Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

My answer: once technology became part of the establishment and technologists were assimilated into corporations to code the future digital enslavement of our peers for money. What's cool about slavery and no privacy, even if you are rich?

Huge amounts of venture capital poured into a million nonsense ideas. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but even if a tiny fraction of those startups changes the world, there will be lots of others that are completely nonsensical, or lame, or cargo cult, or clueless, ultimately producing useless products with teams of people who either don't care or can't deliver. Given how much noise the latter group produces, it's no wonder that startups aren't cool anymore. Most of them are incredibly lame, as are the people who run them, who previously went into the prestige career routes of management consultancy and investment banking.

Everyone is a rapper these days, everyone is a rockstar these days, so no-one is.

Edit: Truly disruptive technology will never stop being cool and magical. But there's another clue - even the word disruptive is cringe these days, because it's been abused by the aforementioned horde of muppets.

Looks more like you don’t want to use the word interesting independent of other feelings you may have about the topic. The story of the making of the atomic bomb is one of the most interesting stories of all history in my opinion. The smartest minds ever to live on this planet decided and agreed it was of the greatest urgency to do what they did and no sane person would argue otherwise.

The single greatest night of destruction in Japan during the war was not either of the nukes but the fire bombing of Tokyo. If the Americans didn’t make the nukes, at some point someone else would have. That’s the beauty (and interesting thing) about technology - it’s inevitable. You really can’t pick and choose. You can slow it down sure but never fully stop it.

If you want to understand the world and this topic with more nuance than a teenage hippy sayin “nukes bad Mann” then I will recommend “The making of the atomic bomb” by Richard Rhodes.

There are some improvements still happening - mobile computing (i.e. phones) are going from strength to strength both in terms of raw power/capabilities, but also ubiquity both in the west and elsewhere.

Programming languages are still exiting - say what you want about slow Electron apps and slow ReactJS websites, but I think that Javascript itself is fucking exciting. It is highly performant, continually getting upgraded, has a low-barrier to entry, and is pretty ubiquitous - where ever someone has a browser (in their phone, desktop, laptop) they've got this super-powered javascript engine that they can just jump in and use for anything they can think of thanks to rich APIs available in all modern browsers (and even non-browser runtimes e.g. node & deno still have a lot of APIs they can call on). I am very excited about the future of javascript.

And of course, the more recent (last 4 or 5 years ago anyway) ML stuff is pretty cool. You can just spin up a ML inference model now with a few lines of code and do what would have been impossible just a few years previously (e.g. the classic xkcd comic about the bird in the photo). The shame with ML is that there seems to be a preference to use Python a lot which is a real shame because its shit.

Likewise cloud computing is now a thing - you can just easily spend a few bucks to "borrow" a server for whatever. No sales calls, no minimum contract periods, no paper work - just put in your payment details and you are away for as long or as short as you want it. Maybe you dont even want a server? perhaps you just need to host a single function? Or just store some files somewhere, perhaps run a DB. All doable now. That is exciting and a great liberator to individuals to try stuff out and do exciting stuff.

Finally, Raspberry Pi has been a smash-hit and has transformed kids access and interest in tech. I am genuinely excited for my kids to get into this - Raspberry Pi foundation has been doing absolutely great work - we do loads of work/volunteering with kids using RPis and scratch etc and they absolutely love it. This is really exciting that a whole new generation of kids are growing up learning to programme from an early age. A certain cohort of kids got a similar experience in the early 80s, but there were a couple of decades in there where youngsters were "locked out" of the basics, so it is great to see this coming back. As a bonus us grown-ups can now get a $15 "disposable" well-supported linux computer for any random thing we can think of (put it in a balloon, put it around a cat's neck as it wanders around, hard-wire it into your car, perhaps make a digital microscope out of it, run a web server off of solar in your back garden - you name it)

Manufacturing hasn't been automated as much as it's been outsourced to cheaper countries with less workers' rights and union membership. Automation has only really hit a select few industries like car manufacturing and warehouse picking, compared to the number of blue collar jobs that have disappeared.