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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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