Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

It became less cool when it started attracting big money. The VC industry incentivizes exponential growth via privacy intrusion, so that's what most startups pursue. Building a useful technology is only the bait to onboard the chumps (which includes both clients and employees); once enough chumps are onboard the incentive structure changes to exclusively "moar growth, moar privacy intrusion, moar rent-seeking" until the company crashes and burns and then we do it all over again.

I despise the incentive structures modern VCs create. Exponential growth is always inherently time-limited and thus it's fundamentally at odds with building a sustainable company that creates great technology over the long term.

I still think technology is incredibly cool, especially if you follow your interests and curiousity rather than what's popular and going to make you money.

That said, tech companies and most of the people on HN do seem a lot less cool to me than they used to…

I think that every so often technology takes a wrong turn, and additional complexity is added to try to overcome the fundamental flaws. Much like the laryngeal nerve which controls vocal cords goes from the brain, loops around the heart, then back up to the throat. Made complete sense in fish, when it was a straight ling from brain to gills, but completely wrong in giraffes.

There are quite a few wrong turns in Unix that spread because it was just “the way it’s done”. And HTML + Javascript is a terrible way to make client server applications, but constant additional complexity slowly smooths out the worst of it until nobody really thinks there’s a better way.

There is, but the effort to start over just to get to the current level of functionality is far too much to bother.

But that’s the fundamental difference, in the early days every path was equally available for exploration. Now you’re pretty constrained in how you can do what you want to. Still lots to explore from there, but the complexity of the underlying implementation means it’s not quite so fun any more.

If you think tech is not cool you're looking at the wrong tech.

I'm currently "playing" with openai tools gpt/clip etc... and my mind is blown every 5 minutes

>Looks more like you don’t want to use the word interesting independent of other feelings you may have about the topic.

>If you want to understand the world and this topic with more nuance than a teenage hippy sayin “nukes bad Mann”

These comments are incredibly and egregiously pointless, wrong, rude, condescending and dismissive, don't do this. I know about the story and a lot of the history of the war and I still don't find it interesting, sorry. It's just depressing and angering to study, even though it is very necessary to study for a valid historical perspective and even though a lot of it was very inevitable from what the war had already escalated to. That's where you've very badly lost the plot.