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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

#91

Post by docandrew »

BuckRogers wrote: post #49
dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #2

The tragedy is - why do the young care about technology? Look like they have to find some meaning in their un-fulfilling lives.

Technology is a false god. Speaking of which, I spent about 15 years of my life being an atheist. I went to Mexico last Christmas and came back a changed man. I answered the calling of my conscience. I think over time the current political situation in the US is going to push people back to traditional values as well. Living life for yourself is always going to be ultimately unfulfilling. Men need to sacrifice and be…

I’m probably guilty of idolizing tech at times too. Others here have echoed the importance of using tech as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. Thanks for sharing your journey.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#92

Post by high_5 »

hibikir wrote: post #69

What makes new technology exciting, whether it's a web framework, a phone, a car, or the internet, is all the things people can do with it that were impossible, or just very expensive, before. In many parts of tech, we've had quite the run where there were leaps and bounds from one year to the next. Innovation curves slow down though: New phones used to really be substantially better than the year before, but now the…

> Even something like Java had a decade of relatively inactivity, and now there are actual, relevant changes.

The key phrase for new tech is _relevant changes_. Much of the "innovation" in software is either NIH syndrome or ideological nuances that address 5% of the problem space. Or simply forgetting or not researching that people fought this problem ages ago. I know that this is HN but most ICT engineers I meet don't care a lot about the history of how we got here in the first place. Just about their puzzle here and know and latest and greatest toolkit.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#93

Post by googlryas »

lawkwok wrote: post #82
pitaj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, I stopped carrying about new web frameworks when I was 25.

Genuine question, as someone who got exhausted and is out of the industry for the foreseeable future. How do you stay competitive or job hop when every post is looking for the latest web framework?

Stop looking for work in tech places. It may require you to take a pay cut and work in a place viewed as a cost center though.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#94

Post by ghaff »

beebeepka wrote: post #50
sylens wrote: post #30

Interesting 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 am still excited about hardware but progress has slowed down to a crawl, especially on the GPU side. Can't blame AMD and nvidia for trying to make a profit, though it sucks to be a consumer because what we do get right now is severely overpriced junk that couldn't be sold to the big enterprise bois. Literal scraps.

For another perspective, although I did buy an Apple Silicon MacBook, I do a lot of my computing on almost 10 year old Macs and mostly care in a theoretical sense about new CPUs and GPUs. Most gear that I have is plenty fast for anything I do.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#95

Post by tgv »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

Title 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…

Once you've seen 3 frameworks, you've seen them all. The novelty wears off, rather quickly. That's the difference between your first encounter and the 10th.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#96

Post by zer8k »

lacrimacida wrote: post #84
zer8k wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have gotten older I stopped developing for the web entirely. There's a certain simplicity the UNIX philosophy gave us that is sorely missed. I've started to take the Suckless philosophy more seriously when more than a decade ago I used to mock them for being curmudgeons. There's no glamor in sucking less. No youtube videos or made-for-conference code. But, there's a beauty about it that is hard to describe.

What is Suckless philosophy? Gravitating around simplicity more or less?

http://suckless.org/philosophy/

More or less. It's the "Worse is Better" philosophy. Instead of adding features to make user experience better make software instead that is good at one thing. It emphasizes minimalism and frugality. You may know the Suckless group from `dwm`.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#97

Post by keiferski »

I wonder how much of this is due to innovation happening "under the hood" rather than on the surface.

As an example: the newest model of iPhone looks 99% the same as the original one that came out 15-20 years ago. The iPhone 5 years from now will probably look the same.

Compare that to the difference between cars in 1960 and 1980, or telephones in 1980 and 2000. The external form is vastly different.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#98

Post by stavros »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #79
jl6 wrote: post #75

Possibly related: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-fiv…

For me the ages are more like Although I also remember being 18 and meeting some 70+ year olds that were very adept at using computers/the web and that really impressed me.

I don't know, I'm forty and LLMs are exciting as hell. If we're talking web frameworks, Django was the last good thing and there can never be any more innovation in that sector.

In seriousness, though, a technology that lets me do things I couldn't do before is great. A technology that slightly reorganizes my code and makes it so I have to throw everything I have so far away, I'm less excited about.

What motivates me is building things, which unfortunately means that I'll always reach for the tools I know, and only learn new tools if my current ones don't work, which is why I've been unable to learn Rust.

With Django, I can get stuff done really quickly, and people don't care that it's not a SPA, they care that they can solve their problem with it.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#99

Post by [deleted] »

lacrimacida wrote: post #84
zer8k wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have gotten older I stopped developing for the web entirely. There's a certain simplicity the UNIX philosophy gave us that is sorely missed. I've started to take the Suckless philosophy more seriously when more than a decade ago I used to mock them for being curmudgeons. There's no glamor in sucking less. No youtube videos or made-for-conference code. But, there's a beauty about it that is hard to describe.

What is Suckless philosophy? Gravitating around simplicity more or less?

[deleted]

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#100

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

There isn't a whole lot of new technology around. Apart from LLMs, everything else is a remix/retread/clone/speed bump with a few tweaks.

iOS is 16 years old. Android is a year younger. AWS is a year older. The original Oculus Rift is from 2016.

Facebook dates from 2004. Twitter from 2006. Amazon has been around for 30 years. (And looks it.)

Starlink is a consumerised reinvention of Iridium (1997).

Docker - 2013. Git - 2005. Github - 2008. React - 2013.

And so on.

Also a non-trivial wave of 80s nostalgia, with endless reinventions/emulators of 80s products or 80s ideals (Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, even RPi in its own way.)

Genuinely new? AI is pretty much it. (And maybe electric cars and scooters.)

Quantum computing and robotics are going to make a difference soon-ish, and likely lead to some innovations in User Space. But they're not consumer technologies yet.

The big change for me is weariness and enshittification. I used to be as enthusiastic as anyone, but what we have today seems like a nightmarish digital dystopia dedicated to mass surveillance, behaviour modification, and relentless predatory pursuit of profit.

This covers the range from the big adtech leviathans, to the mid-tech AirBnBs etc and their catastrophic effects on local economies, to the thousands of crappy addictive phone games that people waste their lives on.

There are some good things, but far less than I hoped.

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