I’m kind of sick of being into tech. Everything is riddled with ads and speculative investment. You have to manage your expectations so much because everything has a good likelihood of turning into garbage at a moments notice. It’s just not fun anymore. I know I’m probably a bit nostalgia blinded, but I miss the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s so much. Games were new and interesting, tech was moving at a lightning fast pace, things were fun.
I know it’s more complicated than that, and there are reasons things are how they are, but fuck man. Anyway, off my chest.
Come on over to the open source free software world. Things are exciting and shiny and new while also working better every day. My most recent install of EndeavourOS took about 20 minutes with all drivers and boot stuff working correctly first try, as opposed to the multiple hour installs of 15 years ago. CalyxOS is awesome and has some really cool isolation between apps, not to mention ad blocking. And free hardware is becoming a real option with the newer RISCV stuff coming to market, allowing many more SOC designs to flourish.
I have been in to tech for about 25 years and it has never been cooler than right now with Valve bringing immutable Arch as a base for their OS and making proton work so well that I don’t even check before trying things.
Also, man, some of the stuff coming out of the 3D printing works is just amazing. There is a guy who I follow who is working on solid state propulsion, another is working on 3D printed rocket engines, and another working on prosthetics. Cool things are still happening, just not on Windows or Mac.
Yeah, I reckon it will be much more of an impact in cheaper devices, say light bulbs and semi smart watches, than in bigger systems like laptops or servers. Given the lack of licensing fees for the CPU it makes a system meaningfully cheaper, so there is a strong incentive for various groups to work on making RISCV successful. Hopefully someone out there will do the same with WiFi chips and maybe also camera sensors.
All the tech is now a service and users are constantly getting the rug pulled out from under their feet with changes to terms of service, availability, privacy, and cost. It’s a shit show.
Computers are fucking dope though
I built my first computer in the early 00s. It was shit in a couple years
My current machine has a bunch of SSD space and a 9900k, with a four year old video card. It plays all the newest games perfectly.
Lot has got to shit but I love my computer so much.
The problem with tech is that it doesn’t directly serve the users interests. It also serves the interests of business.
You can’t really serve two masters as the saying goes, so tech tends to prefer business over the individual which isn’t very healthy.
I’ve taken a deep dive into 3d printing. The tech moves at a slow but steady pace and it’s one of the few tech related things I’m aware of that feels like it’s a real user community movement still. Drones to some degree are getting this feeling too, but a bit more commercial crap there still.
1.a. Modern tech is awesome because you can basically get a device to do anything, just by sticking a CPU in it.
1.b. Modern tech is boring because you can basically get a device to do anything, just by sticking a CPU in it.
1.c. Modern tech is terrible because to get a device to do anything you need to stick a CPU in it.
2.a. Modern tech is awesome because you get updates which fixes bugs delivered straight over the internet.
2.b. Modern tech is terrible because you get updates which fixes bugs delivered straight over the internet, making it acceptable for companies to deliver a buggy product.
3.a. Modern tech is awesome because it just works!
3.b. Modern tech is terrible because it might just not work, and you have limited error information and even more limited tools to slove the issue.
4.a. Modern tech is awesome because we have so powerfull hardware that we can just power through complex problems.
4.b. Modern tech is terrible because we have so powerfull hardware that we have forgotten to optimize code, reducing the effectiveness of moderns computing power.
You’re not wrong.
But also, I’m old enough to remember being into tech as being part of the subversive counterculture. Having a modem, sharing schematics and software via BBS, automating processes with naught but solenoids and a soldering iron, these were things weird people did. I could relate to Data from the Goonies or David Lightman or Wayne Szalinski or Chris Knight, because I was into that shit.
Today, everyone is into tech. The douchebros that drove Camaros and wore sharkskin suits are now techbros selling AI-infused engagement algorithms that tweak the user’s dopamine processes and accelerate KPI growth quarterly.
So now we return to our roots. The mainstream pathways are overrun with profit-seeking data hoarders, so we need to abandon the market leaders. Discover new FOSS and jailbreak your hardware. Communicate off the grid, and build something solely for the sense of adventure.
Eschew convention. Abandon Meta and Microsoft and Alphabet and Xitter. Be a part of the underground, and lend your effort to the revolution.
Some day, someone will monetize what we’re doing and bring the slavering masses to this new frontier. And when that happens, we should be glad to have people follow the trail we blazed. Because that’s a good thing. It’s good now that everyone recognizes the value of technology. It’s good that schools teach STEM in Kindergarten and the gender barriers are slowly eroding. It’s good that everyone is expected to be able to connect a device to the internet and search for an answer to common questions. It’s good that anyone can share their voice and join the international community. It sucks that commercialization and exploitation have turned these things into nightmare versions of what they used to be, but that’s not a reason to lament building them. It’s a reason to dive back into the fray and try to create a newer and better tech that is harder to commercialize and exploit.
