What is still exciting in tech?
61 points by ploum
61 points by ploum
A comment on a lobste.rs post about the tech culture stagnating made me think.
20-15 or even 10 years ago, tech was really exciting. Sure, monopolies were bad, I was fighting them, but tech by itself was very interesting. New versions of software were expected, we were skimming through changelogs to find novelties, installing beta or alpha versions of totally unknown projects. And I had lived that excitement since the 90’s.
When you think about it, today feels really bleak in comparison:
All of this makes me wonder: am I just a grumpy already old man? Am I missing something? If so, what?
So I would like to ask all lobste.rs: what do you find really exciting in tech today? What are you waiting with impatience? Which project are you following closely? What do you expect from them? What do you hope to see in the next few months or years?
Answering your question: Linux for gaming is kinda insane these days. With the exception of a small number of competitive multiplayer games where the devs are actively working to sabotage progress, pretty much anything runs as good or better on Linux now than it does on Windows. Even vintage games that Windows struggles to run.
Many other cases of things just improving over time to go from irredeemably broken to working so well you don't think about it anymore. Wayland runs fine on nvidia. You can get human readable compiler errors in C++. I wonder if part of the lack of excitement isn't how well a lot of things have started working and how mature software in general has become.
Also speaking personally, my own search engine has kinda been growing its userbase quite significantly this summer/fall. It's exciting for me at least :P
But I think in general you see what you're paying attention to, and being on the constant look-out for bad things is a bad mental habit. Thinking back 15 years ago, did we use to do this? I don't know if it's the loss of common cultural touchstones but it feels like there's so much tribalism everywhere now. The injection of clankers into every message board hasn't helped. But never has a place so populated felt so alienating as the web does in 2026.
Very wise words! Thanks for that.
I do really like Marginalia and I have been for a long time. But, to be honest, I’m not "excited" by it as an end user. Because it solves a problem that was already solved before but for which all existing solutions were enshitified.
So while I appreciate Marginalia a lot, while I believe it is very useful, while I find it awesome that a one-man shop is tackling what multinationals don’t really manage to do properly anymore, I’m not "excited" (but I fully understand that you are). Maybe it will come when I do realize that Marginalia bring something that doesn’t really exist yet: not the ability to search the web but the ability to get rid of slop when searching.
Wasn't that almost exactly what we were doing with Linux all along though, building a parallel ecosystem to the already existing and working Microsoft hegemony?
I guess the difference with internet search engines is you can't really host them yourself (without a prohibitive time and hardware investment), which takes away a lot of the tinkerability.
I think in many ways the big difference between then and now is a loss in sense of ownership. Tinkerability is at least some part in that, even if a lot of it comes from locked down hardware and DRM. Like even small things like being able to style the UI components in your applications is falling apart. You could do this 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, but now you at best get to choose between dark and light mode and it'll work on half your installed UI toolkits and some of the browsers you have installed.
With the exception of a small number of competitive multiplayer games where the devs are actively working to sabotage progress, pretty much anything runs as good or better on Linux now than it does on Windows. Even vintage games that Windows struggles to run.
I have a different experience. I bought a dedicated gaming computer a few years back. This was the first time I used Windows in almost 15 years, but I grew frustrating with how buggy of an OS it is and got overwhelmed to debug it, so I switched to Bazzite which is apparently the pinnacle of plug-and-play Linux gaming distro.
I have to admit, I was amazed how much stuff was working out of the box. As you said, some "older" games even run better, for example God of War 2018 would stutter on Windows as soon as it display snow falling or particles, but on Linux Bazzite it was as smooth as butter. Some recent AAA games developed for windows only are plug and play, I was shocked.
Unfortunately, I had to go back to Windows. Around a quarter of the games would not work or be buggy. Some games just crash, and with Google AI Mode I never managed to pin point whether it was the game, the wine version or the Intel graphic card driver. Some games work, but not the way I want, for example God of War Ragnarok only works if you pass STEAMDECK=1 as an environment variable, but it means you can't play with the PlayStation controller. (You can, but the button hints show A, B, ... instead of square, circle, ... which is not what I want)
It was a mixed bag for me. I loved the OS, because Fedora is my daily driver, and I have to recognize a lot of work was put in Wine in the last 10 years, but the state is not advanced enough for people like me who just want a plug-and-play experience :( .
This might come across as kind of weird, but whenever I feel the feelings you're describing of losing hope in tech and the world as a whole, I start browsing Neocities-type personal webpages. I follow every link. I swear, the passion some of these young people have, to continually put cool stuff on the web despite gestures vaguely, is kinda overwhelming; that usually fixes me. They're building webrings. They have personal Forgejos with cool projects. They share their Nix configs. They host friends-only fediverse instances. They unanimously hate AI with a passion. We're going to be okay.
Can you share some entry points into this? I think taking a look at that little world would be very healthy for me.
My list (not up-to-date, sorry!) https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-content/
I've also switched to NetNewsWire (RSS) for articles/blogs and recently removed all news sites from my feeds. It's mostly random people I meet over unoffice hours -- my little social media feed, but without slop.
Yes! So much this. The small web (or smol web if you like), the poetic web and permacomputing are very much alive and greatly inspiring ecosystems thriving on the web today. https://www.naiveweekly.com and https://internetphonebook.net/ are great places to start looking
I think the durable objects stuff is interesting (though I don't know where it goes in my own usage)
Durable workflows are kinda coalescing into a real thing (I think DBOS in particular is just really a nice way to model this problem in a way that fits into boxes nicely)
On mastodon you'll see people kinda poking at "hacker"-y projects that put a smile to my face. When you're on one of the more "let's just do stuff" instances ppl are having their fun and it's motivating
XMPP kinda sorta works now! I swear! Mobile notifications work so well I more or less immediately know when some random chat room I'm in gets filled in with spam. Now I just need people to talk to on it (beyond just talking about XMPP stuff). They should have kept on calling it Jabber, that just sounds better though.
Lots of annoying Python warts are gone thanks to fun language improvements over decades (as well as python ecosystem stuff). There's still annoying stuff. But it's nice to have things be easier
I feel like nushell hasn't entirely solved the non-posix shell but it feels like the nicest version of the powershell idea.
Similarly, Uiua has kinda solved "how to make array language programming digestible" for me.
Solar panels are neat I guess? I haven't really figured it all out though
Emacs is going quite well, imo
Very silly and dumb but I've been drawing more and more the past couple of years and pen tablets work so well it's really surprising.
There's stlil a lot of annoying and dumb stuff out there of course. I think you can still kinda go full "UNIX" mode and have fun with the latest generation of CLI tooling and things like ast-grep. Or jj of course.
XMPP kinda sorta works now! I swear! Mobile notifications work so well I more or less immediately know when some random chat room I'm in gets filled in with spam. Now I just need people to talk to on it (beyond just talking about XMPP stuff). They should have kept on calling it Jabber, that just sounds better though.
I strongly agree on that. I've had a decade or so of bringing very tech-illiterate people to Prosody + Conversation (and Gajim - sadly still the best option I am aware of) because otherwise they wouldn't be able to use an IM. Matrix is sadly a mess and all the commercial alternative throw scary confusing messages at you all the time, so they are out. And it became a "it just works" kind of thing, after the initial setup, which while in my opinion is not the most optimal given what little you want to achieve really is a one time thing. OMEMO just works which is so nice.
I profess being quit excited myself by Delta Chat, which is really decentralized (as opposed to XMPP federation)
YES!
For some reason, I'm giddy about Delta Chat, even though since April I've barely talked with two people over Delta Chat. But it gets so many things right it's scary!
webxdc included in Delta Chat is also a fascinating piece of tech, IMHO:
It's an excellent way to develop "multiplayer apps" with barely any infrastructure- just static file hosting will do! For example, I think this would be exciting to people learning how to program, as it enables them to write fun stuff like games that they can show to others with relatively little effort.
I think it's interesting because it bundles Iroh p2p tech. I suspect that Delta Chat bots could be a great way to expose services running behind firewalls, and webxdc would enable giving them nice UIs.
I'm not dissing XMPP, but... well, I set up my phone with an XMPP account recently because I think it's still great, but... Delta Chat right now seems easier to recommend. In particular, "second device setup" in Delta Chat is much more smooth for people who won't care.
(IRCv3 also excites me, but that's more niche.)
FTR, Cheogram is Conversations fork with support for webxdc. (I use cheogram but never used any webxdc stuff)
In particular, "second device setup" in Delta Chat is much more smooth for people who won't care
There is ongoing work for auth stuff that should lead to this "flash this QR on your phone to authenticate yourself"-flow that some people enjoy… soonish. I don't find login/username that hard to understand but it's true that QR-code flashing is the "expected default experience" these days.
Relatedly, in my experience "people who won't care" generally don't want to use a desktop client to chat. I have most close friends and family using my personal prosody instance and I am surprised at how few of them are interested in having a desktop client besides their Android Conversations / iPhone Monal.
Ah, I'm glad that is happening! I opened an issue about onboarding a second device experience but it barely saw any activity. If you know if there's some other place tracking the work, feel free to close it or I'll go close it myself.
Your mileage may vary, I've seen a good chunk of non-technical people using WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal on their computer, but certainly that might not be universal. I believe SMS on desktops is also a popular feature. (Apple has this, Android has a web SMS experience, Microsoft provides it during Windows onboarding.)
I believe SMS on desktops is also a popular feature.
Oh wow, I know literally zero person who uses that in France. Maybe some Apple users? But my friends are too poor for that. I sometimes do it with KDEConnect, but it's quite clumsy unfortunately (for me, at least, I don't use KDE but sway, that probably plays a role here).
Oh, here in Spain I know very little people who use this feature. Me and my brother used it for a quite bizarre reason that unfortunately is no longer needed. I find it handy for (bad) 2FA.
I think it's a result of SMS traditionally being charged per-message- I expect in France it was the same. But my understanding is that in the US, SMS was always "flat rate" and it became the de-facto IM there. And that's why I think Android, Windows, and Apple provide it- them being extremely US-centric.
(And actually, SMS might be preferable in some ways to other messaging systems. However, although I think I have a flat SMS rate in Spain now, I'm not sure everyone in Spain does.)
on mastodon
Do you have advice for discovering "let's just do stuff" posts? A web search gets me to https://mastodon.social/explore whose front page I can't distinguish from any other entertainment-news/social media site.
You're not missing something, it's mostly quite depressing.
There are some fun green shoots if you look at small things, mostly in the hobby and community-driven space. There's a lot of push-back at how rubbish things are getting and it's pushing everyday users toward libre and community-driven alternatives. Also, awareness of the dangers of tech (and in particular, its use as a force multiplier for the actions of awful people) is spreading more widely. The anti-AI pushback has gone global and it's something that I've found popping up in conversations with people I wouldn't previously have marked as 'techy'. People are looking for alternatives.
For me, the fun stuff is currently in the local-first and self-hosting movements, both of which have seen a lot of activity. It's surprisingly easy to run very mature tech stacks yourself, on your own infrastructure nowadays.
There is something weird about how atproto fits into decentralization and selfhosting movement. You can host your own pds, and the shared identity genuinely solves some issues, but look at the ecosystem and it's full of VC bait projects that are hard to get excited about unless you have the bay area brainworms.
The weird thing about atproto is it seems to work better for things like Tangled than it actually does does for BlueSky. Strange ecosystem.
Now that questionable quality is everywhere, package management and curation of software becomes more important, IMO.
Linux distros like Debian, Alpine, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch Linux etc. all have volunteers that all try to maintain solid packages and bring in quality software. Package maintainers that bring new software into a distro are trying their very best to select software that is open source, has potential, is maintained, is useful, secure and not bloated.
New official packages are worth watching out for, for instance in the RSS feed for Arch Linux (https://archlinux.org/feeds/packages/, found on the right hand side of https://archlinux.org/). Sometimes popular packages like Blender or Godot also have interesting updates.
Some TUI and command line utilities are more fun and useful than maybe first expected.
Also, new Linux kernel releases usually contains improvements for performance or security, that at least some people find exciting.
At the end of the day, excitement is probably an internal thing, though.
Precisely these days I've been rambling about "software discovery curation". I miss Freshmeat a bit, although I guess Repology and "the other one" (I can't remember it) might cover the gap.
Don't take it personally (I don't use Arch, btw), but some movements in distro lately have depressed me. I think it might be important to start publishing ourselves software curation. This is my proof of concept, although now it's just data and I want to "present it" in a more "report-like" way.
I get excited by new Emacs releases, so much has been improved in my favorite editor. Although the third party stuff has a high slop-ratio, Emacs itself and the core stuff is human. And my favorite programming language Haskell also has had lots of QoL improvements lately, and again there are strong community values around understanding code (with exceptions of course, but I actually prefer a plurality of voices).
I used to find Machine Learning interesting. I no longer do. But I think my interest in it started waning some years before ChatGPT, when it seemed all the new methods required very expensive GPU setups and/or huge pre-trained models. I don't find it fun if I can't run it on my laptop.
I've been out of the Haskell community for about six years, but there's a part of me that would love an excuse to dive back in. What recent improvements have happened? When I first started using it in 2009, it felt like there was a lot of exciting activity, but, by the time I transitioned to rust in 2019, I wasn't seeing much movement beyond a treadmill of releases of new effect systems.
What recent improvements have happened?
One major thing is the development of IO-based ("synthetic") effect systems (or "capability systems" if you like that way of seeing things). Effects are basically solved now. Disclaimers:
LogicT-like things may not portAs an even more distant Haskell observer, would you mind linking me some of the newer effects/capabilities art, and perhaps contrasting it to what came before?
When I look back at the things that excited me about tech, it often was the sheer "numbers go up" things. More hertz, more polygons. Despite Wirth's Law, this actually meant something. Code compiled faster, games got more beautiful, latency got down.
This stopped for me for several reasons. One the less rational end of things, the numbers aren't as tangible anymore. More cores instead of just more ghz, these day even "performance" cores. Some advances even peaked (phones can't really get smaller). Some advances just don't matter to me as much, as we've been in "good enough" phases for 10+ years. And quite often, Wirth's Law does apply quite well (compilation speed being a prime example).
I wonder what younger people see here, where they never had that "gigahertz hump" or maybe even smartphones with 128 megs of ram…
Things getting faster, also often was part in making things accessible to me. 3D stuff (rendering, modeling, gaming) no longer being constrained to expensive SGI workstations. Open Source was an even bigger contributor here: Starting with my first Linux CD-ROM I had access to so many programming languages and libraries, even back then. C, Forth, Ada, Perl, Python, all the Lisps! These days? Well, I could probably spend a lot of money to do local LLMs, but otherwise? Don't get me wrong, there's still new things for me to do, but it's rarely at the frontline of tech development (e.g. doing Arduino-style hardware hacking).
For me this also started long before the age of vibecoding. Probably when we entered the "cloud", and "architecture" was more about network diagrams than code design docs, Booch clouds or even UML. When desktop GUIs stopped being something one does. When open source projects suddenly meant JS libraries founded by tech giants (who thought I once miss the days when it was new editors/IRC clients).
Slop development doesn't make it easier, but it also doesn't feel new in that particular regard. The new ennui this creates is more on my "political annoyances" stack than on my "disappointed by tech" mountain.
So, I guess, faux-retrocomputing, where it's not about emulation but about "how we did things in the olden times of the 00s"?
So, I guess, faux-retrocomputing, where it's not about emulation but about "how we did things in the olden times of the 00s"?
One of the things I'm kinda excited about is HTMX, as a reaction to the SPA reactslop. SSR is y2k!
Another thing in that space I've recently became aware of is Gemini web protocol. Again, a reaction to how overcomplicated and end-user-hostile the http+html web has became. Simplify markup, remove site-enforced styling, remove javascript
I derive a lot of excitement, ironically, from the stagnation of corporate tech.
Is it as exciting as it used to be? Eh, maybe not. The mainstream certainly isn't. The fringes are still exciting though!
Regarding (1), it sounds awesome but how does it do regarding noise, heat and power consumption?
My 25 years in tech has gone from stressful, but loved, to 1000+ files per git pull. Its a complete AI clusterfk and taking any joy out of working in tech. Up top are tainted with the lies and promises from Anthropic and the likes. Quantity of code was never our issue, quality and maintainability was... and now we have buckets more code, and less maintainability and quality than ever. Metrics are tracked and we are always under the threat of binned if not 10x'ing ya shit with AI from c*.
I hate it all. Tech is destroyed, race to the bottom.
I'm biased, but I think that the emergence of small social media is something that might be cool. I feel like a lot of the millennial internet users are nostalgic for discussion spaces that are not overwhelmed by assholes and flooded by irrelevant content. Bringing back internet forums but with a more expressive interactivity vocabulary than just plain text, could be that. Add federation between them and you can have a large network but within a cozy community. :)
I'm excited about WebAssembly. It's really coming together now.
I think WASM has a real chance at delivering a secure, robust, cross-platform sandbox. We really need one of those right now - why would I ever want to run untrusted code outside of a robust sandbox in 2026?
The positive outlook is probably that enshittification is known as such by the broader public. It's hard to argue that companies are driven by anything but monetary greed. Who would have thought cyberpunk was right and you can hack everything, not despite but because it's AI slop?
Hardware prices mean that hacking stuff together out of spare parts and creating low energy solutions is in the limelight again.
People at large seem to be creating things for fun rather than for CVs and profit anymore, because they are as annoyed and burned out as everyone else. Eg. they do the equivalent of woodworking. Sometimes just digging out retro computers and such, which also seems to be a growing field.
A lot of it feels like the facade has been ripped of. There is something kind of liberating about that.
Bad projects now are easily detectable by certain .md files.
The good outlook is that copyright/IP/... is essentially dead now or on its last breaths. (I know there is a lot of wishful thinking in there, ignore it if you want to)
There is a lot of "new in old" stuff going on like IRCv3 or all the cool stuff built in NetBSD.
For more mainstream stuff I do think that there are cool developments around QUIC (esp. without the HTTP/3 part) and WASM/WASI. Both of them feel like - at least from some angle - like dreams from 15 years ago. Having that generic binary (oh cosmopolitan libc as well) that runs everywhere and having an easy to use protocol where what you want/need in terms of reliability is just a config option a way.
We have a weird "problem" that is too many C replacements depending on what exactly you mean by that and they seem all pretty active. Meanwhile there are a lot of not-just-research (as in it works with real applications) projects to make C itself safe or safer.
am I just a grumpy already old man?
In a way. But just like large parts of the world? And maybe we can learn from the grumpy old man and stop burning ourselves and find pleasure in something simple. Be it woodworking or repairing that 90s tamagotchi, digging out cassette tapes, record players, C64, or just write a MUD, Usenet client, BBS or something else.
Depending on who you are different things might excite you. But I think getting away from all that stuff that has many users/clicks/likes/devs/stars/servers/... is something worthwhile to look into.
At least to me it seems like all the exciting stuff simply moved away from the buzz which is to some degree exciting to me as well. There has been that tendency that exciting stuff gets bad because someone wants the whole world to use it and thereby removing the exciting part, making it that generic bloated thing that is like the hundred generic bloated things before it. Then the new clean stuff is hacked together until some company buys it up one way or another - employing the main dev, sponsoring or simply becoming the main contributor because they pay people for working on it. If you step away from that risk by doing something "hacky" out of the limelight chances are lower this will happen.
Niche operating systems really excite me today: Haiku, NetBSD, RedoxOS, Fiwix - to name few.
It's bizarre because it's retro as hell, but the Gemini protocol excites me, even though I consider it performance art.
This week I found a second person beyond me who had decided to make their blog Gemini-first, for very much the same reasons I did:
cat and other UNIX tools.It is true that geminispace itself is a bit bare, repetitive, and with the same few people over and over. But I find it a massive demonstration of what the web could be.
(And some day I'll make my own Gemini setup usable by others. I think people could create great websites that work on regular browsers too much more easily than with other means!)
OP here: well, You found a third person because I have been active on Gemini since 2020 and had my main blog become Gemini first in 2022 ;-) (I’m also developing a Gemini browser)
Hah, of course I know about your "existing" client :) (I have to test it- I'm too content with Lagrange and Amfora.) I also wanted to give you props in a way, and remind you that you're participating in something that a lot of people are excited about :)
I mean I know about lots of Gemini blogs, but the interesting thing about this person is that they don't even run a Gemini server. They just find the gemtext constraints a good idea! Also their site has bizarre alignment with mine (e.g. their front page is a full gemfeed of their entire blog history).
I've published more or less nothing on my weblog except for Gemini- and Gopher-related stuff since 2020. I probably need to start making my Gopher log mirror my gemlog rather than my weblog, because most of those are just there to be mirrored to Gopher.
Hah, where is that?
I've always wanted to also publish my site as a gopherhole, but when I've pondered that, I've always thought that either a) it would be very hard to adapt Gemini content to Gopher b) it would be brutal to make things Gopher-first and adapt gracefully to Gemini and HTML. If I found a way I liked, I'd like to do it.
So I would like to ask all lobste.rs: what do you find really exciting in tech today?
It's depressing that we had to get to the current cluster fuck for it to happen, but I see more interest in decentralised/self hosted things, not because there aren't centralised offerings, but specifically because people are aware of (some of) the downsides to giving up control like that.
Just want to say that I resonate with this a lot. Not a few years ago, I was always the one to explore shiny new things; now I dread all of these.
Nowadays, I follow a handful of indie game developers, graphics programmers, and tech artists working on small projects. Their enthusiasm sometimes lifts my spirits too.
Even if you are interested by AI, the ecological consequences and the way it is used are simply awful.
Yeah. I can relate to this one too. Machine learning was (and is still) fascinating to me, from an intellectual-curiosity perspective. Though my interest is definitely tainted by the current trend
Interesting take, and you're not alone. I feel like a grumpy old man as well. And AI slops have worsened it for me.
I was sick of web related technologies even before the slop boom, but I'm sick of em even more now. Wherever you look everything look the same and they are boring.
I've been doing interviews recently, and the tech industry is still the same, same problems, same solutions, same engineers claiming that their problem is unique while it is not. Overall boring.
It's difficult to find excitement in tech any more. But what I love to do is to work on my own programming language (I've been working on it for like 7-8 years now). The research part of it took me down into mathematics rabbit holes which are massively exciting. Not just the thoric part, implementation wise, it is so satisfying as well. Even though many of the problems I'm facing are already solved, but rethinking and understanding them are just refreshing.
Overall, I think in this age that AI bros are generating infinite useless slop, the excitement resides in rethinking the fundamentals lower level concepts.
Id recommend abstaining from social media, filtering the vibecoding tag here, buying a programming book and implementing something hard on your own, without an llm or anything of the sorts. I work on my programming language at $HOME and it fills me with joy to make something faster, better and well engineered on my own, even though at $WORK the clankers are filling me with dread.
I’m having a blast learning Wayland. I think we are slowly getting market share and find the design choices quite liberating. I can build out a status bar that works across all compositors that implement wlr_layer_shell in a couple hundred lines of code.
https://github.com/neurosnap/figbar
I also think there’s a ton of activity and money going into terminals which has been exciting to see
Things I've been watching closely:
Spritely has been building the coolest tech I've seen in a long time. I'm desperately hoping for the kinds of things they're working on to permeate through FOSS tech spaces. (I think they're maybe starting to; it feels like people are starting to understand object capabilities when they come up in discussions online, whereas a few years ago I saw a lot more of "this looks cool but I don't really understand it.")
MNT has made a bunch of open hardware ARM laptops that feel like a bastion of hope in an increasingly locked down world. I use a Pocket Reform as my main laptop outside of work and this thing (with an RK3588 module) is the hackable, decently powerful, cellular-connected netbook that high-school-me could have only dreamed of.
River seems to be leading to another resurgence in small customizable window managers for the Wayland world like the ones we had for X11. And it could do the same for mobile Linux soon too.
Speaking of mobile Linux, the various mobile Linux distros and DEs have gotten a lot more usable over the last few years. I've been daily driving Ubuntu Touch again on a Fairphone 5 for the last few months after having fallen off it for years, and prior to that was using an FLX1s running Phosh. They still definitely have their rough edges, but if you're the sort of person who likes tinkering and doesn't mind some compromises they're pretty much there now. But very much looking forward to the future here.
Over in the commercial world, the fact that you can now plug nearly any of the current flagship Android phones into a USB-C dock and get a desktop environment is very cool. (Somewhat annoyingly this seems further along in the Android world these days than in the Linux world; I'd much rather have a Linux desktop when I do this.) But it's a remarkable technical achievement that the phones most of us are carrying around in our pockets have the hardware to be very capable desktops these days.
I'm eagerly awaiting the Steam Frame for gaming, but more importantly as a standalone headset that's not locked down. And the work Valve's been funding for its development has made x86->ARM translation for games increasingly good!
Microprocessors. The DIP spider guys or the stamp-sized ones with a USB port and twenty castellated pads. Like many people, my formative years were a time when tech meant gadgets and gizmos. Little objects with one job and few moving parts. Bonus points for a transparent case. Fuck skeuomorphism, let me physically pick up the thing with my meat hands! Now you can buy a microprocessor and a 1-inch screen and a tin of mints and make your own doodad, all for the cost of a coffee and a weekend with micropython and a soldering iron. It is genuinely easy enough to do yourself.
Also exciting thing you can do: rescuing something second-hand. Breathing new life into something that would have been discarded. Finding new uses for old things. Get a microchip and add USB or wifi to an obsolete whosit or whatsit you found on ebay so it gets another decade+ of use. Y'know?
Sorry to break it to you but if you were interested in technology for its own sake, then the path dependence to this point was baked in from the very beginning. It is a tool for control and extraction and it always has been.
The alternative is this approach: https://papanek.org/publications/designer-for-the-real/
I don't really see any strong arguments for your assertion...?
I can buy that totalitarianism and forced helplessness is a hard-to-avoid consequence of technological capability as it makes citizens so individually capable that eventually even a single individual could destroy civilizations. But that doesn't make technology a tool of control, but control a consequence of technology.
am I just a grumpy already old man
In the 90s I was a teenager and was expecting the "computer for everybody revolution" to end all bad stuff™ in the world thanks to better access to information and improved means of communications. Oh boy was I naive, techno-solutionist and uneducated. But being less excited about anything is part of growing old too, for the better or worse.
what do you find really exciting in tech today?
While the current LLM hype is awful, there are some amazing things that are enabled by machine learning in the area of health, regarding medecine personalisation and screening. Of course, in the privacy nightmare we live in, one must be cautious as to whether innovations will be a net gain for humanity :grimacing:. FWIW, I am vaguely competent in this domain (health) and I don't see LLMs bringing much to the table, except maybe for research involving non-structured medical records such MD's notes (these are common and pretty hard to extract data from, at scale).
What are you waiting with impatience?
Python performance improvements that make my stuff faster and consumes less joules without changing the code. :)
Which project are you following closely? What do you expect from them? What do you hope to see in the next few months or years?
Out of the top of my head:
This is my armchair coaching advice that I definitely do not follow myself:
This is my utterly shameful self-promotion comment, I'll sneakily combine them in the same comment to get all of the upvotes/downvotes for both aspects :D
half-jokingly: Your dopamine receptors might be fried... I mean we've been constantly bombarded with narrative of "the next big thing" so it's not surprising. And together with the general trend really going to sh*t (fascism, environmental disaster, worsening economy, ...) I can easily see why the outlook is bleak. I think that's probably one of the reason why fascism is rising, the future looks bleak, so people cling to that idealized past. Imo things are about to change yes, but it's also good news because I think there is an opportunity to weight in and change things for the better.
More seriously and to your question, I find quite a few things exciting lately. In terms of more technical stuff:
But what's also quite exciting is how the acceleration of AI and fashware is generating a lot of counter movements, like the human made stuff, worker-owned licenses (btw tech co-ops are a super exciting topic), renewal of luddite thinking, anti-big tech sentiment, very recently read an excellent article on digital solidarity as opposed to digital sovereignty (I'll actually make a submission for this one), and many more. I think I am just excited by all the possibilities of simpler and (actually) democratically governed tech.
Maybe that's a weird take, but I'm excited by the reaction to the gloom and doom, and how people are taking action, and refusing to die.
20 years ago, speaking about DRM, open standard and open source to the normies felt like preaching in a desert. Now lot of normie are aware of these issues and are starting to take action. If you allow me to quote Seneca
In quibusdam aegris gratulandum est quod se sentiant aegros.
We often congratulate sick men for observing they are sick.
And also
Pars sanitatis velle sanari fuit.
It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.
Or for a more French Canadian quote from Claude Peloquin
Vous êtes pas écoeurés de mourir, bande de caves?
Aren't you tired of dying, idiots?
I see people that refuse to die, and I'm happy about this.
There is an old Attikamek story that I read a few a year ago. I don't remember the exact words, but it goes a bit like this
The forest was beset by the biggest wildfire in living memory.
The bear, the stag and the wolf, the beaver and the wolverine,
all fled the flame, and laid in sorrow, defeated completely.But their lament was interrupted by a tiny hummingbird.
that went to the lake, and, picking minuscule droplet of water.
flew toward the raging blaze, dropping his comical payloadAnd back to the lake he went, picking another droplet.
back to the braze, again. Working tirelessly, endlessly,
To the amazement of those that remained paralyzed"What are you doing?" asked a confused wolf.
"What do you think?" answered an annoyed bird.
"I'm doing what I can".
I don't care if it is only small droplet. People are fighting back.
There is value in the fight itself. I'm excited by the self-respect it imply.
We figured out how to use matrix arithmetic to understand human language, answer questions about images, and write and debug code.
Read the room dude
One of my favorite things about the National Treasure Cinematic Universe (two films and a TV show) is the presence of characters I like to call "treasure grumps" - their role is to push back on treasure hunting, arguing that seeking out treasure is an addiction that destroys lives and never comes to anything.
That's interesting. What's also interesting is the recurring trope in "race for the treasure" adventure movies where the people who have clearly quite a lot of money to spend on technology that will enable them to get the treasure by force are portrayed as the bad guys
OP is saddened by the negative externalities of AI; there are already dozens of threads on multiple websites where you can and do boost LLMs continually, and you chose this one. Maybe exercise a little empathy and not butt in with how cool you find them when OP specifically says that that's a reason they're losing their excitment for tech? If someone's saddened by smartphones in general and the negative effects of the present Apple / Google duopoly it wouldn't really be appropriate to comment about how they "enable so much" and how exciting you find the latest folding phone from Samsung, would it?
Do you think it's inappropriate to try to change OP's mind in this thread? He did ask
am I just a grumpy already old man? Am I missing something? If so, what?
Personally I think he _is_missing something.