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It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality - dreams usually don't. Or at least, not as you expect it. Tech is still

It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality - dreams usually don't. Or at least, not as you expect it. Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago. But we have so much of it and it is everywhere, that we re-calibrate and think that all this amazing, cool tech is boring. You can get a 3D printer for a few hundred bucks, build it yourself, build a better 3d printer, get some awesome tech for a hundred bucks or so, and then build a really cool robot. It's the tinkerer's dream right now. But because it is everywhere, we think it is boring. It isn't! I'm Gen X and, if you let yourself, you can get re-engaged. We're the ultimate generation of apathy, so if I can do it, you can do it ;) Make sure some lifestyle choice isn't messing with your curiosity and excitement, though. Bad sleep, missing exercise, doom scrolling, too much booze or other recreational drugs, all that can suck the joy out of life and tech. In the early 2000s, right after the Dot Com Bubble burst, I had a tech friend tell me, "I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now." That was in the web 1.0 days, before the web as we know it now existed. Before rockets that land on their end, before smartphones, before Deep Learning, before all this amazing stuff that exists now. Oh, and you've just gone through a couple of churns of software ecosystem, it can seem same-y, but it is actually great in the long run. New situations mean old ideas that were discarded can become valuable, which can be odd. The complexity sucks, but ... shrug.

hwers 5y ago
Are you sure? I'd like to hear the take of someone in their early twenties on this. My feeling is that a lot of them are terrified by it themselves too.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  Terrified of it? If it is terrifying, it is hardly boring, it would seem!
- tiluha 5y ago
  I'm 22. I feel like there hasn't been any major technologcal shift since ~2014. Phones have gotten faster and more capable, but are still mostly the same. Social media has gotten bigger, but hasn't innovated in a meaningful way. "AI" has gotten better which is fascinating, but in the end it will most likely just be used for manipulation, surveillance and manipulation. I can't really think of any technology to look forward to, that would improve my life or change the world (in a positive sense).
  - gilbetron 5y ago
    Autonomous cars, AI/ML, and fusion are three things that will significantly change our world in the next decade or so. There will absolutely be downsides, but that's how tech works! And this doesn't even get into biological spheres of tech! Also, remember, people in 2005 had same thoughts as you're having right now! Throughout my entire life, people have been saying that tech and science is basically done. They've always been wrong, and I don't see an end in sight. It's the nature of exponentials. They seem slow and then suddenly the world changes. Only a handful of people actually can see that it is going to happen. We're just linear creatures with no intuition for exponential growth. Imagine sitting in a dark room and someone about to turn on a switch - up until the switch is flicked, it doesn't seem like anything is going to happen, and then suddenly you are reeling at the brightness. That's how tech innovation happens now. I bet in a decade you'll be looking back saying, holy shit, I did not see that coming about something! "Remember when we used to drive gas vehicles?" or "Remember when we thought fusion was impossible?" or "Remember when nobody owned a robot?" Who knows what it is, but there will be something! In 2014, almost nobody thought about having an app on their phone to summon a car to take them somewhere. Now it is everywhere (and struggling!). In 2014, speech recognition was awful. Now we have an automated robot lady that will answer spam calls for you!
    - hwers 5y ago
      Autonomous cars and fusion are very different creatures than the growth of the internet or computers in general. The latter was widely distributed and had low hanging fruit that just about everyone in society could pluck and have fun with, the former is something a handful of companies and a few hundred researchers will get to develop while the rest of us will have to have our creativity satisfied with the fulfilling act of paying for it. (Even ML to an extent, since it's so data and compute expensive - generally far from a low hanging fruit -, though less so.)
      - kenjackson 5y ago
        The internet took decades to evolve and was heavily funded early on by government. It only became low hanging fruit once it achieved a high level of maturity -- largely until the WWW had a graphical browser.
- dotnet00 5y ago
  I'm 24, I still feel that tech is very 'cool' and exciting. Yes, there's a lot of stuff that sucks, social media is probably doing more harm than good and the direction that AI research is going in with increasingly larger models that can't reasonably be replicated. But on the other hand, space accessibility is quickly opening up, it's very likely that I would be able to take a trip to space in my lifetime too, maybe even Mars. VR has opened up an amazing new frontier for hanging out with friends on the other side of the world. Medicine is opening up all sorts of scifi technologies, gene therapy with CRISPR, massive strides in protein structure prediction, mRNA vaccines. Synchrotrons and particle accelerators are starting to improve all sorts of observations. Fusion energy is making progress, quantum computing is just getting started. We even took a detailed image of a black hole millions of light years away just a few years ago! Yes, specifically computer related improvements are starting to slow down a little, but with costs only getting lower, there's so much room to bring computers into, so many things that can be automated! AI research has generally stuck to certain niches (basic medicine, basic physics, vision), there's so much that can have breakthroughs at the level of the protein folding model. I think with diverse enough interests, it's hard to say that things are slowing down, they're only getting faster as computers, software and AI mature and dramatically increase efficiency in other fields.
PaulLeiby 5y ago
> "It's an age thing - ... Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago." 1. How can one possible claim that tech is cooler now than is was in the 60s when we were racing into space, developing semiconductors and transistors? Or the 70's when we were rapidly developing integrated circuits, computers and languages? Or cooler than maybe the coolest tech-time ever, the 00s and 1910s when we were simultaneously perfecting bicycles, developing automobiles, powered flight, electrical power networks, and mostly in folks garages or barns?! "It's an age thing." 2. Tech is always cool. 3. Don't let anyone else tell you what is cool, including me.
rcarmo 5y ago
To your point about 3D printing and robots, we haven’t really moved the needle that much. We’ve made it easy for anyone to print a “cool” robot, sure, but it isn’t necessarily a _useful_ one. As a former “maker” and electronics hack I think lot of maker stuff has devolved into “cool” stuff that consists of wire hangers and servos with RGB lighting and very little actual value. But coolness doesn’t really mean much when everything is hyped as such.
- supernovae 5y ago
  Being a maker isn’t about creating “things of value” or being “useful”. That same mindset is ruining many a good hobby. Astrophotography is going down a shameful route where the only thing your peers want to see is the misery of all the debt you have to out fancy someone else. as for 3d printers.. they have come a long way and have become a core part of creativity and engineering for programs like First Robotics.. hardware is improving, safety is improving, reliability is improving - so much so that if you give up on the creative aspect you can just print away and get started with little effort.
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
    For some reason I feel the need to weigh in here. I love photography and astronomy but I see no point in mixing the two. We just spent $10 billion to send a fabulous camera and lens into the L2 Lagrange point. Not to mention the over 30 year old Hubble which no amateur has any hope of matching despite decades of advancements in amateur tech (and to be fair to the amateurs, they can do remarkably better than their peers of 30 years ago). But I already spent my money (in tax dollar form) on the best scientists in the world to go and take pretty pictures which also sometimes provide great scientific input. If people enjoy astrophotography then that's fine, but the most magical part of Astronomy to me is seeing Saturn (easily the visual crown jewel of our solar system) through the telescope with my own eyes and realizing that it really is hanging out there in the sky for all to see.
    - supernovae 5y ago
      Citizen scientists do make discoveries - we often discover NEO's, comets and supernova to assist scientists who have limited capacity - I've seen some great work here and lots of technology + telescope convergence of being able to scan thousands of plate solves a night using GPU to find near earth objects. This part of citizen science is doing well... but astrophotography, it used to be able the wonder of capturing it - regardless if you prefer visual with your eye or assisted seeing with a camera. There used to be a aura of DIY - find a camera, adapt it, take some photos, share them, have people say good job. Now its really about memes, trolling and who can get the most Instagram's.. and that's kind of depressing. The people doing citizen science are way outnumbered by the vocal ones comparing their debt, their investment and their preference of equipment as a superiority complex and social media feeds into that and supports it with the algo favoring the controversy and the fights It was a bitter sweet day to sell off my remote observatory and get my nights back... but the passion for the heavens is still there however, that "eyepiece vs a camera" thing is very much part of the problem with the hobby... it just shouldn't matter.
davidn20 5y ago
It's definitely an age thing. Don't get me wrong, I know OP feeling all too well. But, it's like complaining about how the music I grew with was the best music. It's more likely the curiosity in you die, rather than the world running out of stuff to be curious about.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I don't think so. There are waves throughout history where, at times, it's the Wild West and the opportunities and possibilities abound. One such time was when the Internet had become a global backbone, hardware prices were racing to the bottom, we were seeing new display (LCD) technology, battery tech.... But then Corporations happened. Ads moved in to dominate the web, dollar-chasing sites (also often corporate) drowned everything else out. Search engines too started directing you there — toward the mainstream, dollared sites. As other posters have noted, the devices themselves locked down. Hobbyists go pro? It's difficult to imagine something like the BBS culture taking off now. But I do believe these things are cyclical, so I am still going along for the ride, hoping to find the fun niches (Raspberry Pi perhaps?).
  - anthk 5y ago
    BBS' -> tildes, Gopher rebirth and Gemini.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    Part of it is also just the field maturing. For a solid generation or two car tinkering was accessible and widespread. American culture still has a lot of influence from this but as cars matured and became more powerful and reliable, the need to do it and the threshold to get anything out of it changed. I think the latest new "niche" in that domain is the import tuning scene, decades old at this point. Some tinkerers do it because they just enjoy the tinkering but for most I think it's a combination of enjoying it some while also getting some tangible benefits out of it. When any device you could easily DIY is available off the shelf, the cost-benefit changes. You have hard DIY left, but not easy tinkering for moderate gains.
nukemaster 5y ago
I don't think it's an age thing, there were plenty of old people dreaming along with us.
rob74 5y ago
I agree that it's partly an age thing, but I also agree that the times have been more exciting in the past technology-wise. I grew up as a eighties tech geek kid. I learned BASIC on a SHARP programmable calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403), then moved on to an Atari 800, then to an Amiga, and finally to a PC. Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. Well, that didn't quite turn out the way 20 year old me imagined unfortunately. Of course, technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago". SpaceX rockets look practically indistinguishable from rockets that flew 50-70 years ago. Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). Same with self-driving cars and other potentially exciting stuff.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on. > Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like. > Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.
  - frostwarrior 5y ago
jollybean 5y ago
Tech was nerdy in the 1990s. By the 2010's there is a totally different culture. Call it 'All Birds' culture. 1990's there were a lot of weird folks, hippies etc. 2010's 'All Birds' is more commercial, fashionable, a totally different kind of culture. 1990's tech was about tech, it's upstack now, so more like tech applied to classical business problems. AirBnB isn't really a tech company, it happens to be because other, more established companies were not able to integrate tech quickly enough to develop those kinds of markets, where you want to have strong tech / IT instead of relegating them to the back office. Even Facebook, it's a social media company really. Which is different than Oracle, Sun, Microsoft.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  There are more "nerdy", non-boring tech people, but you are correct, you won't find them at AirBnB, Facebook, or Amazon. So don't go there if you want to find it. There's a place in my town that uses drones to inspect Air Turbines - I can guarantee there are more interesting people there. Go into small, crazy businesses that exist to do cool tech. "Cool" people, in my experience, are pretty dull, at least for the societal definition of cool. Find the nerds and geeks, they are still out there, but they still aren't the cool, in group. They are weird and thorny and sometimes smell a little. But they have really fun ideas!
  - jollybean 5y ago
    My fear is that the 'All Birds Nerds' exclude 'Nerd Nerds'. 'nerd nerds' don't know what they are doing in terms of presentation or communication. If 'nerd nerds' are 'hip' it's completely by accident. I also think 'nerd nerds' just say whatever, meaning that occasionally they will say something un-PC, or lacking in empathy and be 'pushed out' for that reason. There was a time (and some people are still like this) where utterances didn't imply an ideological alignment, it's just something that's said. In 'All Birds Culture' everyone is careful how they communicate. I'm sure there are some nerd nerds at AirBnB and frankly not everyone in All Birds Nerd culture is the prototype either but the 'mainstay' at AirBnB would be All Birds Nerds. Someone who wears a 'Metal' T-shirt, completely un-ironically, because they like Metal, and wore it 5 times without washing it, because they forgot, and have disgusting greasy sideburns just 'because they like it' ... and an article of clothing made out of snakeskin ... that's probably a nerd nerd.
WJW 5y ago
For sure, there is boatloads of cool tech out there and the barrier to entry is lower than ever. Btw, I think an overlooked part of the OP was: > Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur. Doing anything as a job is an excellent way to kill your enjoyment of it as a hobby. Subconsciously, you start looking at projects in a business light ("can I turn this into a side gig", "will this advance my career", etc) and that kills off a lot of the excitement that comes with doing things just because you want to.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  Oh for sure. I tell my nieces and nephews and now my son that the best way to kill something you love is to get a job doing it.
- frostwarrior 5y ago
  I personally disagree. I'm a software dev and software is still exciting to me. What kills enjoyment it's not proffesionalism but efficiency. You stop exploring new things and start doing things the fastest and least effort consuming way. You stop wondering what new cool things a technology could offer and start thinking what's the shortest path to a functional product. Being playful is the opposite of that. Being playful is about going out of your way to explore a new thing, setting your curiosity high and your expectations low, and coming back with a new experience. Let it be a spark of excitement or a total bummer because that new thing turned out being crap. But don't expect that to happen in your job. Any company will always optimize for profits over cool tech. Even if you only have 1 hour a day to spend in a tech hobby, that hour will be more exciting then the previous 9. Another problem is that, when you have a solid knowledge about the foundations, there's a tendency to disregard abstractions or quality of life advances. If for every new language you say "It's slow and heavy compared to C and its advantages are crap" well, you are killing your excitement yourself.
bluescrn 5y ago
There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity, and is built to push ads/subscriptions/in-app-purchases. But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or Win3.1 to Win9x - those were serious upgrades. But going from a PS5 Pro to PS5, an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 13, 1080p to 4K, an i7 to a 5-generations-newer i7, or a GTX1080 to an RTX3080 - they're nice incremental steps, but not revolutionary leaps forwards.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity But that also creates an inherent opportunity for open, 'hackable' versions of the broken, locked down crap. You can see this in much of the embedded ecosystem, where much stuff is unusably locked down simply out of short-term laziness and convenience but many of the most popular products are open.
- randomdata 5y ago
  > But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books. I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something the masses didn't have access to when Windows 3.1 or the C64 landed. Gone are the days of decades of behind the scenes R&D suddenly landing in our laps to amaze us. We now watch the R&D unfold in realtime.
  - brootstrap 5y ago
    self driving tractors have been around for years already. The guy operating usually just chills there listening to the radio and occasionally engages to help with precise turns or whatnot.
barrell 5y ago
> Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago I think a huge factor I haven't seen mentioned is continuous delivery. How often were new operating systems released? How often were new products announced? When you bought software, the devs would be hard at work working on the next version with the incentive to make it good enough that people would buy again. Now software is continually released. "Major" updates are expected every year, and they're often free and people are expected to upgrade. Subscription models have rolled out, so while directly interacting with your customer probably leads to a better product, there's less incentive to re-invent the wheel - you don't need to upsell all your previous clients. I would assume that all of this is leading to better products, but all of the baby steps make it all seem so lacklustre. For example, compare the iPhone 13 Pro's camera to, say, the iPhone 8's camera. Had Apple waited 5 years to release the upgrade, the new camera would have blown. peoples. freaking. minds. However, since it's been getting slightly better each year, we instead have people complaining about how the only difference is a slightly better camera.
- csande17 5y ago
  I am skeptical that, particularly in software, rolling releases are a net improvement. If users are locked into subscription services or monetized via data collection, version N+1 no longer needs to be better than version N for the company to keep making money. (In fact, it can be worse, if users are sufficiently locked in via network services or app/plugin ecosystems.)
- randomdata 5y ago
  I think you're right. A decade ago the hype behind the self-driving car made it sound pretty cool. The closer we get to having them, the more boring the idea seems. Each new model with improved driver assistance is just a small improvement over the previous model. When a true fully autonomous model lands, it too will just be a small improvement over the previous year's model, which will be almost fully autonomous. The day you can go down to the dealer's lot and buy a self-driving car for the first time will be a fairly uneventful day. Like you say, in the days of yore the product cycles were long. It was many years between updates. The innovation that took place over that long period was significant, so it was much more wowing when all that behind the scenes work appeared in view.
naoqj 5y ago
>It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality - dreams usually don't. Or at least, not as you expect it. Every generation is doomed to discover that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc
rowanG077 5y ago
I disagree that it's just an age thing. At least Software is moving steadfastly to a dystopia. This wasn't yet apparent 15-20 years ago. Watching Software is just depressing where it's clear it casts quite a large shadow over Humanity.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  Dystopia how? Social networks and their ilk are something that we are struggling with and has impacted society, definitely, but it isn't dystopian (not that it won't go that way). But "software" in general? I don't see any indicators - what do you mean by that statement? Have any examples?
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    I have a few examples. The loss of ownership over Software. The blatant privacy violations. Free Software + ads combination. The consolidation of vital pieces Software into a very small set(sometimes singleton) of companies. The loss of user agency in Software. Literal killer autonomous robots.
    - drewcoo 5y ago
      Part of what you describe is monopoly. That's not new. That's what capitalism tends toward. The other parts you describe are all about connectedness. Or side effects of connectedness. Largely due to the Internet and partially to cell then smart phones. Those are new tech that humans haven't quite made peace with yet. That happens with all tech changes, belive it or not. Over a century ago electrification was jarring. All sorts of magical devices [1] used electricity. And electricity was dangerous! [2] There was also the less obvious danger of con artists, who with sufficiently technological-seeming devices are indistinguishable from magicians (apologies to Clarke!). And the whole thing was such confusing upheaval to society that Rube Goldberg [3] helped people cope by laughing about it. [1] https://www.announcingit.com/invitations-blog/what-came-first-electric-appliances-timeline/ https://www.announcingit.com/invitations-blog/what-came-firs... [2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/why-did-thomas-edison-electrocute-elephant.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questio... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg
jdmichal 5y ago
I had a thought the other day. Our house didn't have a fridge, so we had to buy one when we moved in. We plugged it in one day about 7 years ago and haven't touched it since. So here's a machine that has been keeping our foodstuffs cold with 100% uptime for 7 years, and we just don't even think about it. I'm also old enough to remember when cell phones became a thing, and then when smart phones became the thing after that. The fact that the thing in my pocket could simultaneously emulate several copies of the computer I had as a kid, while running on a battery? And I can talk to people and access the internet from anywhere? This is amazing stuff, and again we just don't even think about it anymore. Like, I fiddled around programming with my TI-84 and TI-92, but that's nothing compared to the capabilities of this smartphone. And, speaking of which, don't even get me started on the internet. The fact is that I don't even remember what it's like to not have a thing in my pocket that can answer pretty much any question I have, whenever and wherever I have it.
hpcjoe 5y ago
I'm still mad that we don't have flying cars ala "The Jetsons". But then again, I think "auto" accidents would become horrifically worse if we did, so there's that. I watched news reports of the moon landing in 1969 as a kid. I played with tech throughout my youth ... converting a small, unused closet next to our garage as an electronics lab. I started with breadboarding (and occasionally, wirewrapping) 555 oscillators, and 741 op amps into weird circuits I'd read about. About 50+ years later, I still build my own machines, albeit at the subsystem level versus the power supply and chip level. I am looking forward to working on automating image capture/processing for a telescope I bought last year. I don't have a flying car (thank a deity), but I have an 8 inch telescope with automatic location and calibration. And a helluva lotta processing power, storage, and networking to do things with the images. I'm not saying I will run a 10/40 GbE optical fibre out to the deck where the telescope will sit ... but I'm not saying I won't. And yes, its nice to have 40GbE networking in my house (basement). I've always viewed tech as a means to an end. I'm a scientist by training, a technologist and software person by choice. I've been an entrepreneur and many other things in my life. I see the tech as a way to do science more quickly, more accurately, and I really enjoy that it is an enabling function. I got my start in HPC and supercomputing precisely because my simulations were taking too long on the workstations of the late 80s and early 90s. I stayed in HPC to build better/faster/stronger supers, and take advantage of the technological waves. Simulations that used to take a powerful (for the early 90s) supercomputer several hours, now take about a minute, on my laptop. Which has more processors, memory, and storage than the old super. I think of technology as a wavefront that enables one to do more, better, and faster in its wake. Some people love the building of the tech, and designing new tech. Some like the applications. If you are bored with the building of tech, think of the applications that you could try, to help improve something real.
chubot 5y ago
It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality This is a tangent, but I've heard that children who grew up in the "space age" after Apollo thought we would be on Mars right now, or colonizing the solar system. It was their childhood dream. Hence a lot of men (especially rich men) in that era are interested in flying planes and going to space. Bezos was born in 1964 and Musk was born in 1971. On the other hand my first memory of the space program was literally the Challenger disaster ... that's when the myths started dying down, and when America stopped going to space very much. I never really had that dream, and it feels like many/most people my age and younger don't.
- drblast 5y ago
  This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species. Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids. Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since. The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.
the_only_law 5y ago
> I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now. This reminds me of a half-joking quote I think I saw on HN years ago about CS being mostly completed by the 80s.
railing 5y ago
you think it's boring* y'all oldies speak for yourself, the future is now, hell my friend is a vertual reality designer making 6 figures. Kids who grew up with modern tech are really only just starting to hit the market

hwers 5y ago

Are you sure? I'd like to hear the take of someone in their early twenties on this. My feeling is that a lot of them are terrified by it themselves too.

gilbetron 5y ago
Terrified of it? If it is terrifying, it is hardly boring, it would seem!
tiluha 5y ago
I'm 22. I feel like there hasn't been any major technologcal shift since ~2014. Phones have gotten faster and more capable, but are still mostly the same. Social media has gotten bigger, but hasn't innovated in a meaningful way. "AI" has gotten better which is fascinating, but in the end it will most likely just be used for manipulation, surveillance and manipulation. I can't really think of any technology to look forward to, that would improve my life or change the world (in a positive sense).
- gilbetron 5y ago
  Autonomous cars, AI/ML, and fusion are three things that will significantly change our world in the next decade or so. There will absolutely be downsides, but that's how tech works! And this doesn't even get into biological spheres of tech! Also, remember, people in 2005 had same thoughts as you're having right now! Throughout my entire life, people have been saying that tech and science is basically done. They've always been wrong, and I don't see an end in sight. It's the nature of exponentials. They seem slow and then suddenly the world changes. Only a handful of people actually can see that it is going to happen. We're just linear creatures with no intuition for exponential growth. Imagine sitting in a dark room and someone about to turn on a switch - up until the switch is flicked, it doesn't seem like anything is going to happen, and then suddenly you are reeling at the brightness. That's how tech innovation happens now. I bet in a decade you'll be looking back saying, holy shit, I did not see that coming about something! "Remember when we used to drive gas vehicles?" or "Remember when we thought fusion was impossible?" or "Remember when nobody owned a robot?" Who knows what it is, but there will be something! In 2014, almost nobody thought about having an app on their phone to summon a car to take them somewhere. Now it is everywhere (and struggling!). In 2014, speech recognition was awful. Now we have an automated robot lady that will answer spam calls for you!
  - hwers 5y ago
    Autonomous cars and fusion are very different creatures than the growth of the internet or computers in general. The latter was widely distributed and had low hanging fruit that just about everyone in society could pluck and have fun with, the former is something a handful of companies and a few hundred researchers will get to develop while the rest of us will have to have our creativity satisfied with the fulfilling act of paying for it. (Even ML to an extent, since it's so data and compute expensive - generally far from a low hanging fruit -, though less so.)
    - kenjackson 5y ago
      The internet took decades to evolve and was heavily funded early on by government. It only became low hanging fruit once it achieved a high level of maturity -- largely until the WWW had a graphical browser.
dotnet00 5y ago
I'm 24, I still feel that tech is very 'cool' and exciting. Yes, there's a lot of stuff that sucks, social media is probably doing more harm than good and the direction that AI research is going in with increasingly larger models that can't reasonably be replicated. But on the other hand, space accessibility is quickly opening up, it's very likely that I would be able to take a trip to space in my lifetime too, maybe even Mars. VR has opened up an amazing new frontier for hanging out with friends on the other side of the world. Medicine is opening up all sorts of scifi technologies, gene therapy with CRISPR, massive strides in protein structure prediction, mRNA vaccines. Synchrotrons and particle accelerators are starting to improve all sorts of observations. Fusion energy is making progress, quantum computing is just getting started. We even took a detailed image of a black hole millions of light years away just a few years ago! Yes, specifically computer related improvements are starting to slow down a little, but with costs only getting lower, there's so much room to bring computers into, so many things that can be automated! AI research has generally stuck to certain niches (basic medicine, basic physics, vision), there's so much that can have breakthroughs at the level of the protein folding model. I think with diverse enough interests, it's hard to say that things are slowing down, they're only getting faster as computers, software and AI mature and dramatically increase efficiency in other fields.

PaulLeiby 5y ago

> "It's an age thing - ... Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago." 1. How can one possible claim that tech is cooler now than is was in the 60s when we were racing into space, developing semiconductors and transistors? Or the 70's when we were rapidly developing integrated circuits, computers and languages? Or cooler than maybe the coolest tech-time ever, the 00s and 1910s when we were simultaneously perfecting bicycles, developing automobiles, powered flight, electrical power networks, and mostly in folks garages or barns?! "It's an age thing." 2. Tech is always cool. 3. Don't let anyone else tell you what is cool, including me.

rcarmo 5y ago

To your point about 3D printing and robots, we haven’t really moved the needle that much. We’ve made it easy for anyone to print a “cool” robot, sure, but it isn’t necessarily a _useful_ one. As a former “maker” and electronics hack I think lot of maker stuff has devolved into “cool” stuff that consists of wire hangers and servos with RGB lighting and very little actual value. But coolness doesn’t really mean much when everything is hyped as such.

supernovae 5y ago
Being a maker isn’t about creating “things of value” or being “useful”. That same mindset is ruining many a good hobby. Astrophotography is going down a shameful route where the only thing your peers want to see is the misery of all the debt you have to out fancy someone else. as for 3d printers.. they have come a long way and have become a core part of creativity and engineering for programs like First Robotics.. hardware is improving, safety is improving, reliability is improving - so much so that if you give up on the creative aspect you can just print away and get started with little effort.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  For some reason I feel the need to weigh in here. I love photography and astronomy but I see no point in mixing the two. We just spent $10 billion to send a fabulous camera and lens into the L2 Lagrange point. Not to mention the over 30 year old Hubble which no amateur has any hope of matching despite decades of advancements in amateur tech (and to be fair to the amateurs, they can do remarkably better than their peers of 30 years ago). But I already spent my money (in tax dollar form) on the best scientists in the world to go and take pretty pictures which also sometimes provide great scientific input. If people enjoy astrophotography then that's fine, but the most magical part of Astronomy to me is seeing Saturn (easily the visual crown jewel of our solar system) through the telescope with my own eyes and realizing that it really is hanging out there in the sky for all to see.
  - supernovae 5y ago
    Citizen scientists do make discoveries - we often discover NEO's, comets and supernova to assist scientists who have limited capacity - I've seen some great work here and lots of technology + telescope convergence of being able to scan thousands of plate solves a night using GPU to find near earth objects. This part of citizen science is doing well... but astrophotography, it used to be able the wonder of capturing it - regardless if you prefer visual with your eye or assisted seeing with a camera. There used to be a aura of DIY - find a camera, adapt it, take some photos, share them, have people say good job. Now its really about memes, trolling and who can get the most Instagram's.. and that's kind of depressing. The people doing citizen science are way outnumbered by the vocal ones comparing their debt, their investment and their preference of equipment as a superiority complex and social media feeds into that and supports it with the algo favoring the controversy and the fights It was a bitter sweet day to sell off my remote observatory and get my nights back... but the passion for the heavens is still there however, that "eyepiece vs a camera" thing is very much part of the problem with the hobby... it just shouldn't matter.

davidn20 5y ago

It's definitely an age thing. Don't get me wrong, I know OP feeling all too well. But, it's like complaining about how the music I grew with was the best music. It's more likely the curiosity in you die, rather than the world running out of stuff to be curious about.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
I don't think so. There are waves throughout history where, at times, it's the Wild West and the opportunities and possibilities abound. One such time was when the Internet had become a global backbone, hardware prices were racing to the bottom, we were seeing new display (LCD) technology, battery tech.... But then Corporations happened. Ads moved in to dominate the web, dollar-chasing sites (also often corporate) drowned everything else out. Search engines too started directing you there — toward the mainstream, dollared sites. As other posters have noted, the devices themselves locked down. Hobbyists go pro? It's difficult to imagine something like the BBS culture taking off now. But I do believe these things are cyclical, so I am still going along for the ride, hoping to find the fun niches (Raspberry Pi perhaps?).
- anthk 5y ago
  BBS' -> tildes, Gopher rebirth and Gemini.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  Part of it is also just the field maturing. For a solid generation or two car tinkering was accessible and widespread. American culture still has a lot of influence from this but as cars matured and became more powerful and reliable, the need to do it and the threshold to get anything out of it changed. I think the latest new "niche" in that domain is the import tuning scene, decades old at this point. Some tinkerers do it because they just enjoy the tinkering but for most I think it's a combination of enjoying it some while also getting some tangible benefits out of it. When any device you could easily DIY is available off the shelf, the cost-benefit changes. You have hard DIY left, but not easy tinkering for moderate gains.

nukemaster 5y ago

I don't think it's an age thing, there were plenty of old people dreaming along with us.

rob74 5y ago

I agree that it's partly an age thing, but I also agree that the times have been more exciting in the past technology-wise. I grew up as a eighties tech geek kid. I learned BASIC on a SHARP programmable calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403), then moved on to an Atari 800, then to an Amiga, and finally to a PC. Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. Well, that didn't quite turn out the way 20 year old me imagined unfortunately. Of course, technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago". SpaceX rockets look practically indistinguishable from rockets that flew 50-70 years ago. Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). Same with self-driving cars and other potentially exciting stuff.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on. > Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like. > Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.
- frostwarrior 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

Tech was nerdy in the 1990s. By the 2010's there is a totally different culture. Call it 'All Birds' culture. 1990's there were a lot of weird folks, hippies etc. 2010's 'All Birds' is more commercial, fashionable, a totally different kind of culture. 1990's tech was about tech, it's upstack now, so more like tech applied to classical business problems. AirBnB isn't really a tech company, it happens to be because other, more established companies were not able to integrate tech quickly enough to develop those kinds of markets, where you want to have strong tech / IT instead of relegating them to the back office. Even Facebook, it's a social media company really. Which is different than Oracle, Sun, Microsoft.

gilbetron 5y ago
There are more "nerdy", non-boring tech people, but you are correct, you won't find them at AirBnB, Facebook, or Amazon. So don't go there if you want to find it. There's a place in my town that uses drones to inspect Air Turbines - I can guarantee there are more interesting people there. Go into small, crazy businesses that exist to do cool tech. "Cool" people, in my experience, are pretty dull, at least for the societal definition of cool. Find the nerds and geeks, they are still out there, but they still aren't the cool, in group. They are weird and thorny and sometimes smell a little. But they have really fun ideas!
- jollybean 5y ago
  My fear is that the 'All Birds Nerds' exclude 'Nerd Nerds'. 'nerd nerds' don't know what they are doing in terms of presentation or communication. If 'nerd nerds' are 'hip' it's completely by accident. I also think 'nerd nerds' just say whatever, meaning that occasionally they will say something un-PC, or lacking in empathy and be 'pushed out' for that reason. There was a time (and some people are still like this) where utterances didn't imply an ideological alignment, it's just something that's said. In 'All Birds Culture' everyone is careful how they communicate. I'm sure there are some nerd nerds at AirBnB and frankly not everyone in All Birds Nerd culture is the prototype either but the 'mainstay' at AirBnB would be All Birds Nerds. Someone who wears a 'Metal' T-shirt, completely un-ironically, because they like Metal, and wore it 5 times without washing it, because they forgot, and have disgusting greasy sideburns just 'because they like it' ... and an article of clothing made out of snakeskin ... that's probably a nerd nerd.

WJW 5y ago

For sure, there is boatloads of cool tech out there and the barrier to entry is lower than ever. Btw, I think an overlooked part of the OP was: > Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur. Doing anything as a job is an excellent way to kill your enjoyment of it as a hobby. Subconsciously, you start looking at projects in a business light ("can I turn this into a side gig", "will this advance my career", etc) and that kills off a lot of the excitement that comes with doing things just because you want to.

gilbetron 5y ago
Oh for sure. I tell my nieces and nephews and now my son that the best way to kill something you love is to get a job doing it.
frostwarrior 5y ago
I personally disagree. I'm a software dev and software is still exciting to me. What kills enjoyment it's not proffesionalism but efficiency. You stop exploring new things and start doing things the fastest and least effort consuming way. You stop wondering what new cool things a technology could offer and start thinking what's the shortest path to a functional product. Being playful is the opposite of that. Being playful is about going out of your way to explore a new thing, setting your curiosity high and your expectations low, and coming back with a new experience. Let it be a spark of excitement or a total bummer because that new thing turned out being crap. But don't expect that to happen in your job. Any company will always optimize for profits over cool tech. Even if you only have 1 hour a day to spend in a tech hobby, that hour will be more exciting then the previous 9. Another problem is that, when you have a solid knowledge about the foundations, there's a tendency to disregard abstractions or quality of life advances. If for every new language you say "It's slow and heavy compared to C and its advantages are crap" well, you are killing your excitement yourself.

bluescrn 5y ago

There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity, and is built to push ads/subscriptions/in-app-purchases. But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or Win3.1 to Win9x - those were serious upgrades. But going from a PS5 Pro to PS5, an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 13, 1080p to 4K, an i7 to a 5-generations-newer i7, or a GTX1080 to an RTX3080 - they're nice incremental steps, but not revolutionary leaps forwards.

zozbot234 5y ago
> There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity But that also creates an inherent opportunity for open, 'hackable' versions of the broken, locked down crap. You can see this in much of the embedded ecosystem, where much stuff is unusably locked down simply out of short-term laziness and convenience but many of the most popular products are open.
randomdata 5y ago
> But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books. I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something the masses didn't have access to when Windows 3.1 or the C64 landed. Gone are the days of decades of behind the scenes R&D suddenly landing in our laps to amaze us. We now watch the R&D unfold in realtime.
- brootstrap 5y ago
  self driving tractors have been around for years already. The guy operating usually just chills there listening to the radio and occasionally engages to help with precise turns or whatnot.

barrell 5y ago

> Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago I think a huge factor I haven't seen mentioned is continuous delivery. How often were new operating systems released? How often were new products announced? When you bought software, the devs would be hard at work working on the next version with the incentive to make it good enough that people would buy again. Now software is continually released. "Major" updates are expected every year, and they're often free and people are expected to upgrade. Subscription models have rolled out, so while directly interacting with your customer probably leads to a better product, there's less incentive to re-invent the wheel - you don't need to upsell all your previous clients. I would assume that all of this is leading to better products, but all of the baby steps make it all seem so lacklustre. For example, compare the iPhone 13 Pro's camera to, say, the iPhone 8's camera. Had Apple waited 5 years to release the upgrade, the new camera would have blown. peoples. freaking. minds. However, since it's been getting slightly better each year, we instead have people complaining about how the only difference is a slightly better camera.

csande17 5y ago
I am skeptical that, particularly in software, rolling releases are a net improvement. If users are locked into subscription services or monetized via data collection, version N+1 no longer needs to be better than version N for the company to keep making money. (In fact, it can be worse, if users are sufficiently locked in via network services or app/plugin ecosystems.)
randomdata 5y ago
I think you're right. A decade ago the hype behind the self-driving car made it sound pretty cool. The closer we get to having them, the more boring the idea seems. Each new model with improved driver assistance is just a small improvement over the previous model. When a true fully autonomous model lands, it too will just be a small improvement over the previous year's model, which will be almost fully autonomous. The day you can go down to the dealer's lot and buy a self-driving car for the first time will be a fairly uneventful day. Like you say, in the days of yore the product cycles were long. It was many years between updates. The innovation that took place over that long period was significant, so it was much more wowing when all that behind the scenes work appeared in view.

naoqj 5y ago

>It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality - dreams usually don't. Or at least, not as you expect it. Every generation is doomed to discover that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc

rowanG077 5y ago

I disagree that it's just an age thing. At least Software is moving steadfastly to a dystopia. This wasn't yet apparent 15-20 years ago. Watching Software is just depressing where it's clear it casts quite a large shadow over Humanity.

gilbetron 5y ago
Dystopia how? Social networks and their ilk are something that we are struggling with and has impacted society, definitely, but it isn't dystopian (not that it won't go that way). But "software" in general? I don't see any indicators - what do you mean by that statement? Have any examples?
- rowanG077 5y ago
  I have a few examples. The loss of ownership over Software. The blatant privacy violations. Free Software + ads combination. The consolidation of vital pieces Software into a very small set(sometimes singleton) of companies. The loss of user agency in Software. Literal killer autonomous robots.
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    Part of what you describe is monopoly. That's not new. That's what capitalism tends toward. The other parts you describe are all about connectedness. Or side effects of connectedness. Largely due to the Internet and partially to cell then smart phones. Those are new tech that humans haven't quite made peace with yet. That happens with all tech changes, belive it or not. Over a century ago electrification was jarring. All sorts of magical devices [1] used electricity. And electricity was dangerous! [2] There was also the less obvious danger of con artists, who with sufficiently technological-seeming devices are indistinguishable from magicians (apologies to Clarke!). And the whole thing was such confusing upheaval to society that Rube Goldberg [3] helped people cope by laughing about it. [1] https://www.announcingit.com/invitations-blog/what-came-first-electric-appliances-timeline/ https://www.announcingit.com/invitations-blog/what-came-firs... [2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/why-did-thomas-edison-electrocute-elephant.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questio... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg

jdmichal 5y ago

I had a thought the other day. Our house didn't have a fridge, so we had to buy one when we moved in. We plugged it in one day about 7 years ago and haven't touched it since. So here's a machine that has been keeping our foodstuffs cold with 100% uptime for 7 years, and we just don't even think about it. I'm also old enough to remember when cell phones became a thing, and then when smart phones became the thing after that. The fact that the thing in my pocket could simultaneously emulate several copies of the computer I had as a kid, while running on a battery? And I can talk to people and access the internet from anywhere? This is amazing stuff, and again we just don't even think about it anymore. Like, I fiddled around programming with my TI-84 and TI-92, but that's nothing compared to the capabilities of this smartphone. And, speaking of which, don't even get me started on the internet. The fact is that I don't even remember what it's like to not have a thing in my pocket that can answer pretty much any question I have, whenever and wherever I have it.

hpcjoe 5y ago

I'm still mad that we don't have flying cars ala "The Jetsons". But then again, I think "auto" accidents would become horrifically worse if we did, so there's that. I watched news reports of the moon landing in 1969 as a kid. I played with tech throughout my youth ... converting a small, unused closet next to our garage as an electronics lab. I started with breadboarding (and occasionally, wirewrapping) 555 oscillators, and 741 op amps into weird circuits I'd read about. About 50+ years later, I still build my own machines, albeit at the subsystem level versus the power supply and chip level. I am looking forward to working on automating image capture/processing for a telescope I bought last year. I don't have a flying car (thank a deity), but I have an 8 inch telescope with automatic location and calibration. And a helluva lotta processing power, storage, and networking to do things with the images. I'm not saying I will run a 10/40 GbE optical fibre out to the deck where the telescope will sit ... but I'm not saying I won't. And yes, its nice to have 40GbE networking in my house (basement). I've always viewed tech as a means to an end. I'm a scientist by training, a technologist and software person by choice. I've been an entrepreneur and many other things in my life. I see the tech as a way to do science more quickly, more accurately, and I really enjoy that it is an enabling function. I got my start in HPC and supercomputing precisely because my simulations were taking too long on the workstations of the late 80s and early 90s. I stayed in HPC to build better/faster/stronger supers, and take advantage of the technological waves. Simulations that used to take a powerful (for the early 90s) supercomputer several hours, now take about a minute, on my laptop. Which has more processors, memory, and storage than the old super. I think of technology as a wavefront that enables one to do more, better, and faster in its wake. Some people love the building of the tech, and designing new tech. Some like the applications. If you are bored with the building of tech, think of the applications that you could try, to help improve something real.

chubot 5y ago

It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality This is a tangent, but I've heard that children who grew up in the "space age" after Apollo thought we would be on Mars right now, or colonizing the solar system. It was their childhood dream. Hence a lot of men (especially rich men) in that era are interested in flying planes and going to space. Bezos was born in 1964 and Musk was born in 1971. On the other hand my first memory of the space program was literally the Challenger disaster ... that's when the myths started dying down, and when America stopped going to space very much. I never really had that dream, and it feels like many/most people my age and younger don't.

drblast 5y ago
This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species. Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids. Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since. The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.

the_only_law 5y ago

> I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now. This reminds me of a half-joking quote I think I saw on HN years ago about CS being mostly completed by the 80s.

railing 5y ago

you think it's boring* y'all oldies speak for yourself, the future is now, hell my friend is a vertual reality designer making 6 figures. Kids who grew up with modern tech are really only just starting to hit the market