Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun? • Hacker News Board

I found joy making sdf2stl.saej.in. It's similar to a bunch of things that already exist, but I was able to make a set of requirements that made mine technically unique.

It was too complex for me to create when I started, so I learned as I went.

In personal projects, I only use LLMs for when I don't care and I don't want to learn. For example, all the WebGL APIs. I am perfectly fine not knowing how to allocate, initialize, and bind a shaderbufferindexobjectstoragehandlepointerarray. But I'll do the fun parts, the interface design and algorithms, by myself.

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

#85

Post by frio » Sun, May 17, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #77

frio wrote: 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?

Mine hasn't actually arrived yet! I'm still waiting for it in the mail. I don't think I'll tweak that much, all I really want to do is flash the published open source firmware, attach it to my tailnet and use it to control a little server I keep in the crawl space under the house (because crawling under there whenever it needs a reboot + entering disk encryption keys is distinctly unpleasant).

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

#86

Post by bradgranath » Mon, May 18, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

https://overthewire.org/wargames/

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

#87

Post by musicale » Mon, May 18, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

FPGAs are fun. It's fun to write code that turns into usable hardware.

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

#88

Post by isolay » Mon, May 18, 2026, 3:20 AM UTC

> The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147793