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Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

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Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#41

Post by _puk »

It's kind of touched on elsewhere, but when phones became computers.

Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting.

It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature.

You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spectrum, nothing is too complex now.. learn from the LLM if you don't want to just let it run with the code.

Shit.. it's fun to finally build out a good portion of the never ending ideas list (and to realise half of those ideas just aren't worth the effort)

Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#42

Post by 16bitvoid »

stldev wrote: post #30

I think it's natural to lose enthusiasm over time when a joy becomes a job. "I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)" I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prot…

> I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.

I can't speak for the poster, but to me, there's no joy in either because, plan or not, it doesn't feel like I am the one building it. If I got someone (AI or human) to build a castle in Minecraft to my specifications, regardless of how detailed those specs are, it wouldn't feel like I built anything. The sense of accomplishment is just gone.

Honestly, I think I'd rather be the one getting specs and figuring out how to implement them than the other way around.

Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#43

Post by mattgreenrocks »

How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.

Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.

Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#44

Post by mianos »

teamonkey wrote: post #17

Microcontrollers are fun. The specs of modern MCs are similar to home computers 30 years ago. The community aspect is there. They’re cheap, too.

Esp32s are amazing fun. I designed boards in the 80s and I still love tinkering with microcontrollers. The reflux control for my still currently uses a brushed motor controlled by PWM and I am upgrading it to a second hand pump with a brushless motor so I am looking at driving it. I just set up an old drone ESC and am controlling the motor with dshot and it works ok. There is a little pre built board Simple FOC that is also esp32 I just ordered for 20 bucks to give a try.

I've been a developer for 45 years and I still actually like it most days.

Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#45

Post by Slackwise »

When smartphones took over computing and landed in everyone's pockets, and the shareholders realized they have access to every single eyeball on Earth, and so the squeezing of tech for profit began. The big watershed moment for me was when Google Reader was killed off; it signaled the end of the web for users.

Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#47

Post by ngcazz »

The 80s and 90s were fun, with Atari, Commodore, DEC, SGI, Sun, HP, Next, even IBM all going at it. I guess widespread Wintel and internet access, plus Google going for commodity hardware for their servers sealed the deal - consolidation was the way forward, competition was dead.

Re: Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

#48

Post by _puk »

_puk wrote: post #41

It's kind of touched on elsewhere, but when phones became computers. Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting. It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature. You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spe…

25 years ago, we were still trying to milk as much as possible out of autoexec.bat and config.sys.. maybe we'd moved on slightly, but we were definitely still trying to get the damn 56k modem to give us the best ping possible.

All this to say.. it was fun because it wasn't easy. We were learning.

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