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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?

#251

Post by rchaud »

user_7832 wrote: post #187
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #68

In my impression it really accelerated after the '08 financial crisis (+- a few years for all the people who left wall street and went to HBS) after being an ibanker was no longer cool or well paid and the people who would have gone there decided to come to Silicon Valley. That's a huge mass of people who are grinders who just want to make money and quick and have a totally different mindset than the people who wante…

Slightly off-topic (but related to your comment) - do you know of any company or organization that's truly for public welfare? Or, any VC that cares more about society than a super-high rate of return where such a society-focused company can be launched/funded?

Mackenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), although her approach is about as far removed from traditional VC as one could imagine.

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

#252

Post by gilbetron »

rowanG077 wrote: post #212
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 disagree that it's just an age thing. At least Software is moving steadfastly to a dystopia. This wasn't yet apparent 15-20 years ago. Watching Software is just depressing where it's clear it casts quite a large shadow over Humanity.

Dystopia how? Social networks and their ilk are something that we are struggling with and has impacted society, definitely, but it isn't dystopian (not that it won't go that way). But "software" in general? I don't see any indicators - what do you mean by that statement? Have any examples?

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

#253

Post by starkd »

What you are experiencing sounds fairly typical. You are just maturing to a point where you are not so easily entertained by the novelty of it all. Instead, you are craving for something more reliable, longer lasting.

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

#254

Post by lubesGordi »

I was actually pretty excited about the impact of social media back in the day (2008+). I remember saying, we just need to be loud and things will change. That didn't work out the way I expected it to.

My initial take on social media was that it would be a place for free expression. It took me a long time before I realized that people expect what you say on social media to be consumable by them, otherwise it makes them wonder and that makes them cringe. It surfaced more judgement than anything. Now its just accepted that social media is a cringefest and that type of judgment has become embedded in how we look at everything (not just social media posts).

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

#255

Post by vanadium »

pessimizer wrote: post #242
koonsolo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you crazy? I'm from '79, so probably a bit younger than you. We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed. My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especial…

> We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago, there just hadn't been that wave of marketing around microcontrollers as a hobby that happened around the time of Make magazine. $2 for a PIC and $45 for a programmer, maybe? Waiting excitedly for the next issue of Nuts & Volts? Idly flipping through the Jameco and Small Parts c…

AS&S is, in a relatively literal sense, next door to me. Fun bunch of folks whenever I stop by.

But as a late 70s Gen Xer, I would never trade living through that transition period from pre-Internet to Internet. You can't pay to have had that experience or perspective, and what transpired through those years from BBSes to pre-Web to Web adoption, from technological and sociological standpoints, was _insane_.

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

#256

Post by rchaud »

marktangotango wrote: post #230
dvh1990 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but flying drones are not exciting when everybody can build/buy one.

Ask the military planners of the world how exciting drones are. That one little device being dismissed so casually has changed warfare, for all time.

Those people were probably just as excited when NSO's Pegasus became commercially available. For the rest of us, that wouldn't be the case.

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

#258

Post by mattgreenrocks »

holografix wrote: post #37

Technology is now in the hands of most people. Most people couldn’t give a fuck about it, they don’t find it fun or interesting. They just want a well paid cushy job, so they keep coming up with “start ups” and new frameworks to generate GitHub stars so they can secure cushier job. Doesn’t stop you from doing something new. Something hard. Something interesting.

The fact that people take GitHub stars so seriously is a perfect example of how tech lost it's way. What should be worthless Internet Points now is now a resume bargaining chip.

By this logic, a tiny self-bootstrapping metacircular Lisp evaluator is orders of magnitude less cool than Webpack.

The reality is: only one of those projects is beautiful, and actively expands the imagination.

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

#259

Post by chubot »

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…

It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality

This is a tangent, but I've heard that children who grew up in the "space age" after Apollo thought we would be on Mars right now, or colonizing the solar system. It was their childhood dream.

Hence a lot of men (especially rich men) in that era are interested in flying planes and going to space. Bezos was born in 1964 and Musk was born in 1971.

On the other hand my first memory of the space program was literally the Challenger disaster ... that's when the myths started dying down, and when America stopped going to space very much. I never really had that dream, and it feels like many/most people my age and younger don't.

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