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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?

#331

Post by autoexec »

jart wrote: post #128
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…

Does anyone remember what it was like growing up in the 90's when people would pay $100/month for television that was 33% ads? Life was miserable before most of us had Internet access. I think there's simply no comparison. Also does anyone remember what it was like back then trying to sell software? I remember back in 2003 whenever I wrote a piece of software, for every guy who paid me $20 via paypal for it, there'd…

I remember when cable first came out and had no ads at all. That was its major selling point besides clear reception without rooftop aerials and rabbit ears. Then ads came showing you what you was going to air later on the same channel, then ads came showing you what would air on other channels, then finally came the ads for cars and laundry powder. Cable TV started out as a great deal, but it became another tech disappointment with animated station logos, spying on what you were watching, and pop-up ads covering 25% of the screen during shows.

> Think about how much leverage industries like health care hold over people's lives, cause bankruptcies, and then compare that to tech products collecting usage analytics.

Well... healthcare bankrupting sick people is a uniquely American failure, tech being used to spy on everyone allows for far more control over people's lives. Look at china and their "social credit system". America already has it's own version of the same only instead of tracking how good a citizen you are it tracks how good a consumer you are. In china your social credit score could get you banned from trains and planes. In the US your Your consumer credit score determines how companies treat you, what they'll tell you their policies are, what services you get offered and how much you pay for things.

The effects of surveillance capitalism on our everyday lives is expanding all the time, but you're not allowed to know about it. You just see the bill from your insurance company, you don't know that you're paying more this year because people in your zip code spent more money at fast food restaurants. You just see the rejection letter from a job you applied to, you don't get to know that the company reviewed your social media accounts and recent spending habits and thought you spent too much money on alcohol. You just get to wait on hold while calling for service, but you aren't allowed to see that you've been moved to the bottom of the queue because they've used your cell phone number to see that you make less money in a year than the other people calling in.

Benevolence is not a feature of tech, it's a feature of people and so far they've mostly decided they want to use tech to control you. FOSS is the best hope we have right now, but it's still running on locked down hardware and processors that are controlled by a very small number of companies which have been backdoored and used to collect data on us as well.

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

#333

Post by captainoats »

Most things stop being cool when they become mainstream. Tech used to be exclusive to a small group of people who understood it, the hacker counter culture grew from this and for a while gated entry into the tech community. Now tech careers are considered akin to any other good white collar job. You don’t have to have a specific personality to discover it or thrive within it. Its pedestrian now and has be very successfully commercialized.

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

#334

Post by yakytaky »

irrational wrote: post #269
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…

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 p…

I agree with this. I’m a somewhere between generation X and millennial, and for some reason tech was uncool in the eyes of my peers. Suddenly many of them are talking about decentralized this, UX that, and the whole space is slowly losing it’s “coolness” to me.

I’ll admit I enjoyed the exclusivity that my interests evolved into, but I definitely wish I had more people around me to share my interest in technology when I was younger.

In a way I think I grew into this expectation of exclusivity, as that was the only way my adolescent self could tell myself it was a cool hobby.

Age might play a factor in this equation, as others are saying. I say this because I have found enjoyment in simplicity more than complexity these days, and I’m told that’s something that happens with age. Writing a website that runs purely on html+ css, text based communication (as in not slack or discord), and things that I can work on for a few days and complete. I’ve taken a recent interest in sailing. My former self wanted to take on massive undertakings of complexity that required months or years of planning and doing to accomplish. To go on a bit of a tangent, I remember having an idea years ago to find a way to build a computer into a boat which would take real-time measurements of the water and weather conditions. These days I’m interested in reading my surroundings to understand the environment.

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

#335

Post by tbugrara »

dvh1990 wrote: post #197
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…

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

Just want to chime in and say there's nothing wrong with finding excitement in doing something unique. That drive inside of you has taken people very far I'd imagine, with the obvious tradeoffs.

Don't give up on tech and keep an open mind. It's true that flying drones are not exciting to you, but flying a drone could be a first step in finding something more interesting to do with drones.

Boredom is functional. It can be a guide towards more interesting things so as long as you don't let it run the show. Tolerate it and follow (intelligently) where it takes you, don't avoid it.

I don't know how helpful this will be to you, but it bothered me to see people dismiss your interest because you value doing something unique. Those same judgements held me back for years.

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

#336

Post by tmaly »

I think there is a huge opportunity in education right now. I do not necessarily mean only the public education system.

Look at how easily and quickly you can learn something new from a short video that you have free access to. This is only going to improve.

This opens up even more opportunities for tech to evolve.

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

#337

Post by drblast »

chubot wrote: post #259
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…

This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species.

Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.

Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.

The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.

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

#338

Post by dotnet00 »

hwers wrote: post #52
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…

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 24, I still feel that tech is very 'cool' and exciting. Yes, there's a lot of stuff that sucks, social media is probably doing more harm than good and the direction that AI research is going in with increasingly larger models that can't reasonably be replicated.

But on the other hand, space accessibility is quickly opening up, it's very likely that I would be able to take a trip to space in my lifetime too, maybe even Mars. VR has opened up an amazing new frontier for hanging out with friends on the other side of the world. Medicine is opening up all sorts of scifi technologies, gene therapy with CRISPR, massive strides in protein structure prediction, mRNA vaccines. Synchrotrons and particle accelerators are starting to improve all sorts of observations. Fusion energy is making progress, quantum computing is just getting started. We even took a detailed image of a black hole millions of light years away just a few years ago!

Yes, specifically computer related improvements are starting to slow down a little, but with costs only getting lower, there's so much room to bring computers into, so many things that can be automated! AI research has generally stuck to certain niches (basic medicine, basic physics, vision), there's so much that can have breakthroughs at the level of the protein folding model.

I think with diverse enough interests, it's hard to say that things are slowing down, they're only getting faster as computers, software and AI mature and dramatically increase efficiency in other fields.

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

#340

Post by Karrot_Kream »

jollybean wrote: post #322
bluefirebrand wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect, with no evidence, that the distinction you are making here can be described as neurotypical nerds (what you call All Birds nerds) versus neurodivergent nerds (autistic, adhd, whatever you want to bucket them under) Neurodivergent people tend to have a bit less of a social filter, they are more direct and honest, often to the point of bluntness (leading to the 'just say whatever' behavior you mentioned) The…

Neurodiversity is probably aligned with that but I suspect a lot of people are just not self aware, never learned to communicate in a political environment. A neurodiverse, even introverted kid who went to private school then Ivy League, and had 'a lot of money / no fears' growing up ... probably will have been socialized in the political sense. Grow up in a small town or the burbs, people are 'judgy' about some stuf…

> Torvalds, James Gosling, Wozniack, Sergei Brin - those are nerd-nerds.

Remember that college educations, especially highly skilled STEM ones, were very rare for their parents' generation (born in the 30s - 50s)

Torvalds - Father was a politician, grandfather a famous statistician

Wozniak - Father was an engineer for Lockheed

Brin - Father a math professor, mother a NASA researcher

Gosling was the only one in this bunch who really just came out of nowhere. I agree with what you're saying about Nerd Nerds and All Birds Nerds but the founders of Silicon Valley were always well-heeled. I think the culture changed for rank-and-file engineers mostly because of the money in the field. While founders would certainly make it big (Moore, Gates, etc) the average engineer was payed well but not fantastically.

One could feasibly work in other white-collar fields (law, accounting, airline pilot, etc) to make similar money and those who were interested in the largest pay packages and large amounts of prestige went into fields like finance or medicine. Folks who went into tech typically chose tech because they liked the problems that you could solve in tech or liked the people who chose to go into tech (often somewhat neurodiverse). Nowadays tech salaries are insane and most people who enter tech are doing it for money and prestige foremost. These folks are going to be the All Birds Nerds; smart folks who are more interested in making money and rising the ranks rather than playing around with tech.

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