9 ms·

Computers as a whole seem so boring nowadays. I get that we all have supercomputers in our pockets, and it should be amazing, but it's just dull.

mhh__ 4y ago
Computers are boring but system on chips are kind of interesting again now that you need all this compute for AI. People have made huge mistakes waiting for workloads that have very predictable computation, now with AI we have a need for coprocessors again.
smackeyacky 4y ago
Dull? You can hang the equivalent of an eighties micro on anything you please and record things nobody has ever seen before, download the data en masse to your pocket supercomputer, sync that to an AI and make accurate predictions that can be used to affect real world outcomes. You can talk to anyone on the planet with minimal charges. You can take infinite numbers of pictures of everything at insane resolutions, backyard astronomy is unbelievable compared to the Sun era. Computing has never been so exciting. If you think you missed out because you weren't in silicon valley in the 1980s, the amount of cool work being done everywhere but the valley needs reconsidering. I've been doing this since the 80s and its never been better than now.
- hulitu 4y ago
  And still printing a web page is real challenge. And if you want to compile a programm you find out that it needs 30 libraries. Some things are better. Most of the things are worse. I have a text editor on my Android phone. It cannot do search and replace.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    I don't have any problems printing web pages. Rick click, print, done. Non trivial programs always required a lot of libraries. At least now you don't have to wait 3 weeks for a tape to show up so you can continue working. Vim for Android is a thing [0] [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.droidvim&hl=en_AU&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.droidvim&h...
    - jsjohnst 4y ago
      Vim[0] for iOS too [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660
    - throwuxiytayq 4y ago
      I print articles/pages to PDF all the time to read them on my e-ink. They come out readable about 30% of the time thanks to multiple layers of banners and popups on the average site these days. It's annoying that even (and especially!) Medium/Wordpress etc can't be bothered to exclude them from @media print. I usually end up editing the site via devtools before printing, but that's not always an option (eg. in third party mobile apps for pdf export). Make your websites printable, darnit. It's very little effort to get 90% there.
      - ninkendo 4y ago
        Yes, please make your sites printable, with no popups or ads or other garbage! Also, somebody make an extension so that every webpage renders with its print style sheet, so I don’t need to see the popups or ads or other garbage.
  - aBitPlayer 4y ago
    To me, one exciting motivation today in computing is rethinking and simplifying systems. https://youtu.be/k0uE_chSnV8 https://youtu.be/k0uE_chSnV8 https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk
    - trevcanhuman 4y ago
      Nice, Jonathan Blow. Although I may not understand the underlying philosophy under which his arguments are made, he's inspired me to challenge ideas that are sometimes given for granted. I'd definitely be interested in working with operating systems or even systems theory, although I haven't put much thought to it.
  - turtlebits 4y ago
    Printing has been solved a long time ago. Do you remember having to search for/install printer drivers? Even after a few years, I'm still amazed that I can print from my phone to a wireless printer I have at home, and how easy it was to setup.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      My mom’s printer is basically care free. $200 and she has a scanner/copier/printer and I pay about $60 a year and she automatically gets paper and ink from HP. Most of what she does is from an iPad, which is setup free. The laptop required some minor setup.
      - donthellbanme 4y ago
        $60 a year is great. She dosen't print much. My mother's HP stops printing completely if one color is down. She only prints B/W. (Personally I think printing companies shot themselfs in the foot with chipped cartridges. Instead of printing out willynilly; we, most of America, only prints out what's absolutely necessary. It's a business move on their part I will never understand. They tried to amend there blunder with Eco, but it's a bit too late. We got used to not printing. "Here's a picture of Billy Sue riding her brother's bike." Of course, we don't print it out like the 2000's and hang it on the frig.)
    - garaetjjte 4y ago
      >Do you remember having to search for/install printer drivers? ..yes? I need to fight with weird driver installers every time I connect new device to my Brother printer. (and then you setup scanner and printing stops working, arghh...)
    - jrockway 4y ago
      That's my experience. I have some cheap Samsung laser printer connected to my network, and a page comes out a few seconds later whenever I pick "print". It reminds me that it exists when I open the paper tray to steal a sheet of paper for notes and the rollers turn on when the tray is closed. Can't complain.
- sedatk 4y ago
  I agree with you fully. It's just that tech stopped giving the same dopamine boost as social platforms nowadays.
- eezurr 4y ago
  For me, I imagine part of the excitement is applying the art of computer science every day at your job back then. When things are taken care of for you, they become boring. Not because those things are inherently boring, but they're boring because you're no longer thinking about them. You can't get excited about things you aren't thinking about. Many jobs transitioned from surgeons with scalpels to supergluing prefab parts together. Which one sounds more exciting to you? I'd rather be a surgeon.
  - hodgesrm 4y ago
    C'mon over to databases. Computer science is alive and well here.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Yes, but the question then becomes, is it more fun and exciting to use those things, or was it more fun and exciting to build the underlying technologies and products?
- theonething 4y ago
  Hacking on my Commodore 64 in the 80s was much more fun than the web app of the week I'm doing now.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    Get into hardware. Pick up a micro controller, its all restricted memory, C or assembly, awful tools, big challenges. Its just as satisfying as an 80s micro and a lot more useful.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Cheap microcontrollers are beefy these days. You can run Python on them; plug it into your workstation, open "code.py" on the drive, write your program, enjoy. Yes, there's the REPL too!
- rektide 4y ago
  Altogether far too much computing happens in far off mainframes. Aka the cloud. Far too little computing can genuinely be engaged with. The potential has been coopted & occluded & we're left chainrd to the cave again, starting at megacompany's shadowpuppets. It's worth admitting the formative years are often a lot of fun. Some come-down is expected. But I also believe collective discontent slowly grows in this deeply consumerized computing climate & eventually we'll push for new terrain, grow tired of this technostratifocation.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    I don't see this in my work. I've been hanging microcontrollers off sheep for the last 5 years. Sure, some of it is cloud based but a lot of it is visceral, tough, hard to write code that is very satisfying.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Your work isnt cloud but it sounds equally industrial, equally as much as a rebuff of personal computing. Your eork os reserved for & explorable only by a very very very few. many many people on this site have great & wonderful experineces with computing, are.greatly empowered & do good things. but rarely will our efforts have a tangible output on computing itself, affect the way anyone else computes. the general iniative of computing has somewhat rather stalled, become overexploited for narrow & controlled ends.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    maybe, maybe not. I can get VC funding and in 2 months time have a compute cluster with thousands of nodes processing terabits per second of data. Then when my funding runs out I can just shut it all down and not worry about what to do with all that stuff. Compare that to prior to cloud where you'd need to secure DC space, sign multiple contracts with many vendors. Wait many quarters for all that equipment to land. Hire a small army of consultants and experts to configure all this stuff. Then when the PM team says you know what, what about that new feature...we'll say no as we just made this huge capex purchase. The Cloud has democratized super computing to the masses. Truly amazing
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  Around about as long. It's been reined in and put to work for real. Whips don't hurt much, for now.
- yarg 4y ago
  Computing could be more exciting than it's ever been - were it not for the walled gardens being build all about.
- smm11 4y ago
  You weren't paying attention from 91-95 or so, then. You'd run into Sun, SGI, OS/2, 3.1, Mac, NeXT, and DOS everywhere you looked, and might have heard about Linux. New Netscape versions were released nightly. There was no data mining, or ads.
- jjav 4y ago
  > Dull? Yes, dull. Technology has been made into a walled garden consumer product. Hosted on remote servers ("cloud") tighly locked away, non-interoperable and no serviceable parts inside as the sticker says. Dull.
  - Yuioup 4y ago
    Hm maybe you should try Linux.
    - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
      or maybe like Linux From Scratch, to spice things up :)
    - jjav 4y ago
      Been using Linux since late 1993. But I'm talking about the tech industry and products.
    - hansel_der 4y ago
      maybe thats the problem right there. EVERYBODY is using some unix these days (android, linux, ios, macos) so it's not cool and nerdy anymore, it's your mom, uncle, grandparents ... it's dull.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Or FreeBSD.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    Not for me. Anyone can create the future outside of those walled gardens. The price of entry has never been lower.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Computing is less fun exactly because all this is commonplace.
codegeek 4y ago
It feels boring because for the most part, we have solved some of the most common problems that we needed computers for. The idea of watching movies, ordering groceries/food, talking to a friend/family 8000 miles away in a second were all interesting and fancy and now it is part of life. So we get bored. Today's personal computers pretty much do everything we need in terms of basic necessities. I was driving earlier today and realized the power of Maps on our phones. Imagine back in the days when you need to print mapquest (remember?) or plain old maps to figure out how to get to the Interstate from this new place you just visited. Things like VR etc so far (my opinion) have been disappointments for the most part even though we keep trying to innovate. Also, remember 3D TVs ? I guess we need things like teleportation, real robots (not the one like Rocky IV movie) and some cooler stuff to make it interesting again.
- MikeTheRocker 4y ago
  I'm biased because I've been working on AR/VR at Meta/Oculus for the last 4 years, but I'm curious what you've found disappointing and whether you've tried the lastest VR software and hardware. As far as gaming goes, Half-Life: Alyx and Resident Evil 4 are superb AAA experiences. As for hardware, Quest 2 and Valve Index are both great at what they promise for their respective price points.
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    I'm curious, in your field have you had a chance to try the Varjo Aero yet? It looks stunning.
    - MikeTheRocker 4y ago
      I haven't tried the Aero but I tried another Varjo model a while back (not sure which), and the visual clarity was magnificent. I'm really glad there is room in the AR/VR space for devices at varying price points and levels of quality.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  VR is not a disappointment imo. A lot of people are having a lot of fun with VR chat. The hardware is just still very expensive and has the huge requirement of needing a 3x3m space to play in. The average person doesn't have an empty VR zone ready just to play specific types of games in. 3D TVs only failed because they never worked out how to do it properly without glasses. People will accept a clunky solution for the early adopter version but once it became clear there was no path forward, they just become discontinued.
grishka 4y ago
Software engineering is no longer considered engineering these days. People mash abstractions together without even trying to understand what's beneath those abstractions. Knowing what you're actually doing seems to be a big deal in software development now.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Engineering is trying to underestand things and learn from mistakes. SW engineering is like financial engineering: trying to get profits fast.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    Anecdotally that tracks, because all of my (very good!) CS professors in undergrad were retired engineering-engineers, with only a single retired software engineer that I can recall (who taught the course focused on real-world SWE/project management)
  - grishka 4y ago
    This is why I've given up on working anywhere where venture capital is even remotely involved. I want to make the world a better place and empower people, not make rich people richer while they do nothing of value.
    - weq 4y ago
      ha you sound as jaded as i do. ive come to learn that we will work with google (search) programmers as long as buisnesses fool themselves that outsourcing saves money.
georgeecollins 4y ago
Right, because micro computers have had decades of investment and development, when in 1982 they were like 15 years old (microprocessors anyway (HN correct me)). Now the excitement is probably something that new or newer.. drones, recent ML, AR/VR/XR, wearable, or something that I don't know what it is. It's gotta be something where most people think it won't even work.
- ghaff 4y ago
  15 years in 1982 is casting a pretty wide net for actual microcomputers. The Altair 8800 kit debuted on Radio-Electronics in 1975 and the Apple II came out a couple years later. But I was an engineering undergrad in the late 70s and I knew no one who owned a personal computer. They didn't even become geek things beyond a very limited number of people until the early 80s.
gonehome 4y ago
One of the things that drew me to urbit is it feels like when I first started playing with linux. It's fun, but in a way that tackles some real underlying issues with the modern web/computing stack. The ideas are interesting and whatever happens it's definitely not boring imo: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...
walrus01 4y ago
I think there was a lot more novelty and shock/awe in amazing new things when we didn't have youtube channels and social media of every new thing immediately poring over ever detail of it. For instance, when ID first released DOOM to the Internet and BBSes it was something you discovered on your own and among your local community of people who had network access and a PC capable of running it, there weren't hundreds of youtube channels playing full-1080p playthroughs of the entire game, etc.
- bovermyer 4y ago
  Selective ignorance might be something worth cultivating. When I was young (middle/high school), I devoured print strategy guides for video games and printed (hah) source code in library books. It was hard to come by, and just as nuanced/wrong as solutions/strategies/source you now find on the web/GitHub/etc. In the last few years, I've stopped indulging in play-throughs, guides, or other experiences-on-rails. My sense of awe at discovering things has increased dramatically as a result. Not quite where it was thirty years ago, but getting there.
- ngc248 4y ago
  Exactly, the novelty of finding something our for yourself. And lots of times the anticipation of waiting for something itself used to be so fun. As you mentioned, with everything being reviewed to the minutest detail, all of that novelty is gone now.
paulcole 4y ago
Let me guess, computers were a lot more interesting and amazing when you were a teenager and into your early 20s?
virtual_void 4y ago
Sometimes i think this too. I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like nothing. If I’m doing something with a load of libraries and feel like a plumber more than a programmer then I find that excitement hard to come by. Playing with modern day microcontrollers, SoC stuff or building software with hard real-time requirements is still a lot of fun - i just don’t get to do it so much these days.
uuyi 4y ago
It’s not dull really but I find it laborious and sometimes stupid. The sense of achievement has been sucked away by deep rabbit holes of research required to decipher even the simplest tasks. The retention and value of knowledge has declined due to the transient nature of everything too. Every day is a catching up session for something which is either horrible or will be replaced before you’ve finished the job. I reserve the label stupid specifically for templated YAML which makes me want to strangle people fairly quickly.
- joeberon 4y ago
Gigachad 4y ago
Computers have not become boring. You have become old. Kids these days are having more fun than ever with today's computers.
nyokodo 4y ago
> Computers as a whole seem so boring nowadays. For most of us everything becomes less exciting as we get older compared to our youth. Our minds are less responsive to novelty and there’s less novelty to be had. Kids still get enthralled by computers these days.
elzbardico 4y ago
It is the paradox of choice or abundance. I remember that in the early 90s getting a bootleg copy of turbo C for my PC was something that I eagerly anticipated for the weeks it took me to finally get the disks. Heck, I was excited to install windows 3.1. To be frank even using debug.com to execute some small snippets of assembly code was terribly exciting. Because there was not a lot of much else to do.
superasn 4y ago
I think once the VR goggles get more portable, hopefully the size of contact lenses one day, it will make things super exciting once again. I just hope it happens in the next 20 years.
phendrenad2 4y ago
I'll share a controversial opinion: I think computers were always boring, even if you worked for Sun Microsystems, yes even in 1981. In 1981, the Intel 8086 had been on the market for 3 years, and the 68000 had been on the market for 2 years. There were probably a hundred startup companies trying to make a workstation to compete with Sun. If you went to work for one of those companies, you crashed and burned or were acquired, and got to watch the project you worked so hard on become abandoned.

mhh__ 4y ago

Computers are boring but system on chips are kind of interesting again now that you need all this compute for AI. People have made huge mistakes waiting for workloads that have very predictable computation, now with AI we have a need for coprocessors again.

smackeyacky 4y ago

Dull? You can hang the equivalent of an eighties micro on anything you please and record things nobody has ever seen before, download the data en masse to your pocket supercomputer, sync that to an AI and make accurate predictions that can be used to affect real world outcomes. You can talk to anyone on the planet with minimal charges. You can take infinite numbers of pictures of everything at insane resolutions, backyard astronomy is unbelievable compared to the Sun era. Computing has never been so exciting. If you think you missed out because you weren't in silicon valley in the 1980s, the amount of cool work being done everywhere but the valley needs reconsidering. I've been doing this since the 80s and its never been better than now.

hulitu 4y ago
And still printing a web page is real challenge. And if you want to compile a programm you find out that it needs 30 libraries. Some things are better. Most of the things are worse. I have a text editor on my Android phone. It cannot do search and replace.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  I don't have any problems printing web pages. Rick click, print, done. Non trivial programs always required a lot of libraries. At least now you don't have to wait 3 weeks for a tape to show up so you can continue working. Vim for Android is a thing [0] [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.droidvim&hl=en_AU&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.droidvim&h...
  - jsjohnst 4y ago
    Vim[0] for iOS too [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660
  - throwuxiytayq 4y ago
    I print articles/pages to PDF all the time to read them on my e-ink. They come out readable about 30% of the time thanks to multiple layers of banners and popups on the average site these days. It's annoying that even (and especially!) Medium/Wordpress etc can't be bothered to exclude them from @media print. I usually end up editing the site via devtools before printing, but that's not always an option (eg. in third party mobile apps for pdf export). Make your websites printable, darnit. It's very little effort to get 90% there.
    - ninkendo 4y ago
      Yes, please make your sites printable, with no popups or ads or other garbage! Also, somebody make an extension so that every webpage renders with its print style sheet, so I don’t need to see the popups or ads or other garbage.
- aBitPlayer 4y ago
  To me, one exciting motivation today in computing is rethinking and simplifying systems. https://youtu.be/k0uE_chSnV8 https://youtu.be/k0uE_chSnV8 https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk
  - trevcanhuman 4y ago
    Nice, Jonathan Blow. Although I may not understand the underlying philosophy under which his arguments are made, he's inspired me to challenge ideas that are sometimes given for granted. I'd definitely be interested in working with operating systems or even systems theory, although I haven't put much thought to it.
- turtlebits 4y ago
  Printing has been solved a long time ago. Do you remember having to search for/install printer drivers? Even after a few years, I'm still amazed that I can print from my phone to a wireless printer I have at home, and how easy it was to setup.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    My mom’s printer is basically care free. $200 and she has a scanner/copier/printer and I pay about $60 a year and she automatically gets paper and ink from HP. Most of what she does is from an iPad, which is setup free. The laptop required some minor setup.
    - donthellbanme 4y ago
      $60 a year is great. She dosen't print much. My mother's HP stops printing completely if one color is down. She only prints B/W. (Personally I think printing companies shot themselfs in the foot with chipped cartridges. Instead of printing out willynilly; we, most of America, only prints out what's absolutely necessary. It's a business move on their part I will never understand. They tried to amend there blunder with Eco, but it's a bit too late. We got used to not printing. "Here's a picture of Billy Sue riding her brother's bike." Of course, we don't print it out like the 2000's and hang it on the frig.)
  - garaetjjte 4y ago
    >Do you remember having to search for/install printer drivers? ..yes? I need to fight with weird driver installers every time I connect new device to my Brother printer. (and then you setup scanner and printing stops working, arghh...)
  - jrockway 4y ago
    That's my experience. I have some cheap Samsung laser printer connected to my network, and a page comes out a few seconds later whenever I pick "print". It reminds me that it exists when I open the paper tray to steal a sheet of paper for notes and the rollers turn on when the tray is closed. Can't complain.
sedatk 4y ago
I agree with you fully. It's just that tech stopped giving the same dopamine boost as social platforms nowadays.
eezurr 4y ago
For me, I imagine part of the excitement is applying the art of computer science every day at your job back then. When things are taken care of for you, they become boring. Not because those things are inherently boring, but they're boring because you're no longer thinking about them. You can't get excited about things you aren't thinking about. Many jobs transitioned from surgeons with scalpels to supergluing prefab parts together. Which one sounds more exciting to you? I'd rather be a surgeon.
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  C'mon over to databases. Computer science is alive and well here.
jimbokun 4y ago
Yes, but the question then becomes, is it more fun and exciting to use those things, or was it more fun and exciting to build the underlying technologies and products?
theonething 4y ago
Hacking on my Commodore 64 in the 80s was much more fun than the web app of the week I'm doing now.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Get into hardware. Pick up a micro controller, its all restricted memory, C or assembly, awful tools, big challenges. Its just as satisfying as an 80s micro and a lot more useful.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Cheap microcontrollers are beefy these days. You can run Python on them; plug it into your workstation, open "code.py" on the drive, write your program, enjoy. Yes, there's the REPL too!
rektide 4y ago
Altogether far too much computing happens in far off mainframes. Aka the cloud. Far too little computing can genuinely be engaged with. The potential has been coopted & occluded & we're left chainrd to the cave again, starting at megacompany's shadowpuppets. It's worth admitting the formative years are often a lot of fun. Some come-down is expected. But I also believe collective discontent slowly grows in this deeply consumerized computing climate & eventually we'll push for new terrain, grow tired of this technostratifocation.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  I don't see this in my work. I've been hanging microcontrollers off sheep for the last 5 years. Sure, some of it is cloud based but a lot of it is visceral, tough, hard to write code that is very satisfying.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Your work isnt cloud but it sounds equally industrial, equally as much as a rebuff of personal computing. Your eork os reserved for & explorable only by a very very very few. many many people on this site have great & wonderful experineces with computing, are.greatly empowered & do good things. but rarely will our efforts have a tangible output on computing itself, affect the way anyone else computes. the general iniative of computing has somewhat rather stalled, become overexploited for narrow & controlled ends.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  maybe, maybe not. I can get VC funding and in 2 months time have a compute cluster with thousands of nodes processing terabits per second of data. Then when my funding runs out I can just shut it all down and not worry about what to do with all that stuff. Compare that to prior to cloud where you'd need to secure DC space, sign multiple contracts with many vendors. Wait many quarters for all that equipment to land. Hire a small army of consultants and experts to configure all this stuff. Then when the PM team says you know what, what about that new feature...we'll say no as we just made this huge capex purchase. The Cloud has democratized super computing to the masses. Truly amazing
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
Around about as long. It's been reined in and put to work for real. Whips don't hurt much, for now.
yarg 4y ago
Computing could be more exciting than it's ever been - were it not for the walled gardens being build all about.
smm11 4y ago
You weren't paying attention from 91-95 or so, then. You'd run into Sun, SGI, OS/2, 3.1, Mac, NeXT, and DOS everywhere you looked, and might have heard about Linux. New Netscape versions were released nightly. There was no data mining, or ads.
jjav 4y ago
> Dull? Yes, dull. Technology has been made into a walled garden consumer product. Hosted on remote servers ("cloud") tighly locked away, non-interoperable and no serviceable parts inside as the sticker says. Dull.
- Yuioup 4y ago
  Hm maybe you should try Linux.
  - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
    or maybe like Linux From Scratch, to spice things up :)
  - jjav 4y ago
    Been using Linux since late 1993. But I'm talking about the tech industry and products.
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    maybe thats the problem right there. EVERYBODY is using some unix these days (android, linux, ios, macos) so it's not cool and nerdy anymore, it's your mom, uncle, grandparents ... it's dull.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Or FreeBSD.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Not for me. Anyone can create the future outside of those walled gardens. The price of entry has never been lower.
Aeolun 4y ago
Computing is less fun exactly because all this is commonplace.

codegeek 4y ago

It feels boring because for the most part, we have solved some of the most common problems that we needed computers for. The idea of watching movies, ordering groceries/food, talking to a friend/family 8000 miles away in a second were all interesting and fancy and now it is part of life. So we get bored. Today's personal computers pretty much do everything we need in terms of basic necessities. I was driving earlier today and realized the power of Maps on our phones. Imagine back in the days when you need to print mapquest (remember?) or plain old maps to figure out how to get to the Interstate from this new place you just visited. Things like VR etc so far (my opinion) have been disappointments for the most part even though we keep trying to innovate. Also, remember 3D TVs ? I guess we need things like teleportation, real robots (not the one like Rocky IV movie) and some cooler stuff to make it interesting again.

MikeTheRocker 4y ago
I'm biased because I've been working on AR/VR at Meta/Oculus for the last 4 years, but I'm curious what you've found disappointing and whether you've tried the lastest VR software and hardware. As far as gaming goes, Half-Life: Alyx and Resident Evil 4 are superb AAA experiences. As for hardware, Quest 2 and Valve Index are both great at what they promise for their respective price points.
- Handytinge 4y ago
  I'm curious, in your field have you had a chance to try the Varjo Aero yet? It looks stunning.
  - MikeTheRocker 4y ago
    I haven't tried the Aero but I tried another Varjo model a while back (not sure which), and the visual clarity was magnificent. I'm really glad there is room in the AR/VR space for devices at varying price points and levels of quality.
Gigachad 4y ago
VR is not a disappointment imo. A lot of people are having a lot of fun with VR chat. The hardware is just still very expensive and has the huge requirement of needing a 3x3m space to play in. The average person doesn't have an empty VR zone ready just to play specific types of games in. 3D TVs only failed because they never worked out how to do it properly without glasses. People will accept a clunky solution for the early adopter version but once it became clear there was no path forward, they just become discontinued.

grishka 4y ago

Software engineering is no longer considered engineering these days. People mash abstractions together without even trying to understand what's beneath those abstractions. Knowing what you're actually doing seems to be a big deal in software development now.

hulitu 4y ago
Engineering is trying to underestand things and learn from mistakes. SW engineering is like financial engineering: trying to get profits fast.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  Anecdotally that tracks, because all of my (very good!) CS professors in undergrad were retired engineering-engineers, with only a single retired software engineer that I can recall (who taught the course focused on real-world SWE/project management)
- grishka 4y ago
  This is why I've given up on working anywhere where venture capital is even remotely involved. I want to make the world a better place and empower people, not make rich people richer while they do nothing of value.
  - weq 4y ago
    ha you sound as jaded as i do. ive come to learn that we will work with google (search) programmers as long as buisnesses fool themselves that outsourcing saves money.

georgeecollins 4y ago

Right, because micro computers have had decades of investment and development, when in 1982 they were like 15 years old (microprocessors anyway (HN correct me)). Now the excitement is probably something that new or newer.. drones, recent ML, AR/VR/XR, wearable, or something that I don't know what it is. It's gotta be something where most people think it won't even work.

ghaff 4y ago
15 years in 1982 is casting a pretty wide net for actual microcomputers. The Altair 8800 kit debuted on Radio-Electronics in 1975 and the Apple II came out a couple years later. But I was an engineering undergrad in the late 70s and I knew no one who owned a personal computer. They didn't even become geek things beyond a very limited number of people until the early 80s.

gonehome 4y ago

One of the things that drew me to urbit is it feels like when I first started playing with linux. It's fun, but in a way that tackles some real underlying issues with the modern web/computing stack. The ideas are interesting and whatever happens it's definitely not boring imo: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

walrus01 4y ago

I think there was a lot more novelty and shock/awe in amazing new things when we didn't have youtube channels and social media of every new thing immediately poring over ever detail of it. For instance, when ID first released DOOM to the Internet and BBSes it was something you discovered on your own and among your local community of people who had network access and a PC capable of running it, there weren't hundreds of youtube channels playing full-1080p playthroughs of the entire game, etc.

bovermyer 4y ago
Selective ignorance might be something worth cultivating. When I was young (middle/high school), I devoured print strategy guides for video games and printed (hah) source code in library books. It was hard to come by, and just as nuanced/wrong as solutions/strategies/source you now find on the web/GitHub/etc. In the last few years, I've stopped indulging in play-throughs, guides, or other experiences-on-rails. My sense of awe at discovering things has increased dramatically as a result. Not quite where it was thirty years ago, but getting there.
ngc248 4y ago
Exactly, the novelty of finding something our for yourself. And lots of times the anticipation of waiting for something itself used to be so fun. As you mentioned, with everything being reviewed to the minutest detail, all of that novelty is gone now.

paulcole 4y ago

Let me guess, computers were a lot more interesting and amazing when you were a teenager and into your early 20s?

virtual_void 4y ago

Sometimes i think this too. I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like nothing. If I’m doing something with a load of libraries and feel like a plumber more than a programmer then I find that excitement hard to come by. Playing with modern day microcontrollers, SoC stuff or building software with hard real-time requirements is still a lot of fun - i just don’t get to do it so much these days.

uuyi 4y ago

It’s not dull really but I find it laborious and sometimes stupid. The sense of achievement has been sucked away by deep rabbit holes of research required to decipher even the simplest tasks. The retention and value of knowledge has declined due to the transient nature of everything too. Every day is a catching up session for something which is either horrible or will be replaced before you’ve finished the job. I reserve the label stupid specifically for templated YAML which makes me want to strangle people fairly quickly.

joeberon 4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago

Computers have not become boring. You have become old. Kids these days are having more fun than ever with today's computers.

nyokodo 4y ago

> Computers as a whole seem so boring nowadays. For most of us everything becomes less exciting as we get older compared to our youth. Our minds are less responsive to novelty and there’s less novelty to be had. Kids still get enthralled by computers these days.

elzbardico 4y ago

It is the paradox of choice or abundance. I remember that in the early 90s getting a bootleg copy of turbo C for my PC was something that I eagerly anticipated for the weeks it took me to finally get the disks. Heck, I was excited to install windows 3.1. To be frank even using debug.com to execute some small snippets of assembly code was terribly exciting. Because there was not a lot of much else to do.

superasn 4y ago

I think once the VR goggles get more portable, hopefully the size of contact lenses one day, it will make things super exciting once again. I just hope it happens in the next 20 years.

phendrenad2 4y ago

I'll share a controversial opinion: I think computers were always boring, even if you worked for Sun Microsystems, yes even in 1981. In 1981, the Intel 8086 had been on the market for 3 years, and the 68000 had been on the market for 2 years. There were probably a hundred startup companies trying to make a workstation to compete with Sun. If you went to work for one of those companies, you crashed and burned or were acquired, and got to watch the project you worked so hard on become abandoned.