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As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
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Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#32As I get older, I just care about boring technology. I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware. The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time. Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hund…
>As I get older, I just care about boring technology.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
There's something intellectually alluring about new technology or new shiny in general that I think appeals to your general technologist, it's a trait the draws such people to various fields. I know when I was young I drank the Kool-aid every turn.
As I got a little older, and after I was burned several times adopting shiny things either wasting my time or never seeing them widely adopted to a point of reasonable usability, I came to the very realization that everything we create, including technology, exists to serve human needs. It's stupidly obvious, it shouldn't need to be stated but I think it does. Law exists for humans, medicine exists for humans (even medicine for animals, it exists to serve altruism or empathy in humans) and so on. Technology is absolutely no different.
There's a few ways technology can serve humans. It can appeal to the general intellectual interest but ultimately, few if any pay money for that. People in general don't care about it, it's neat for a few minutes then gone. So ultimately what functional need does technology really serve? What does it enable me to do that I otherwise couldn't? How does it make my life easier?
If it doesn't do these things, I frankly don't care about it anymore. I have plenty of places to tap into serving my intellectual interest, places where the things I learn aren't as vanishingly ephemeral in nature and entirely artificial, be it learning something about physics of the world, medicine, whatever. There's well over a lifetimes worth of other mature and well established things to learn about you won't waste your time in like NewWebFramework with NewSyntacticSprinklings.
To me, this is why I similarly only care about new well crafted tech. Your thing needs to either help me do something I otherwise couldn't or make my life easier. A huge amount of new tech does neither, it pedals novelty and the ambiguity of some type of miniscule improvemen in quality of life, all while trying to make a buck.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#33Having grown up in 80s/90s, I also start getting older. While I don't care for technology like "do X with an app" where I know X can also be done without an app, I do get excited for actual real new tech with substance. LLM's, self driving cars once they truly work, much higher video resolutions than the past, etc...
This is the best way to look at it. I feel similarly, and I’ve been thinking for a while now that the one technology that is actually worth embracing or paying for that I have used is adaptive cruise control. It’s close enough to self driving for me that I consider it self driving.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#34Title is misleading. Not getting excited about a new Next.js version doesn't mean you don't care about new technology. Maybe it just means that you don't feel like reorganizing your code or something. Relatively speaking it's still an incremental upgrade to your approach overall. I am 45 and stopped caring much about new web frameworks many years ago. It's not that I don't find them interesting or even advantageous i…
Yea, either you pick the tool that is most suited to the job or pick the tool that you are most productive is.
I agree about your sentiment about learning this that are important . I made a natural language network scanner and I got to speak about it at defcon. I never intended for people to find it interesting I just wanted to learn to apply LLMs . The source code is at https://github.com/zitterbewegung/saturday and you can interact with it at +1 (825) 251-9142
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#35One thing that I hear a lot in the tech field is how exciting it is to work in tech since "I'm always learning new things." This doesn't excite me very much since many of the new things I'm learning are not useful outside of a narrow slice of time within that specific tech job. They're not broadly applicable to anything, and are wholly specific to a software product as a service which will be fairly different, or may not even exist in a few years. (even if it does exist, my company will have moved on to some different product by then.) For example, learning regex could be useful because it might be used broadly in many different products. Learning how a specific product handles certain data fields is really not exciting at all. It's wasted space in my mind, except of course for the paycheck.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#36Interesting that the Reddit post is about web frameworks and stacks, as the title made me assume this was purely about devices/hardware. Maybe I was projecting my own feelings onto the topic, which are mostly about hardware. As I’ve gotten older, I find it much harder to care about new PC components, cutting edge graphics for video games, and processor cores. I just value stability and consistency above all else
I'm honestly not sure it's as much you getting older as its games and hardware getting older and with that change is becoming more incremental.
When you got a new graphics card and game generation in 2005 the leaps were pretty wild, nowadays you can probably skip a generation or two of top hardware and you can still run things fine. After they put out the Dead Space remake I was interested to see how the old game from 2008 played, and even that still plays and looks modern. That's 15 years now, go back 15 years from 2008 and it's very different.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#37I used to work 5 days a week, then I was very much in a “I just want my shit to work and do my job” mentality. I had no energy to learn and experiment outside of work. Now that I work 4 days a week, I have found my passion again. I’ve gone back to emacs, started a blog, learning rust, started self hosting and I am having tons of fun in doing it. I haven’t been this passionate since high school.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#38One thing that I hear a lot in the tech field is how exciting it is to work in tech since "I'm always learning new things." This doesn't excite me very much since many of the new things I'm learning are not useful outside of a narrow slice of time within that specific tech job. They're not broadly applicable to anything, and are wholly specific to a software product as a service which will be fairly different, or may…
Nailed my problem with "learning new things". I especially feel this way about "cloud" - you aren't learning some new technology, you're learning some company's (cough... Amazon... cough...) proprietary offering which is designed to lock you in and wring every last penny out of you. Not that it isn't useful, obviously it is, but I just don't get the same joy out of learning about it that I do from playing with SBCs or other tech like I used to.
I suppose that is why something like Kubernetes is useful (I haven't touched it; I'm one of those weirdos who uses Swarm); it allows you to abstract away a lot of the underlying provider and create your own overlay environment which does bring back a sense of ownership for me at least.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#39I'm quite excited about technology. I'm not too excited about the sloppy seconds in technology. We seem to substitute performance for convience. For example the whole need for FSR in rendering to just to get playable performance shouldn't be the desired output. It seems like we keep settling for the half ass solution. AAA Games coming onto desktops needing 4090 with DLSS just to be playable at 4k just feels wrong.
Desktop PC gaming may have spelled its own doom with these GPU prices. I have a 11900K, 4070 and 990 Pro but my next system may be one of those handhelds. I tried to get a fair price on a GPU for a very long time. I won’t be doing that again.
On needing a 4090, I think the problem is 4K. These games are getting pretty advanced, and 4K is a very large number of pixels. I like it for the additional horizontal real estate. But I don’t like it for gaming. I would stick to 1080 or 1440. 1440 on a 27 inch screen at the average desktop view in distance is a great all around solution. That said, my next monitor is probably going to be 4K. I will just be playing a lot of games in 1080P on it.
Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
#40The post was about not wanting to spend time constantly upgrading.
Sometimes life is too short to upgrade all my apps to latest standard or framework, no matter how great the new things are. I hope they could be more backward compatible.