Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 185 posts

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

#121

Post by jeroenhd »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #112
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #100

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…

This might be true for pure SW and computer tech, but what about biological sciences? Or consumer markets?

In terms of biotech and medicine, we're still developing new stuff continuously. Computers being able to do machine learning are helping us push ahead where human manpower was once wasted on busywork.

You can live a full live with AIDS now, with little to no side effects, even with little to no infection risk. We have vaccines against various causes for cancer, and are vaccines for specific types of cancer are actually being tested.

We're in the human trial phase of rewriting a living person's DNA to solve genetic defects. So far they haven't been particularly successful, but the concept was mere theory just 20 years ago.

We were hit with a pandemic and had working vaccines in less than a year. Even with vaccine deniers, we've managed to overcome the deadly wave of the pandemic in record time.

Things that were mere theories two decades ago can now be done inexpensively in a small lab. We don't get to tinker with it, but medicine and its adjacent fields are rapidly developing.

Computer science has become rather boring, although languages that bring novel ideas to the mainstream like Rust are still somewhat exciting I suppose.

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

#122

Post by analog31 »

I'm 59, and I'm selective about which new technologies I get excited about. One question I ask myself is, will I regret missing out on this or waiting for the next version?

I would have regretted missing out on microcomputers and programming.

I don't regret missing out on Windows Vista.

I get excited about technologies when I find a use for them. So far I haven't found a use for LLM's, but that could change, and there will always be the next version.

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

#123

Post by fidotron »

doubled112 wrote: post #111
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #100

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…

Honestly, this is how I've been feeling lately. Everything is old now. It's been a long time since a huge revolution tech wise happened. It's just incremental evolution now, and a lot of it is NOT for the better. The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change.

> The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change.

Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference.

Of course you meant in relative terms, but in absolute terms the computation (and especially per watt) that you can do today is astonishing relative to in 2000. Software development on the 2600 had more in common with the PS2 than the PS2 does to today. (Writing assembler in Excel for the vector units was a thing on the PS2).

What has happened is we have completely lost sight of what all this is for, and ever more of the created resources get allocated to enabling fast pivots towards anything that looks like it might be worth doing.

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

#125

Post by mythrwy »

I'm 52 and I care about new technology. If it looks like it improves things.

Most of the time that isn't the case and it's simply more useless abstraction and time wasting and marketing and resume building and scamming and ego very clever see!.

But it is worth looking into things briefly if they pass the initial 2 second smell test in my opinion. There is the occasional diamond in the dung heap that passes for modern technology.

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

#126

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #120
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #100

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…

mRNA, Crispr-cas9, immune checkpoint inhibitors, etc. Those are novel and at least with Crispr-cas9 one has been so universally recognized as novel that it resulted in the Nobel Prize at a much shorter delay than usual.

Yes! We switched from electronic technology to bio technology.

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

#127

Post by Boxxed »

It is always striking to me how many of my coworkers truly do not care about solving a problem or getting things done. If they aren't exploring some new database, language, tool, or whatever then they just lose interest and try to force one of those things into the codebase.

Oddly enough, I feel like I have some friends that are the same way in their hobbies. It's crazy to me how they'll buy a new board game for $80 and play it once, maybe twice and never look at it every again.

This constant novelty-chasing is probably what both groups are really after.

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

#128

Post by lafar6503 »

Me too have developed an aversion to new frameworks, but mostly because the old ones become outdated and go out of support so fast. Feels like we're forced to keep updating and switching tools without any real gain, just to stay compatible with the infrastructure.

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

#129

Post by leerob »

randomdata wrote: post #65

I fail to see how one could get excited about Next.js, young or old. It makes so many poor design decisions for the type of tool it presents itself as. It is my understanding that the original intent of the project differed, so I can understand that the design choices may have been sensible in that context, but are a terrible fit for the change in project scope and, indeed, how people are trying to use it today. I'm…

The original intent of Next.js holds true today: https://vercel.com/blog/next

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

#130

Post by perfectstorm »

man i went through the same thing. when Swift was introduced by Apple back in 2014(?) i pushed for its adoption as a senior engineer. when Apple introduced SwiftUI, I was like lets wait 2-3yrs and see how it goes before we adopt it and i'm glad everyone in my team agreed with me.
Post reply on HN