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Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

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Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#111

Post by gilbetron »

jollybean wrote: post #73
gilbetron wrote: post #13

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…

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 oth…

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!

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#112

Post by Clubber »

morelandjs wrote: post #80

Little bit annoyed that your phrasing attempts to speak for the world on the "coolness of tech". I still find it cool. Neural networks that generate art? Quantum computing making meaningful gains? Apple M1 chips are absolutely bonkers... Try to get a little less grumpy and appreciate the amazing things that are happening around you.

>Neural networks that generate art?

Not very interesting. I'd be more interested in what an ape can come up with, since it's a lot closer to humans.

>Quantum computing making meaningful gains?

Nothing I can afford to fool with. I like to tinker. Plus, this will most likely be used to break cryptography, so it's a negative for me.

>Apple M1 chips are absolutely bonkers.

They are, but at the end of the day, my Mac still does the same shiz it did before the M1, the fan's just don't come on. Don't get me wrong, I hate fan whirr, but it's not the same as say when average / affordable hard drives went from 40M to 540M overnight.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#113

Post by zozbot234 »

rob74 wrote: post #67
gilbetron wrote: post #13

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…

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 ), 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…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#114

Post by k8sToGo »

What killed the fun for me that these days I have the feeling I am fighting tech rather than use it and enjoy it. Fighting includes, fighting how some Genius at a company decided I have to absolutely use the product way X and nothing else, but also just fighting crashes and bugs all the time.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#115

Post by Delphiza »

You may have a focus on tech that is too narrow. Especially if you are mostly interested in ad-supported social media driven by Silicon Valley VCs.

Tech is still cool. I'm not young, so I don't think that age is a factor.

Just this morning I while waiting for a call to start we were talking about the tech behind the Russian drone on the news today. I have always had a passing interest in 'Long Range Fixed Wing FPV), which is pretty amazing tech. That is something that is accessible to the modern equivalent of "Tom's Hardware lurker". Commercially, remote operations (including industrial) is cool.

The accessibility of microcontrollers is pretty cool. The languages are a bit old, but how easy it is to do stuff is interesting. Real Time Operating Systems are still cool to tinker with - especially if you pair it to accessible electronics.

Agritech is pretty cool. As consumers, we don't see it much, but what farmers can do with so few workers is astounding.

Energy grids sound boring, but are pretty cool. As we generate more renewable energy and have to match it with substaintial demand, such as EV delivery vehicles, is not a boring problem.

I have customers that do pretty cool stuff at the nanometre scale. X-ray crystallography, CCDs that can detect a single photon of light. I've seen systems that are build to cool to, and operate at millikelvin.

There is so much cool tech! Getting a scrollable feed on a smartphone is a bit _meh_. You need to broaden your definition of 'tech'.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#116

Post by mbg721 »

screye wrote: post #49

Economies of scale ruined it. Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did, back in the day. Your 'kind of useful but fun/dirty' hacker project either becomes ad-infested to survive or is too-useful and gets copied by a big-company. If your problem is cool enough and you can solve it, investors will throw millions at you in hopes of making a global succe…

There's a distinction between something like gaming or a mom-'n-pop restaurant vs. business software or building your own house. The first category still exists much more than the second; I think the difference is whether taste is the dominant feature of the product.

Indie games aren't being regulated out of existence, and they don't need much scale to survive, compared to something like a five-and-dime shop; they're almost purely about taste.

Building your own house is partly about taste, but there are a ton of physical constraints and different specialized skills involved in making it work (plus the regulatory concerns), so generally taste takes a back-seat, and the beautiful houses are old ones that were grandfathered-in.

An independent restaurant is somewhere in between; you have to meet health department standards, and you have to make money in order to keep it open, but past a minimum bar of safety and comfort, your customers care mainly about the food and atmosphere and are willing to pay for it. If it were all about scale, McDonald's would be the only thing left.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#117

Post by BeatQuestGames »

Hard disagree, it's easier now to build cool stuff out. You can download Unity and get something nice going within a couple of months. But it's on you to find what you want to do here, if you're waiting for some form of guide to point you in the right direction, you'll be waiting for a while.

I'm in the process of combining my two hobbies, my love of music, and my love of game design. Here's a music visualizer I'm working on. https://youtu.be/2dv2cjJIh2s

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#119

Post by severak_cz »

anotherhue wrote: post #53
davidn20 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue smartphones are one of the best all-in-one devices for creating...most people just don't use it that way.

Is it their fault? The software tries every trick in the book (and some new ones) to steal your attention. I disagree about the creation utility from a quality perspective, lack of ergonomics while filming, bad mics, etc. But there's no question the availability of the device is astonishing. The old addage: "the best camera is the one you have with you".

I actually bought cheap modern camcoder and it's obvious that it's descendant of old line of purpose made devices. It does one job but does it very well.

Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

#120

Post by ianai »

autoexec wrote: post #62

For me it was when tech no longer served me and my interests. Anything tech does for me these days is usually just a means to get me to use it so that someone else can collect data, push ads, or control me. There's rarely a product or service that doesn't have some hidden cost or give someone else power over you. Cars have internet, but track your location, can listen in on your conversations, and optional features o…

Agree. Luckily there are projects to FOSS the newer stuff. Like pinephone, framework laptop, and actually getting Linux to run on cell phones. To me, at least, that kicks up the old tech interest “feels.”

I have always wondered at the difference between how computers used to be all about computation and now most CPUs average like 1-3% utilization or something. If it’s pegged it’s often something nefarious, even.

Definitely feels like tech went from a cool way to do new things to a curated garden with hidden mics and surveillance.

Not totally on point but I still would like a computer display headset with a couple transparent screens built in. Seems totally do-able with modern tech but nobody’s doing it.

Edit and of course there’s all the bad faith to propagandist uses of tech discussion still ongoing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30997666

Edit-typo

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