Stopped being cool after the 2016 US election when it's downsides became clear.
It will become cool again when it produces something that teens find cool.
Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
81–90 of 367 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#82There's a good Douglas Adams quote that explains this; Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Apply thi…
I like pithy quotes like this, but I can’t help feeling we over rely on them/take stuff like this too seriously.
There is no rule that everything has to get boring after 35. If you think like that it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#83It'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…
For sure, there is boatloads of cool tech out there and the barrier to entry is lower than ever. Btw, I think an overlooked part of the OP was:
> Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur.
Doing anything as a job is an excellent way to kill your enjoyment of it as a hobby. Subconsciously, you start looking at projects in a business light ("can I turn this into a side gig", "will this advance my career", etc) and that kills off a lot of the excitement that comes with doing things just because you want to.
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#84Any hobby that becomes ones 9-5 would suffer from that effect I’d imagine
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#85It'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…
To your point about 3D printing and robots, we haven’t really moved the needle that much. We’ve made it easy for anyone to print a “cool” robot, sure, but it isn’t necessarily a _useful_ one. As a former “maker” and electronics hack I think lot of maker stuff has devolved into “cool” stuff that consists of wire hangers and servos with RGB lighting and very little actual value. But coolness doesn’t really mean much wh…
I think this would be helped a lot if the maker community immersed itself more in industrial engineering.
Like you mentioned, its hard to go from "hah, I can make a cool thing" to "Let me make this super useful mechatronic contraption" but this is the bread and butter of industry.
You see production lines and they're just a long string of such contraptions working in unison.
Makers nowadays have amazing resources that were previously reserved only for industry so heck yeah, maybe go make a fish fillet machine or something just for kicks but also maybe a brand new small business
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#86you're just creating your own inner narrative
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#87> We seem to be experiencing diminishing returns on tech for the past few years. More tech is no longer necessarily better.
I don't think that's true. It might be true for the richest people in the world, but there are still lots of people in the world that lack tech, either because it hasn't reached them or because it hasn't been developed yet.
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#88Oh, this is a question I actually have asked myself before! The definitive answer is July 10, 2008; App Store opens, and ushers in this new age of garbage software.
The app store wasn't immediately garbage, though. Apps on smart phones started off being inventive or at least interesting. It was when the gold rushers came in after seeing success that the system became increasingly filled with things designed not to help you the user, but to extract maximum profit from you as a customer.
I only disagree mildly; it's a matter of calling the 'start' of a sigmoid curve.
Already among the earliest apps on the app store, there was evidence of the bad incentives (eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich 2008 or https://ifartmobile.com/ifart-debuts-the-worlds-first-fartin... 2009).
Within a couple years of the App Store I remember all manner of Crazy Frog garbage had flooded tech.
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#89I would say with introduction of social media and increase of mobile users. Censorship of Big Tech and most of the social media just leave me disapointed in humanity.
Also there are hardly any revolutionary/significant improvements in hardware, we still use crappy baterries as 10 years ago, they are just larger, I'm still waiting for graphene baterries.
There are no new useful/interesting devices since capacitive touchscreen smartphone, one could actually say we are going backwards with horrible devices like electric scooters/hoverboards and all these companies litering public space with their rental business which has nothing to do with sharing.
And don't get me started on military drones and military dogs, so we can be under even bigger control.
I think I should read again Unabombers manifesto after many years, it's more relevant than ever.
Re: Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
#90> Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable.
I'm going to focus on this, because to some extent this is a real problem. But it's also one that can be worked on.
The thing to keep in mind is that most startups are solving problems that a small number of people can handle in a small amount of time. 3-5 people in less than a year for a pre-A MVP sort of project, 50-100 in 2-5 years with funding before you need to have it cracking.
Now think back to every geek's first or third love, the history of physics. Back in the golden age of experimental physics, the guys all of our units were named after were making their discoveries solo using a length of wire and a homemade battery or a handmade telescope. Now, we have hundreds or thousands of researchers collaborating on nation-spanning super colliders or telescope arrays.
Why? Because anything that two people in a garage lab could figure out has already been figured out.
1990's Google was proof-of-concepted by a team of two. But to build a 2020's search engine you need teams of hundreds, if not thousands. Some of your favorite video games of the 80's were the work of, if not one person, a team you could fit in a small room. Modern flagship games have more people working on hair physics.
As time goes on in any field, the easy problems get solved, and it takes more and more people to do interesting work. Raising the bar like that makes it hard for start-ups, with their limited funding and head count, to compete.
But in tech, unlike physics, hope is not lost for new golden ages: new tech comes along and changes what one developer can do.
Take games -- sure, flagship games might have hundreds of developers, but we're in a golden age of indie games, in no small part because modern frameworks and distribution have come together to let small houses do more than they could before while reaching more customers than they previously could.
If you want to promote more startups doing more interesting things, that is the lever to push on. What technologies are too expensive for a small team to develop, that they could use as a springboard? How could you make it easier for tech startups to get paid?