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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

What you really miss is your state of mind when you were young and carefree. Don't blame Netflix or Instagram or VCs. Your youth isn't coming back regardless of how computers may look today. You have aged 20 years. Your friends aren't having LAN parties they all have kids in middle school. Fiddling with computers isn't fun because you have taxes to file. You can't still have Red Bull and coffee-fueled all nighters hacking on that shiny new framework because your heart would literally give out. All the new kids entering the industry have their own culture and their own lingo and you hate it all.

Nothing is ever as it was in the "good old days". The best move is to realize this and adapt and make the best of your current life situation.

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That sounds terrible for you.

I'm a greybeard who wears socks-n-crocs, I have lan parties all the time in my house, and sometimes I nap in the afternoon so I can hack at odd hours. I think you should do what brings you joy. Maybe not all the time, because taxes and your health are important too, but at least some of the time.

> Nothing is ever as it was in the "good old days".

Some things aren't as good, but many things are, and at least some of those things are better.

Maybe not for you though? Everyone gets old, so of course, on the whole, at some point things for you are going to look worse than they used to be, but guess what: you're also going to die, so if you think the whole point of your life is about you, all you'll ever see is decline, so I think the best move is to think the whole point of your life is about something else, that way you can see things getting better and become a part of that.

Maybe you will discover life is about the community we're a part of and you need to get to a lan party: Some of those middle-schoolers might have fun playing games with their parents too.

The infinite is great.

I love you, and I'm putting this comment up on my wall. Thank you.

Speak for yourself. We still have LAN parties. Plenty of times its online and thats ok. But we regularly gather up our computers on wheels and drag them everywhere. Sixteen to twenty xboxes is quite a sight.

If anything its gotten larger. Plenty of us bring kids with their own computers.

We all have dedicated server hardware. Monthly get-togethers at least. Mostly Factorio and similar but also quake/doom and quite a few others. We can still link back home for files and add more server space. We've now got the skills and hardware to do things we previously couldn't.

Why should we only remember the good ol days when we can live them right now? As for the music, the best stuff has just been written. Why limit yourself, anyway? We have a catalog of way more than fifty years!

C'mon. It's doesn't have to be so binary between getting old and things changing for the worse. They can both be partly true - and I think we could all agree that the fundamental character of working with computers has changed immeasurably during the last 20 years.

Computing becoming infrastructure does indeed changes things. Before the web your computer was just a side gig, a purely fun driven, consequence-less thing. It was mostly static, you bought the thing, the software (or hacked the shareware :) and that's it, nothing on your mind, you booted MSDOS without ever thinking about your password. Now it's part of the socio-economic ocean.. what you use changes due to market dynamics or policies.. obligations, privacy, security. It's obviously a different world.

Reminds me of articles on early amateur radio. It was free-spirited, until society decided it wasn't and now you need licences and it's a business first toy.

It's not wrong, but I don't think it's the whole story - otherwise, we'd expect today's youth to be just as happy and excited about that stuff as we were. But they don't seem to be - gen z seems to feel more miserable than previous generations at the same point in life.

"nothing ever gets worse, you just get older", is just as bad a rule of thumb as, "how it used to be is how it ought to be."

Ehhh

> nothing ever gets worse

It mostly gets different (and largely, I'd argue, better). Yeah, you get older - which should come with experience, self-knowledge, personal growth...

For me - LAN parties are now dinner parties. Hacking all night on that new framework is pondering architectural decisions and seeing them pay off days or weeks later. Young 'uns with their new ideas means freshness, and teaching opportunities, and foisting the stuff that takes that kind of energy off on those who have it ;)

Different is really only bad when you're unable to adapt.

You are putting words into his mouth. He is not blaming Netflix and co for anything, he is just stating that he is personally not interested in doing anything online in his free time and that the reasons he got into FOSS are not valid anymore.

So sad that good memory also sucks (true for me, lots of good memory). LAN parties was the best social movement, it even had some sort of federation like cross internet cafe competition, customers exchange, home game, away game.

I still like computer for numbers of reason.

> You can't still have Red Bull and coffee-fueled all nighters hacking on that shiny new framework because your heart would literally give out.

This is the worst part of being old.

No, plenty of people still like computing when it's based on FLOSS and doing more interesting things than just logging on to some huge centralized service like IBM of old. Look at the excitement around new projects in Rust. Even Web3, for all of its silliness, builds on the same aspirations. Your comment is just thinly-veiled ageism, you are saying things about "getting old" that just don't apply.

Sure, but adaption can be a number of things. There is no real reason you cannot ‘go back’ if you adapt that way; it is a choice either way. Ofcourse things are not the same but the feel can be. And your heart definitely is a lot stronger (unless you have obvious defects by birth or lifestyle) than red bull and coffee.

The good old days were measurably better than what we have now. Decade by decade, software bogs down.

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