You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
> and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements.
The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.
Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.
A lot of fun new technology gets shouted down by reactionaries who think everything's a scam.
Here on "hacker news" we get articles like this, meanwhile my brother is having a blast vibe-coding all sorts of stuff. He's building stuff faster than I ever dreamed of when I was a professional developer, and he barely knows Python.
In 2017 I was having great fun building smart contracts, constantly amazed that I was deploying working code to a peer-to-peer network, and I got nothing but vitriol here if I mentioned it.
I expect this to keep happening with any new tech that has the misfortune to get significant hype.
It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads.
But it's fundamentally a correlation, and this observation is important because something can be completely ad-free and yet disempowering and hence unpleasant to use; it's just that vice-versa is rare.
> It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads.
Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.
But note that I, as the user, want to block the ads. If I can easily do so (and I usually can) it’s fine. But the moment I can’t, in that very small way, I am disempowered.
And that’s usually where the junk shows up: in what way is the software not as good as it could be both because it needs to show ads and because it wants it to be hard to disable them (the second is worse).
The thesis is that jank is not quite imperfect software (it will never be perfect!) but rather something which is clearly not at a local minimum, and it’s pretty hard to have a local minimum with ads (even if the global ecosystem requires them for sustainability; something something evolutionarily stable something something always defect).
On a secondary point, when ads are locally optimal, we call it an effective sponsorship. Especially interesting when you don’t know that it’s an ad. How many times have you paid to see something with an agenda? Note that’s not a bad thing; I’d say every decent work of art needs at least some agenda. But it’s interesting because ads generally are not, in this sense, art; though on the flip side I’ve seen sponsorships on YouTube which are genuinely as if not more entertaining than the video itself and are still clearly sponsored and hence not deceptive.
No, they wouldn't. On Youtube, for example, videos were consistently trending longer over time, and you used to see frequent explainers (https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-video-extra-long/) on why this was happening and how Youtube benefits from it. Short-form videos are harder to monetize and reduce retention, but users demand them so strongly that most platforms have built a dedicated experience for them to compete with TikTok.
You can. It’s not a hermetic seal, I assume because they live in the same database as normal videos, but if you’re thinking of the separate “shorts” section there’s a triple dot option to turn it off.
> That happened because technology stopped being fun.
Exactly and I'm sure it was our naivete to think otherwise. As software became more common, it grew, regulations came in, corporate greed took over and "normies" started to use.
As a result, now everything is filled in subscriptions, ads, cookie banners and junk.
Let's also not kid ourselves but an entire generation of "bootcamp" devs joined the industry in the quest of making money. This group never shared any particular interest in technology, software or hardware.
The ads are just a symptom. The tsunami of money pouring in was the corrosive force. Funny enough - I remain hopeful on AI as a skill multiplier. I think that’ll be hugely empowering for the real doers with the concrete skill sets to create good software that people actually want to use. I hope we see a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs that opt to bootstrap over predatory VCs. I’d rather we see a million vibrant small software businesses employing a dozen people over more “unicorns”.
>The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.
Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first.
Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and escape from the mundane social expectations wider society has.
It may encompass both "hot takes" to simply say money ruined tech. Once future finance bros realized tech was easier than being an investment banker for the easy life - all hope was lost.
I don't think that just because something becomes accessible to a lot more people that it devalues the experience.
To use the two examples I gave in this thread. Digital music is more accessible than ever before and it's going from strength to strength. While at-home subtractive CNC is still in the realm of deep hobbyists, 3d printing* and CNC cutting/plotting* (Cricut, others) have been accessible and interested by the masses for a decade now and those spaces are thriving!
* Despite the best efforts of some of the sellers of these to lock down and enshittify the platforms. If this continues, this might change and fall into the general tech malaise, and it will be a great loss if that happens.
No. You're both about 50% correct; what's making everything weird is that the things associated with "hacking" transitioned from "completely optional side hobby" to "fundamental basis of the economy, both bullshit and not."
This is why I'm finding most of this discussion very odd.
lol, no. They're people who think faster. Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Someone who clicks through GUI windows will never be able to control their computer as fast as someone with a command prompt.
I'm sure that there are some examples who enjoy it for the interface. I think CRT term/emulator is peak aesthetic. And a few who aren't willing to invest the time to use a gui an a terminal, and they learned the terminal first.
Calling either group a luddite is stupid, but if I was forced to defend one side. Given most people start with a gui because it's so much easier. I'd rather make the argument that those who never progress onto the faster more powerful options deserve the insult of luddite.
> Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim.
Is this an actually serious/honest take of yours?
I've been using vim for 20 years and, while I've spent almost no time with VS Code, I'd say that a lot of JetBrains' IDEs' built in features have definitely made me faster than I ever was with vim.
Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right?
The take was supposed to be read as slightly hyperbolic. Because while the fastest user of an IDE, has never come close to the fastest I've seen in vim, as you pointed out, thats not really a reasonable comparison either. Here I'm intentionally only considering raw text editing speed, jumping across lines, switching files. If you're including IDE features, when you expect someone in vim to leave vim, you're comparing something that doesn't equate to my strawman.
My larger point was it's absurd to say someone who's faster using [interface] is a luddite because they don't use [other interface] with nearly identical features.
> Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right?
I guess that's fitting insult, given I started with a strawman example too.
edit: I can offer another equally absurd example, (and why I say it's only slightly hyperbolic because the following is true), I can write code much faster using vim, than I can with [IDE], I don't even use tab complete, or anything similar either. I, personally, am able to write better code, faster, when there's nothing but colored text to distract me. Does that make me a luddite? I've tried both, and this fits better for me. Or is it just how comfortable you are with a given interface? Because I know most people can find tab complete useful.
> My larger point was it's absurd to say someone who's faster using [interface] is a luddite because they don't use [other interface] with nearly identical features.
People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.