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Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

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71–80 of 115 posts

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

#71
Try toying with ideas & projects which give back agency to the user.

Read manifestos from Anytype [0] and Reticulum [1].

Contribute or implement something using GrapheneOS, Nix/NixOS, Immich, Tailscale/Headscale, Home Assistant, SQLite, BespokeSynth, OpenStreetMap, Organic Maps, Columba, FluffyChat.

Maybe run local LLM and integrate it with your workflows/lifeflows?

Hardcore is not dead. [2]

0 https://anytype.io/why/manifesto/ 1 https://github.com/FreeTAKTeam/Reticulum-Community-Hub/blob/... 2 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gh3mFO1nwa0

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

#72

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.

Man, they just take away one of implementations, RSS lives as a standard! It is actually good to understand how cloud services are never going to benefit us, long term.

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

#74
Microcontrollers (ESP32, RP2045), CAD modelling and 3D printing are my current creative outlet. They work together which feels nice though the more you know, the more complicated the project gets.

I'm slowly pushing towards electrical engineering but it's a steep hill to climb. Prefab modules get you a long way but it'd feel like an achievement to make my own PCB.

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

#75

It’s hard for me to know if it’s the computers that changed or my stage of life. I think they become less fun sometimes during the later stage Web 2.0 era as everything shifted toward services. For most, computers became a thin client to access services on the Internet. To me, this isn’t very fun. The computer becomes an appliance to access services rather than one used to run programs that can be customized and tail…

Given that enshittification is such a common term today, that didn't exist a few decades ago, suggests the decay is real not just a stage of life perception.

Earlier computers, and particularly the early Internet, were all about personal freedom. The computer served you and the Internet was there to connect you with peers. So that was fun and the possibilities were literally infinite.

As the giant corporations and particularly the advertising industry (which destroys everything it touches) have slowly taken control, computers and the Internet no longer serve us, the people. We are now the product, to be fully monetized at every stage. Monetization alone is bad but not terrible, but in order to maximize monetization the corporations also need to exert control, thus all the increasingly restrictive technology where we are very clearly only a paying consumer kept within a box, not a participant.

While the technology world has been almost entirely enshittified, it's good to keep some optimism though. The fun parts still exist, they're just more effort to find.

On the Internet, support your hobby email lists (open participation, no corporate control), support enthusiast-driven forums and websites (independently run, no social media giants monetizing every message!). There are fewer of these but they do exist, support them. Or start your own! Don't let the megacorporations own your hobby interactions.

On the programming side, work on something hands-on fun if you like. When I want to geek out programming like it's 1995, I have a BSD box and work on a hobby project which is all in C. No vibe coding, no thousands of unknown npm dependencies, none of that junk. Just me and emacs and the kernel and the compiler. I don't work on it often but every now and then a weekend of real programming is very relaxing and reminds me how much fun it is.

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

#76
post #11

Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial. You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously. 2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly u…

I feel 2023 is when we entered the decrepit stage, but ~2015 is when it began: Theranos, Musk's charlatanry and cult, "unicorns", Cambridge Analytica, the raise of social media addiction, etc.

Not that things were amazing before that... it's just that mid 10s had simply too many bad actors showing up at the same time with a lot of money and power.

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

#77
post #12

I feel this a lot too these days. The only place the fun seems to remain for me is in Linux and in devices out of China, that you can hack and experiment with — like the Anbernic consoles, or the Xteink X4, or the little mp3 player DAP things, or the Sipeed NanoKVM devices, or the Supernote. The Steam Deck probably sits in this niche too, now I think about it. Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be triv…

What sorts of things do you do with a NanoKVM?

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

#79

Thanks for the great question! I think they used to be so much fun because they were an unexplored frontier. Perhaps we need a new frontier?

I thought that a bit at a talk at ClawCon https://youtu.be/6rSEOzWY08U?t=2517

Maybe AI agents are the new frontier?

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

#80
I am also looking for that personally.

I think its partially as you say: "everything I may need either already exists". Through the connection over the internet (as great as it is) you see things already done already and often better than I would be able to do it myself with the limited time I got.

Also generally the large amount of things going on, its just a lot one could try, much more than in former times. So for people with focus problems its also a question of, yeah: focus.

For me I still code enough for work (as long as they let me do it - looking at the AI push) so I am fine but I still think back to the old times (C64, Amiga, 90s PC, rise of Linux on the Desktop) where I had more fun. So I guess its the technology getting more mature and personally its also getting older and maybe burned out a bit.

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