off, it's threatening to take our jobs, something that popular SciFi didn't really talk about, so already we are primed to look at it more negatively.

But I cannot overstate how impossible it was just 4 short years ago for computers to do any of what they are doing today, and how much it will change the world. And yet look at the discourse around it.

It's like some weird, alien life has suddenly sprung up amongst us and we're all just going, "But it writes crappy code though."

> Of course nowadays days I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.

I know a lot of people have a troubled relationship to their phone, but this is really surprising to me. Would I want to go back to a world where I can't conveniently contact people, navigate the world, look up anything I want to know in an second, and set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer? Not even a little bit.

The last time I personally felt the excitement the author describes was probably with the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, but unfortunately that product went nowhere.

I bought a flip phone that blocks web browsers and social media apps.

All other apps work though.

Best of both worlds.

Would love to know what phone :)

> set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer?

I know it's mainly in jest, but this always strikes me as an odd example of 'high tech'. It feels like a 'first you create the universe' solution to using an egg timer with doughy fingers. Egg timers are simple devices that clean easy and can handle dough transfer. They are (or perhaps only 'were ') built as fit for purpose.

Yes, it's just an extra thing the 'high tech' can do, but damn it's an awful example of the (reached) potential of high tech.

A better example could be:

I can ask the air to buy me a big mac and have it paid for and delivered to my house within 30 minutes all while I'm changing a nappy and putting the baby to bed. There's a whole stack of systems needing to communicate to make that thing happen.

I was expecting a much better example. Not many people are looking to micro-optimize their time. An app to do that (and maybe choose something cheaper and better than big mac) already exist. Whatever improvement is marginal.

Your example reminds me of the famous chatbots buying plane tickets. There is no demand of people looking for a chatbot to buy plane tickets.

The marginal payoff from incremental innovation produces lesser and lesser endorphins as we age. They increasingly become a smaller part of our experiences.

And btw, by and large, this happens to every feeling, not just excitement from technological innovation.

I hear that...

It isn’t that surprising that computers have become somewhat crap as they’ve gained ubiquitous adoption (that’s just the nature of appealing to everyone). IMO it is more surprising that nothing has really filled in that gap.

I used to not be excited about the next consumer tech gadget or the next JS framework, but I am now pretty excited about transforming new tech now (AI, energy, space, etc).

Now that you mention it, yeah. I remember my mom doing the watch this microwave thing boil a cup of water demo for months everytime someone stopped by. It was a show. The last one I remember like this, with both "I want to show" and "I want see" high demand like that, was the Siri launch. Someone in my office got it running and he had people coming to his cubicle all day asking to hear it.

Last time I saw it was a guy bringing a VR headset to the office. Some 8 years ago.

Last time I saw it was a guy using ChatGPT to translate a conversation. Some weeks ago.

One thing I've thought about for a long time, as someone who's been interested in new technology and sci-fi for a long time:

you still need to work; still need a job.

With all this new technology that does things for us, there will be new things that need doing in order that we can pay for the things that do the old things for us.

I still find this a jarring thought.

Robotics, AI, hypersonic/Ramjets, affordable mobile data, streaming video, lots of innovation in the last 10 years.

Tiny batteries that can power laptops, drones, cars etc for hours.

VR is probably the coolest new tech of the last decade to me, hanging out with friends and exploring weird spaces is so wild (sure there are lots of flaws and limitations but it's definitely exciting and new to me even as a jaded, increasingly luddite programmer)

there are still new things and fun tech, don't give up!

Don't worry, you're just getting old. It happens to all of us. At some point we simply stop being excited about new shiny things and start to prefer stuff we know and rely on. In especially bad cases, some start seeing new shiny things as threat to the stability of their lives.

We have self-driving cars and near-human AIs. And yet the author can't find something to get excited about?!?!?

I'm slightly older than he is and I lived through all those changes he talks about. I'm still in awe every time I fire up Codex. This article sounds like depression talking.

self-driving cars isn't a reality besides in a few controlled environments and I empathize that near-human AIs being used as an excuse to lower wages and fire people isn't something to get excited about.

"In theory" you can imagine all sorts of terrible scenarios that will make you depressed.

In practice you can ride in a real self-driving car in a dozen major metro areas in the US. I have and they are fantastic.

In practice you can fire up an LLM today and use it for research or writing code or organizing your finances or any of a million incredibly useful things.

At present, the downsides are theoretical and the upsides are practical. The article says more about the author than the state of the world.

In theory, you can pretend that the experience of one afluent person in a metro area in the US is enough to make the dystopian situation we are heading to looks fantastic.

In practice, most people are fighting to keep their jobs if they have one, CEOs of corporations are talking daily about AI-driven layoffs and some of them even come to this forum to do exactly the same while talking about how this new era is bright and great. They make money through making other people hopeless and dependent.

Unemployment in the US right now is historically very low and "dystopian situation" is your projection, not real life.

The future is uncertain, but most objective metrics in the non-war-torn part of the world are positive right now.

If you had told yourself at age 20 that in that $NUMBER_OF_YEARS you would be able to sit in a car that drives itself, while talking to an AI researching babylonian grammar, it would have blown your mind.

As we got older, we can shift the goalposts and get used to things the way they are. And we need to step back, look and see HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS WILD.

There are just so many new technologies, some just as software, some in hardware,food,medicine, etc.

But maybe it makes it harder to get excited from most things.

For example, once you browse Anna's library, or ask Claude to develop some software for you, it's harder to get excited from most things.

New tech nowadays usually means more restrictions on how I can use my own stuff. Oh I can't use the computing machine I have right in front of me right now? I have to rent your computing machines to do it (which you rent from someone else)?

Yes it is you getting grumpy, not older.

My 95-year-old great granddad finds delight regularly, from his great sounding carbon fiber trombone (you try holding a full brass one as an nonogenarian!) to how much self-driving or AI has improved in 2025 to now.

Most modern tech solutions feel like scams: illegal cabs, illegal hotels, gambling, price fixing, loan sharking, data harvesting, IP theft, mass surveillance... It stopped making our lives better and became mired in crime.

Oh come on...

* Putting down the throttle of my first BEV was magic (a rented ID3 Pro rented, it's not even performing like mad, but RWD gets it done). I laughed manically and in tears until arriving at home. Even laid back acceleration is still fun. ICE cars have become boring to me.

* The first time generating a longer working script with ChatGPT in its early incarnation was great! Correcting a broken web app by a junior dev with the help of Claude and ChatGPT was also crazy the first time.

* Letting the drone of my brother in law start and land from my hand, making incredible camera moves by pushing a few buttons was surreal.

* Hearing the first sounds of my mobile with Dolby Atmos was also like hallucinating. These tiny speakers have become unbelievable good for media consumption.

* Playing a recent e-piano that even mimics damper and co-vibrating strings. The improvements in tactile and acoustic experience are subtle but great

* I cannot wait to test a tone3000 neural amp modeling thingy -- the first time I heard a Kemper and tested even the basic Pod Go was also great.

* First picture of a laser projector: blown away. Next level of sharp picture.

...

So, I don't know what you're talking about.

Which e-piano please?

DVD over VHS was pure upgrade — better quality, no rewinding, no wear. Hard to name a recent tech shift where you didn't lose something in the trade.

I dont think it's that flawless. DVDs introduced some anti-consumer features to limit what you are allowed to do with your media that are now widespread, like copy-protection/drm/hdcp limiting your choice of playback devices and preventing you from creating backups, or enforced market segmentation through region-codes. Every VHS was rewritable, only special DVD were.

I'm excited about self driving cars for aging boomer and drunk mobility. Most consumer tech seems to be pure agitation and slop. Can't seem to think that ways to engage media is getting better (paid streaming now with ads etc.) TVs take a forever to change channel, call quality seems to be worse than analog etc.

Self-driving cars are really cool but they won't really solve our transit problems, they'll probably just make them worse and more expensive. We should be focusing on better development patterns (appropriate density - not skyscrapers and not suburbia), walking, biking, and hopping on a tram or something along those lines.

Self-driving cars are an additive technology, and there is certainly a place for them, but they should be at best (like all cars) your 3rd or maybe even 4th best option for daily activities.

Poor driving isn't limited to drunks or boomers.

I'm a single issue voter to stop old people from driving when they shouldn't.

You are absolutely right, and the only negative is the utopian-esque description, therefore it'll never quite work as well as it should - but I think aiming for that will still get something better than what we've got.

Your comment just made me think about the whole self-driving car thing as an extension of the car-centric thinking of the US (and how car-centricity is essentially anti-social, but that's beside the point), and now even the US is losing the car race to China, but it will maintain it's car-centric philosophy based on momentum rather than practicality. Could public transport be a national security priority? (mostly tongue in cheek, but just a smidge not).

Yea, it is an extension. It's additive. The safest car is the one that's parked. Car-centric culture has a lot of negative externalities. But the entire society is geared toward cars and propping them up. Cars themselves, auto jobs, departments of highways, tires, oil, gas, insurance, fast food, COSTCO, you name it. Most of those things can be replaced with something as simple as a sidewalk and better urban planning. If your goal is to prop up an industry, self-driving cars will do that for you.

If your goal is to increase autonomy [1], wealth, entrepreneurship, and happiness and decrease death and health concerns, racism, obesity, and other things you need to move away from car-only building and design patterns. I also think busses are a problem because they just reinforce bad habits. For most municipalities a bus is just a worse version of your car which is why they're largely unsuccessful for the masses. Bike/walk/rail is, in my view, quite literally the only good path forward for future transportation development.

I don't think the US is losing the car race to China though. What race? Why are we even in a race all of a sudden? I drive an EV and like them but aside from emissions I'm not sure one is really all that better than another (I find EVs more convenient though).

[1] Been a bad person lately? Maybe the government and the vehicle facial recognition technology says sorry no driving for you. Now what? Secondarily for the elderly (as the single-issue voter OP has mentioned) walking/biking/rail allows for better outcomes and for folks to participate more in daily life. Driving becomes more and more hazardous as we age and folks wind up stuck at home.

Dishwashers with WiFi, but they can't keep the water in.

It's called getting older.

Agreed. He's just old. He's been around the block and seen new tech releases a million times.

It's still exciting (and has always been) for the young'uns.

That’s what the post was asking about. He was interested to hear from “young’uns.”

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- 90s: - video games were something truly new. before it, stories and fantasy was something to be enjoyed mostly through static medium. and games were the first medium that lets you interactively enjoy stories. - internet was something truly new. never before we get to connect with people by sharing things we create. and there's so many things were created out of genuine love and passion - late 2000s - social media were something truly new. it lets you connect with people and share things

every era brought something truly novel to the table. but then something changed mid 2010s. and it's not entirely megacorps' fault. it's also us customers. we didn't want to pay. and thus the business model that promotes enshittified services were born and now we have to live with it.

You do have to move your focus for sure. Gadgets used to be cool, but now you'd have to look at SpaceX or Stoke for space, and all the crazy ambitious fusion startups, or Quaise. Those are the ones I'm tracking at least..

Tech is no longer exciting to me because I no longer feel a connection between tech improvement and world (or personal life) improvement.

I used to read sci fi for the wonder, but now I read it with dread, for Chekov's Gun is a Torment Nexus, and if you introduce a Torment Nexus in Act 1 of a sci fi dystopia, it will be fired IRL by act 3.

Deeper lurks a more chilling question: what, on a dying planet run by fascists, should I do with my time?

I think that this is enshittification seen from a different angle.

There's a term for that, it's called "getting old" and older people have been saying this kinda stuff for generations.

The kids don't seem very excited anymore either from what I can tell.

Have to agree with you. They are bored most of the time and waiting for something to happen to them.

You're old, you have no idea what the kids are into.

How accurate did the endless news reports about your generation feel when you were young?

I'm getting old, but it seems like we're all more ambivalent about new tech. Maybe I'm projecting, but we don't expect tech to be the solution to human problems as much as we used to. The boundless optimism about the World Wide Web has putrified into techno-pessimism for at least half of us.

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