My honest opinion is that encrappification (of the world in general, and software and computer culture in particular) has some part in it. While A.I has exciti

My honest opinion is that encrappification (of the world in general, and software and computer culture in particular) has some part in it. While A.I has exciting properties, there's not very much really interesting stuff going on.. Mostly new libraries, written on top of older libraries to abstract some abstraction into something even blander.. When was the last time a new kind of hardware device was introduced ? I don't mean some iteration of an old one, but a new one ? Like, when we switched from working off of floppy drives to hard-drives, that really _changed_ something.. When we started attaching modems to our computers and went out into the world.. When the voodoo chips came and we started having dedicated pci cards just for drawing 3d graphics! There is a bit going on with VR headsets, but they're not showing the same kind of promise anymore.. Software is becoming scarce.. We sit with the most powerful general purpose computers in the history of mankind in front of us, and we use them to view "web apps" crawl forth with abhorrent efficiency compared to the wares of yesteryear. So, maybe some of the nostalgia is not so much because we want to look back, but rather because looking forward is frankly a rather bleak sight.