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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?

#261

Post by rowanG077 »

gilbetron wrote: post #252
rowanG077 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have a few examples. The loss of ownership over Software. The blatant privacy violations. Free Software + ads combination. The consolidation of vital pieces Software into a very small set(sometimes singleton) of companies. The loss of user agency in Software. Literal killer autonomous robots.

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

#262

Post by badsectoracula »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #225
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…

> Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did I just read "Masters of Doom", and this struck me as wrong. People tend to only remember Carmack and Romero, but Doom had a team about as big as Super Mario World, another AAA-gamechanger. So I looked it up. 15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including develope…

> 15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.

While Super Meat Boy was mainly made by (AFAIK) two people, the original DOOM was made by an id software that had just 10 employees - this is mentioned in the Doom 3 manual. But this also includes everyone on id, in an article about Quake some months ago Romero mentioned that "We got Doom done mostly with only five people, and then we got a sixth person during the last few months. With Quake, there were only nine of us, but by that time everyone on the team was awesome".

However it isn't just the number of people but also how long it took to make the game. Doom was made in less than a year (or about a year if you include the engine research that went into Shadowcaster) but Super Meat Boy was made in a bit less than two years (and that was with already having Meat Boy as a template).

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

#263

Post by raisedbyninjas »

tiluha wrote: post #139
hwers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I'd like to hear the take of someone in their early twenties on this. My feeling is that a lot of them are terrified by it themselves too.

I'm 22. I feel like there hasn't been any major technologcal shift since ~2014. Phones have gotten faster and more capable, but are still mostly the same. Social media has gotten bigger, but hasn't innovated in a meaningful way. "AI" has gotten better which is fascinating, but in the end it will most likely just be used for manipulation, surveillance and manipulation. I can't really think of any technology to look fo…

Private space travel is exploding. In 2016 Spacex had captured 30% of the launch market. They've doubled that figure since. The space shuttle cost $50K per kilo of payload. The Falcon 9 brought that down to $3k. They're hoping starship can bring that down to $10! Imagine buying a burger for $5 and sending it to space for another $5. This is already bearing fruit of cheap, global satellite internet access.

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

#264

Post by mrob »

nicoburns wrote: post #126
rob74 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago" In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automa…

A typical desktop PC from 30 years ago had at least 2MiB RAM. There's no cheap microcontroller with this.

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

#265

Post by leesec »

Maybe it's just your outlook. VR is progressing rapidly. Electric cars can drive themselves. Rockets land themselves. We can output MRNA vaccine's in days that solve major issues. 3D printing is getting really awesome and cheap. You have access to more compute than ever. Deep learning is solving vision and language.

What's so boring?

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

#266

Post by kayoone »

randomdata wrote: post #162
bluescrn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity, and is built to push ads/subscriptions/in-app-purchases. But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or…

> But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books. I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something…

funny that you mention John Deere, the company who is/was facing farmer revolts because they removed the right to repair and locked down the ecus.

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

#269

Post by irrational »

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…

I don’t know about your experience, but I grew up during the same time period. Tech was decidedly uncool, at least among my classmates. I don’t think tech became cool until the early 2000s when smartphones took off (specifically the combination of smarthphones and social media/communication). Now these things are so common place that I think they have ceased to be cool. It’s like considering a rotary or push button phone to be cool in the 1980s.

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

#270

Post by gilbetron »

bluescrn wrote: post #131
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…

There's also the fact that much modern tech tends to be very locked-down, discourages tinkering/creativity, and is built to push ads/subscriptions/in-app-purchases. But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or…

Get into VR and the game modding world there. My son is having tons of fun in that world, and it is progressing the same as original Playstation 1 era consoles and PCs, imo.
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