As far as I can tell, what the smartest people do on weekends now is pure analog/nontech, or toy/throwaway/education stuff, learning new programming languages,

As far as I can tell, what the smartest people do on weekends now is pure analog/nontech, or toy/throwaway/education stuff, learning new programming languages, or very small personal use software(I know someone who made their own VCS!). Most engineers thing "Unnecessary privacy risk" or "Boring bloatware" when they see the stuff that would have been big in 2003. In 10 years, I doubt I'll be using anything that the smartest people are playing with now, the smartest people seem to be more interested in ideas and logic than products and projects. If there's no real novel idea in it(Or at least new to them), they'll get bored. A lot of stuff is possible and users would love it, but... engineers have no interest, because their idea of tech progress is less software not more. Human centered stuff is basically impossible to change on a DIY scale, so the transition from toy to practical is a lot harder. A city is inherently almost unchangeable except via million dollar contracts, and any kind of commune/ecovillage/etc has the overhead of trying to do its mission, while also existing within the current economy, so everyone seems to do a lot of work and make a lot of sacrifices as far as I can see from the outside. There's still smart people playing with stuff that will be everywhere(Like IoT), but not as many. Or, perhaps it still works that way, and in 10 years the world will find a deep respect for Kackzynski, and my next computer purchase will be a black market laptop when everyone votes to ban them and be done with it!