Item — HN Reader

I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹.

It's certainly true that IT has grown vastly since those good old days, but there has always been a proportion of people who're just... not that interested in what they're doing. For example I remember being mildly horrified in around 1998 that a colleague didn't know how to run his compiler from the command line; without an IDE he was lost - but I doubt he was the only one.

Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News². Just because they haven't spread to ubiquity doesn't mean they're not going to. Linux was not mainstream right out of Linus's Usenet announcement - that took time.

As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days

² Edit: Not to mention, there's also a whole bunch of crap that's not very interesting. But survivor bias means we'll have forgotten those in 20 years time when we're surveying this time period; as Sturgeon's law reminds us, "90 percent of everything is crap."

5 comments

Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.

It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days.

And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities.

As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.

The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability.

But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.

You're correct about AI seeming to be "where it's at" right now, but I'm really not thrilled with the corporate concentration that seems to be the natural result of requiring massive amounts of computing power.

Perhaps over time it'll get efficient enough to run outside of huge companies; that could be an interesting aspect to keep an eye on.

I don't see how over time we could get to a place where an entity with orders of magnitude less computing power can run AI that is anywhere near as powerful as the huge companies. Maybe for certain narrow applications, maybe even for many such applications, but hard to imagine it happening in a way that un-concentrates power.

Though certain novel uses could lead to new individuals or entities gaining power.

I'd like to be hopeful and would like to hear good arguments for how this could happen - but it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power - with exceptions and anomalies but that being the dominant trend.

I am sure the same thing was thought about never getting to a point where every person would have a tiny computer in their pocket that was orders of magnitudes faster than the multi-million dollar computers that took up whole rooms and were only owned by the largest companies.

You mean a tiny computer in your pocket that you can mostly just consume content with and chat with others. Sure there are some neat, useful apps out there, but you can't really learn how technology works on a tablet or phone unless you're allowed to build that specific kind of app. You don't even have a filesystem. 10 year old me in today's world would have not been able to break my phone like I did my old DOS / Win95 PC and actually learn something. Shit I used to spend hours just browsing the filesystem, and the install media to see what I could find and learn and use. That's how I found the Weezer music video, and the pinball game on the Win95 I still CD. There is no equivalent to this with phones.

My comment has nothing to do with that.

It was about how only big companies have the resources to make big computers that take up a whole room that are powerful enough to run smart AI models.

But if tech progress is any indication, in say 50 year or probably less, we will have the power of a modern day datacenter in our pockets and be able to run smart AI models locally without it being a large corp monopoly.

If you take human brains as the limit (a questionable assumption) they do it all for 20 watts (and hardware that makes itself!) The training is often years and can be expensive.

In all seriousness though there’s plenty of room for improvement both in current models and hardware.

(Apologies for the bad form of replying twice…)

> it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power

Which is why we are dominated by IBM, AT&T, Kodak and Xerox.

few here recall the "mainframe versus PC" era, as it was.. Basically, there has always been an Oracle

I agree entirely; just because VC focused startups are eager to "rub some AI on" their products doesn't mean that AI itself is boring; it's incredibly cool! Some of the applications are ghastly, but LLMs and diffusion models? Oh my!

Or, you know, if AI is the mainstream hotness or just doesn't float your boat, look for what the iconoclasts are up to and go dive into that, not whatever the VCs are flinging their gold at today.

> I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.

But... they're still there. They're a little diluted, but I've not yet worked somewhere where I had no like-minded tinkerers amongst my colleagues. I don't think I'd want to, but it just hasn't come up.

> As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.

But the free software movement dates back to the early 80s, not the 2000s that we're talking about. Open source itself was being seen as a dilution of the principles of free software in the late 90s/early 2000s. More to the point, free and open source software is still very much here - we're absolutely surrounded by it.

> mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies

It's oscillated. DEC used to be the zippy young upstart snapping at IBM's heels you know. Microsoft didn't start out big and evil; nor did Google if it comes to that. Put not thy faith in shiny new companies for they shall surely betray thee once they devour the opposition... :D

>I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹

That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.

>Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News²

Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.

>As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)

Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...

I'd say "good old days" thinking is probably involved, but not the full explanation. Over the past few decades, software has gone from a fairly obscure profession to being seen as a great way (maybe the best way) to make a lot of money. In absolute numbers, there are probably at least as many engaged, curious engineers as before. There are almost certainly drastically more uninterested engineers who are there partially or fully because of the money, though.

edit: I hadn't scrolled down to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303388 when I wrote this

Dunno. I’ve been at this since the late ‘80’s, and have run into precious few developers who were interested in software and programming for its own sake. For most of them it was just a job.

When I was doing job interviews during my last year of college, I was able to chat with all my interviewers about the morning's Slashdot headlines. Everyone had checked the /. front page that morning and I was able to have a nice ice breaker about the day's stories.

That isn't the case anymore. That sort of monoculture where everyone is reading the same stories, discussing the same topics, and reading about shared values and principles, is long gone.

Requisite "Good old days" clip from The Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gvk0_6p_-s

Hits so much harder as a middle aged adult than when I saw it on tv ~2 decades ago.