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Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

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Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#1

Post by botolo »

I was born in 1973.

My first exciting thing was my Commodore 64. I loved playing games with friends, I loved typing code from magazines, I loved creating sprites on paper and dreaming of giving them life on my Commodore 64.

My second exciting thing was my first modem and the first connections to the local BBS in my town. I loved chatting with people, I loved downloading JPGs (well, you can imagine what kind).

My third exciting thing was the internet. This was an evolution of my second exciting thing, it was BBS on steroids. I loved visiting my local newsstand and buying the new issue of .Net magazine. The final pages always included a list of cool new websites to try.

My fourth exciting thing was social media. I loved keeping in touch with friends on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc.

My fifth exciting thing was Bitcoin. I got lost in the rabbit hole, having fun mining with my computer (when it was too late to make money), spending hours reading posts on btctalk, buying my first Bitcoin from a guy at a coffee shop for cash, mining with my first Butterfly hardware (again, not enough to make a profit), building my Raspiblitz, staring at Blockchain.info waiting for the next block to be mined.

It has now been quite a while since the last time I was excited about something. The top excitement for Bitcoin was maybe around 2015. Now it's just all about money money money on crypto or developments that are way too complex for me to understand.

What is exciting you nowadays? Any new technology, any new website, any new cool thing going on in the tech world?

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#3

Post by e67f70028a46fba »

I predict we are entering (or have entered) a silver age of technology where progress will be slower and less breathtaking. Rather than radical innovation we will see slower and steady progress within existing technologies. Ideally the manic optimism (and pessimism) of the past will give way to a calmer, more humble optimism.

In web development in particular I hope this will lead to a reexamination of lost ideas, such as the hypermedia architecture. I think you are seeing that with things like Hotwire and htmx.

So I would look to ideas from the past, perhaps abandoned today, for things to inspire us.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#4

Post by WhisperingShiba »

I'm enthusiastic about block chain. Is it in a bubble? Yes, but so is virtually every speculative asset... Blockchain legitimately has potential to solve major social problems equitably, for example, online representative voting with open source software, anonymity, verifiability, higher efficiency and powered by the people.

Otherwise, I'm getting pretty stoked about computer vision techniques. If I had more time I would work on projects for controlling basic things within the home. I saw a Youtube video which demonstrated a volume control system, controlled by a camera looking at the distance between your thumb and index finger. I also think many of the techniques in CV have applications in art which has been completely unexplored.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#6

Post by WhisperingShiba »

e67f70028a46fba wrote: post #3

I predict we are entering (or have entered) a silver age of technology where progress will be slower and less breathtaking. Rather than radical innovation we will see slower and steady progress within existing technologies. Ideally the manic optimism (and pessimism) of the past will give way to a calmer, more humble optimism. In web development in particular I hope this will lead to a reexamination of lost ideas, suc…

Taking it a little slower could be great for mental health and social technologies. I love science and science/engineering technologies, but IMO we have been amiss by changing our lives so quickly with technological progress, considering people need time to actually experience 'What is good' and not hop wildly between new technologies.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#8

Post by dTal »

Cheap solar combined with the electric transport revolution (courtesy of better batteries), and the likely implications towards the architecture of our future power generation and storage.

It costs money, but it's now possible to live a first-world lifestyle - sports car and all - without burning any fossil fuels. Houses can be made self-sufficient. The biggest impediment to turning that into a massive distributed green power grid is regulatory.

We'll need that grid, so I'm confident the walls will come down. Electric cars are widely accepted as the future, with many countries attempting to ban ICE cars completely within a relatively short timeframe, but nobody seems to be strongly considering how on earth we'll charge them all. There's going to be a rocky period of power shortages, but that will incentivize the construction of off-grid homes, which will incentivize ways of arbitrating their surplus power. The future of this space looks interesting.

An offshoot of all this that's exciting from a social perspective is the rise of personal electric transport, like e-scooters and e-bikes. We're well on our way to eliminating fossil fuels from our cities, and that makes me happy.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#9

Post by Aldipower »

I am excited about dedicated servers. Yes, dedicated, not cloud servers in AWS or something like that. I am interested in running my own server for decades, but nowadays, since about 2 years, you get extremely powerful and reliable servers for already 40 bucks a month. That is amazing. The power you can deliver today compared to the costs reached a very good ratio. This was unthinkable 5-7 years ago and open a lot of possibilities.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#10

Post by huetius »

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether the current technological landscape, through positive and negative pressures, can enable a revival of small-scale production. Basically, making more of what you consume at home, in your neighborhood, etc.

I think “human scale” technologies can help mitigate some of the more nightmarish horizons of the technological society we inhabit, though, obviously, neither completely, nor on their own.

My background is in networks, so I tend to think about things from that perspective (e.g., a private U-LTE network for communication with neighbors, mesh nets of sensors to make home food production more manageable and efficient). It’s a very fruitful area for anyone interested in a more communal and family-oriented future.

Obvious difficulties are: Is the efficiency hit one gets from decentralization practically viable, long term? In which cases? How do you get your silicon? Other materials? Are those suppliers going to let you do this? How do you do this in the existing regulatory and political climate? Can this work for the poor? Does it open, unintentionally, new frontiers of technological domination?

All interesting questions; only some have technical solution.

EDIT: Adding also that I am interested in new or revived applications for “low-tech,” if that’s something anybody else knows about and wants to share.

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