As I get older, I just don't care about new technology
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I am 45 and stopped caring much about new web frameworks many years ago. It's not that I don't find them interesting or even advantageous in some ways, I just don't feel compelled to bother learning in detail about most of them. Although I usually do look into them enough to get the gist.
You just can't pick up every single new thing. If you try then you won't ever get any real work done.
But some things you really have to take notice of. And this is subjective and usually not one right answer. For me, image and text generation was something I felt compelled to jump into.
A big part of this calculation is also social. If you are looking to pick up contracts or jobs, your choice of technology is important. And often picking up the latest trend will make that easier.
It really depends on the technology and what it offers you. I would say that getting familiar with the OpenAI API provides much more bang for your buck (depending on what you are trying to do) versus upgrading Next.js versions. That's much easier to get excited about.
SPAs were an answer to cross platform and device issues, given the web browser was the best cross platform piece of software used by the largest population. It made sense to try that vs making native apps on all the different platforms.
The fundamental problem in the web space spawning all of these tools has always been JavaScript’s weaknesses though.
Whereas a C gig today probably means embedded, or subsystem far away from the frontend churn. If I'm lucky they have unit tests. The Lindy path you were talking about.
Many of us use it quietly, to do good work, and there is no need to crow to the world about what is happening under the hood.
Ex: Maintain some SQL queries, upgrade to a new database version without bricking everything, write some scripts that get fired off at a scheduled time, knowledge of the industry you're serving, update some configuration files for the company website which won't change for another decade, read some log files, create some visualization displays for operations staff, install software on certain machines, manage the company's VPN stuff, configure Linux, do the paperwork...etc
All this stuff is more generic IT and less rockstar developer. It reliably pays the bills and isn't very flashy.
There are plenty of people in IT that write code every day, some that rarely write code, and some that basically never write code, but just manage the business side of it all (there is a lot of beauracracy in large organizations).
Pretty sure you can get a job in frontend dev if you know React, which is 10 years old.
I agree about your sentiment about learning this that are important . I made a natural language network scanner and I got to speak about it at defcon. I never intended for people to find it interesting I just wanted to learn to apply LLMs . The source code is at https://github.com/zitterbewegung/saturday and you can interact with it at +1 (825) 251-9142
I'd much rather conserve my limited energy for things that are inherent to the platform and actually exciting, like WASM or WebGPU.
The value proposition has changed though and there isn't a compelling reason to start using jQuery now, but if you are somebody who just stuck with it this entire time it still works and you are still as productive as you ever were.
And as a bonus you didn't waste any time chasing failed fads along the way...
On the other hand the rise of AI is an interesting thing. And Mars rockets and ebikes are cool.
iOS is 16 years old. Android is a year younger. AWS is a year older. The original Oculus Rift is from 2016.
Facebook dates from 2004. Twitter from 2006. Amazon has been around for 30 years. (And looks it.)
Starlink is a consumerised reinvention of Iridium (1997).
Docker - 2013. Git - 2005. Github - 2008. React - 2013.
And so on.
Also a non-trivial wave of 80s nostalgia, with endless reinventions/emulators of 80s products or 80s ideals (Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, even RPi in its own way.)
Genuinely new? AI is pretty much it. (And maybe electric cars and scooters.)
Quantum computing and robotics are going to make a difference soon-ish, and likely lead to some innovations in User Space. But they're not consumer technologies yet.
The big change for me is weariness and enshittification. I used to be as enthusiastic as anyone, but what we have today seems like a nightmarish digital dystopia dedicated to mass surveillance, behaviour modification, and relentless predatory pursuit of profit.
This covers the range from the big adtech leviathans, to the mid-tech AirBnBs etc and their catastrophic effects on local economies, to the thousands of crappy addictive phone games that people waste their lives on.
There are some good things, but far less than I hoped.
It's been a long time since a huge revolution tech wise happened. It's just incremental evolution now, and a lot of it is NOT for the better.
The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change.
Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference.
Of course you meant in relative terms, but in absolute terms the computation (and especially per watt) that you can do today is astonishing relative to in 2000. Software development on the 2600 had more in common with the PS2 than the PS2 does to today. (Writing assembler in Excel for the vector units was a thing on the PS2).
What has happened is we have completely lost sight of what all this is for, and ever more of the created resources get allocated to enabling fast pivots towards anything that looks like it might be worth doing.
Maybe in terms of development, as you suggest, but definitely not in terms of player experience. For example, I'm able to play and enjoy games from the PS2 (and even the PS1), but games from the 2600 are essentially unplayable. I have a lot of nostalgia for computers and games from the 80s but I realize now that it's for the late 80s, around the time of the SNES.
Sometimes I think that 1990-1995 was peak computing, in terms of "the computer as a feeling". 25MHz single core, 1MB RAM, 100MB HDD, 9600 bps modem, 320x200 256 colors--you could get a lot done and yet every byte and cycle were precious and it was all understandable by a single person. If consumer hardware had stalled out there, we'd still be flying high, albeit with a text-only internet. Software would be more stable and there would be incentive to optimize and improve instead of amass and churn. In fact the only things I'd change in that list to make it simpler would be SSD instead of floppy/HDD and packet-switched internet instead of modem.
Don't get me wrong, as a consumer I would want to stall out a bit later, closer to 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 1Mbps always-on network, 1024x768 true color; but by that point the hardware is complicated enough that the software becomes unwieldy, too much for one person to grok fully, and the craft is lost to waste and bloat. For example, with 320x200x8, there's a certain magic of having byte-addressable video memory laid out in a way that directly corresponds to the screen pixels. You can still get evocative images but you have to care about each pixel. With 1024x768x24 you can waste 90% of the resources and be 'good enough'.
Atari 2600 you were playing something like Pole Position. Gran Turismo 4 was released on PS2. Gran Turismo 7 for PS5.
What improved from Gran Turismo 4 until 7? Model detail? Better grass and reflections? Some improved physics simulation? It looks great, don't get me wrong, but it isn't a massive improvement in user experience for 23 years of development.
VR racing could be a riot. Maybe VR is that leap forward, but VR is another tech we've been trying to get going since the 80s.
Also disqualifying VR that way by stating we've been trying to get it going since the 80s is a bit silly. Most of the other "huge steps" we've made like the iPhone were too just incremental improvements from predecessors.
You can live a full live with AIDS now, with little to no side effects, even with little to no infection risk. We have vaccines against various causes for cancer, and are vaccines for specific types of cancer are actually being tested.
We're in the human trial phase of rewriting a living person's DNA to solve genetic defects. So far they haven't been particularly successful, but the concept was mere theory just 20 years ago.
We were hit with a pandemic and had working vaccines in less than a year. Even with vaccine deniers, we've managed to overcome the deadly wave of the pandemic in record time.
Things that were mere theories two decades ago can now be done inexpensively in a small lab. We don't get to tinker with it, but medicine and its adjacent fields are rapidly developing.
Computer science has become rather boring, although languages that bring novel ideas to the mainstream like Rust are still somewhat exciting I suppose.
Those are novel and at least with Crispr-cas9 one has been so universally recognized as novel that it resulted in the Nobel Prize at a much shorter delay than usual.
Maybe not a big thing for everyone, but for the nature-loving nerds at the intersection of computers and mechanics this has personally been the most exciting hobby for the last 5 years.
The whole MTB industry is exploding with innovation, just recently Pinion released a motor with integrated gearbox getting rid of the 100-year old derailleur.
https://youtu.be/YXmMV1LQu-s?si=xfHIfBTPeYfGar5X
https://youtu.be/H3KsWIz4LDo?si=j6gMUylkr12GetPN
Better battery tech and sleeker integration/improved weight is creating some truly amazing new mountain bikes and the experience of riding one is quite novel compared to anything in the past.
For the uninitiated, it's not like riding a motorbike. These bikes are pedelecs meaning you only get extra assistance when pedaling (there is no throttle).
The best analogy is the feeling of being a bionic man with extreme strength and stamina. The first time riding up a steep hill brought the same sensation as riding a bike for the first time as a kid.
Pure bliss, I couldn't stop smiling.
What's really concerning though are how so many players want to do so at all costs i.e. suck the air out of the building except for their own room.
THAT is not fine.
Play the game. Stop tilting the table however.
The only point I get from this is that interesting technology takes a long time to get to a mature point.
This is the problem, you are expecting something brand new and revolutionary while looking at the past through rose coloured lenses. None of that stuff was revolutionary! It was only so because you were in a stage of your life where everything of this sort was new to you.
Couple this with the fact that genuinely new technology is always berated at first, and you've got a wonderful recipe for aging pessimism.
I don't think I've cared about new technology... ever. I have cared about "new to me" technology at several points in my life.
When I was a teenager, the world was FULL of new (to me) technology, and I ate it all up. Programming in QBasic and Turbo Pascal, using hex editors to figure out file formats in my video games and mod them, building PCs from parts. Along the way to my late 30s, a few more new to me things produced excitement: GIS, Bash, Vim, Raspberry Pis, 3D printing, Linux containers, etc. I was years late to all of those parties, but still happy when I got there.
No amount of adopting the new version of an existing thing will ever replicate the joy and wonder of encountering something entirely new to you, and as you stay in the industry longer, there just aren't as many completely-new-to-you things to come across. Now, I have more excitement learning new things that have absolutely no connection to tech, because it's still novel enough to be exciting. Small engine repair, biology, and carpentry have sparked more wonder in my more recent years than anything I did on a computer.
In many parts of tech, we've had quite the run where there were leaps and bounds from one year to the next. Innovation curves slow down though: New phones used to really be substantially better than the year before, but now the new capabilities are mostly irrelevant for most people. Even something like OS updates used to bring in relevant changes, but not so much nowadays. Web frameworks, as the OP looked at, have not been doing anything remotely revolutionary in a long time. So anyone that is focused on just one corner of tech, and only looks there, is bound to start not caring about new tech. It really is not getting better.
To remain enthusiastic, one needs to keep looking in different places, and see improvements in new areas, or jumps in places that were stagnant. AI was relatively boring in the 90s, not so much today. Even something like Java had a decade of relatively inactivity, and now there are actual, relevant changes.
So yes, it makes perfect sense to pay a lot less attention to web frameworks right now. But if what you want is relevant novelty that is likely to change how things are done, the solution is to look elsewhere, instead of getting depressed about how modern UI tech is stagnant.
The key phrase for new tech is _relevant changes_. Much of the "innovation" in software is either NIH syndrome or ideological nuances that address 5% of the problem space. Or simply forgetting or not researching that people fought this problem ages ago. I know that this is HN but most ICT engineers I meet don't care a lot about the history of how we got here in the first place. Just about their puzzle here and know and latest and greatest toolkit.
FPGAjobs.com runs on a single Django app, with some Bootstrap-flavored templates on the frontend. Very little JS, ideally none at all.
It was a learning curve to implement Django at first (I’m not a SWE by training), but now that I know it, it’s fast and easy to add new features. You don’t get that kind of iterative speed when you’re constantly in the early stages of a technology learning curve. I’ll never give up Django. I’d rather sell the business to someone who knows how to scale it than switch tech stacks. That’s just not what I want to do.
It’s easier to get that dopamine hit of “ship thing, watch it get used” when you know your tools well enough to be able to ship and iterate quickly.
i find myself getting frustrated really quickly. if i run a node command and it gives error, i have urge to throw laptop out of window or smash it.
web dev use to be about immediacy in the late 90s to mid 00s. now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. frustrating and tedious.
At least we've moved past webpack, that was a bundle of wires that couldn't ever be completely untangled.
That reemergence of DLL hell on the web that every bright dev insisted was The Modern Way to code (or quit to somewhere else that enabled it) accompanied by spending my days pointlessly upgrading a mix of abandoned and pointlessly breaking packages then submitting forks/patches so they could remain in sync with each other was about the point that I gave up coding because I felt I’d stopped making an impact and moved to management.
We seemed to suddenly move from fast REPLs where we could iterate with the customer and solve problems while knowing most of the stack enough to code, deploy, and support, back to the pre-my-days compiling sword fights of old together with days to get undocumented boilerplate up and running with fancy pipelines that no one understood yet alone dared touch. I was never entirely sure what we gained but it certainly seemed to make coding both less fun and less productive yet everyone defended the new normal.
Then sitting as a manager after that dev career watching relatively basic form journeys takes teams of five 9 months to implement on the latest stacks when that used to be something a single junior dev knocked out in a week or two and the teams be shocked when in a crisis you could reason out the stack with them in a way that doesn’t seem to really be taught anymore (academically or professionally).
I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard full of unbelievable “back in my day” stories when I look at the systems I considered and built resiliently a decade ago still ticking along, and still get easily upgraded as the environment and systems around them change. Meanwhile I watch new projects that would have been a small piece of work, maybe even just a ticket for a couple people, now take cross-functional teams of 50 up to 18 months to move through the org machine only to immediately have its replacement lined up as the next initiative because no one can face supporting/upgrading the “legacy” solution they just designed, built, and deployed. Don’t get me started on the way “those that can’t do” have redefined process around their own need for relevance and control.
With that said, I’ll concede to having burned out a little on that journey and currently being on a bit of a sabbatical where I’m toying with fun business ideas and other passions to reenergise and reboot creatively, so perhaps my cynicism is an anecdote rather than a snapshot.
35 here, started coding when I was 9. Even got into web pre-jquery.
Yes things take longer now. Yeah we need different ways of working too. But you know what's cool? Not being pulled into a super critical meeting with client executives at 6am because the site is down and you, the 23 year old kid, are the only person who knows how it works.
Team-based work made coding feel like work. And it brought new annoying toolchains and other shenanigans. BUT it also unlocked vacations and the ability to do a thing and move on to a different thing. I rather like that.
PS: all my references and cool jokes are out of date and my team mostly gives puzzled looks. The "back in my day" stories are completely unrelatable :(
If this daylight-savings change goes through in the US I'm going to have to build a new version and I haven't touched it in like six years, I'm sure that's going to go swimmingly.
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
— Douglas Adams
Although I also remember being 18 and meeting some 70+ year olds that were very adept at using computers/the web and that really impressed me.
In seriousness, though, a technology that lets me do things I couldn't do before is great. A technology that slightly reorganizes my code and makes it so I have to throw everything I have so far away, I'm less excited about.
What motivates me is building things, which unfortunately means that I'll always reach for the tools I know, and only learn new tools if my current ones don't work, which is why I've been unable to learn Rust.
With Django, I can get stuff done really quickly, and people don't care that it's not a SPA, they care that they can solve their problem with it.
Since "value" can either be a societal construct or a biological one (e.g. needs for food), it has now occured to me that it makes more sense to view technologies themselves as without intrinsic "value". Technology can only be a mean to an end, and not the other way round. (Or who is going to fund it? The military? Then it has to be military tech.. which is used to enable the strong stablization of a status quo, a currency, or the American dream... so once again, tech would always be a mean across any social/cultural/political/psychological vehicles.
There's also the thing that one may be depressed for one reason or another and then feels like doing nothing new anymore and just want to play with the known - which is a quite natural reaction, but shouldn't be confused with getting old.
In fact, if you add up all the breakthroughs we've accomplished, most of it is just helping us use resources more efficiently so that we use more of them, eating them all up like a virus.
We should have stopped most research and technological invention long ago, and instead focused on sustainability and trying to reach an equilibrium with our natural environment.
Technology went from empowerment to entrapment
Don't forget "toxic" too !
Maybe I was projecting my own feelings onto the topic, which are mostly about hardware. As I’ve gotten older, I find it much harder to care about new PC components, cutting edge graphics for video games, and processor cores. I just value stability and consistency above all else
When you got a new graphics card and game generation in 2005 the leaps were pretty wild, nowadays you can probably skip a generation or two of top hardware and you can still run things fine. After they put out the Dead Space remake I was interested to see how the old game from 2008 played, and even that still plays and looks modern. That's 15 years now, go back 15 years from 2008 and it's very different.
Can't blame AMD and nvidia for trying to make a profit, though it sucks to be a consumer because what we do get right now is severely overpriced junk that couldn't be sold to the big enterprise bois. Literal scraps.
I still think new hardware is neat but I don't have the mental bandwidth to follow it closely and in depth at this stage.
So I'm fairly cautious about what I bother to learn. I'll grudgingly learn new stuff if my work requires it, but mostly I coast on my decision to learn python 15 years ago.
I think that you just realize eventually that you have to be more selective with your attention. And it's often not hard to use up plenty of time keeping up with whatever domain you are already in.
By the time that’s a problem, there’s a good chance OP will be managing people or in a different field.
Typing? Get off my lawn.
While I don't care for technology like "do X with an app" where I know X can also be done without an app, I do get excited for actual real new tech with substance. LLM's, self driving cars once they truly work, much higher video resolutions than the past, etc...
More or less. It's the "Worse is Better" philosophy. Instead of adding features to make user experience better make software instead that is good at one thing. It emphasizes minimalism and frugality. You may know the Suckless group from `dwm`.
I suppose that is why something like Kubernetes is useful (I haven't touched it; I'm one of those weirdos who uses Swarm); it allows you to abstract away a lot of the underlying provider and create your own overlay environment which does bring back a sense of ownership for me at least.
I had an intern over the summer and he “upgraded” a station to the latest of everything, modified the terminal profile with mods, tricked out VIM instead of our pre-existing IDE, and so on. I think maybe one of these changes were actually useful, and the rest broke some dependency in our setup that he had to go fix, or I had to get him to revert when someone else needed to use the station.
We also have a new hire who keeps using the word “Dockerize”, which makes me wary
I'm old. I still get excited about technology that is worth getting excited about. But Next.js brings nothing to the table.
Basically, I need something beyond that, which gives me a strong emotional response and/or a feeling of social interaction. I found some very "art"-y games which give me such emotional response, and some online multiplayer games (for instance dota2... until they don't hide AI based bots... because sometimes...), or "strong community based" solo games (for instance celeste)
Corollary B: As I get older, I am aware that some nasty human beings are using technology to "take" over big critical parts of our every day life: that's why I am adamant on interop between Big Tech and Small Tech. Tech must stay in user control and not be used to control the user for "others". For instance, why most if not all administration services should be provided to noscript/basic (x)html browsers (as they were before Big Tech brain washed/corrupted administration tech executives with their grotesque and absurd web engines).
Heard about Inside, and lurking on Planet of Lana (but I need to validate it runs well in a lean wine+vkd3d build before #noproton).
(I am waiting for some of them since I played their demo, don't recall all the names)
While I don't share the same love of "emotional experience" games, at this point I'm thinking about only sticking to mission-based and "wide linear" games so that I leave plenty of time for other pursuits in life.
I personally believe that one of the biggest lies about professional life is that of "working with your passion," because it creates unrealistic expectations. Plenty of people can be passionate about programming, but precious few will have the luxury of being passionate - over time - about working as software developers.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time.
Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hundreds. I'm trying to use this approach wherever possible.
There's something intellectually alluring about new technology or new shiny in general that I think appeals to your general technologist, it's a trait the draws such people to various fields. I know when I was young I drank the Kool-aid every turn.
As I got a little older, and after I was burned several times adopting shiny things either wasting my time or never seeing them widely adopted to a point of reasonable usability, I came to the very realization that everything we create, including technology, exists to serve human needs. It's stupidly obvious, it shouldn't need to be stated but I think it does. Law exists for humans, medicine exists for humans (even medicine for animals, it exists to serve altruism or empathy in humans) and so on. Technology is absolutely no different.
There's a few ways technology can serve humans. It can appeal to the general intellectual interest but ultimately, few if any pay money for that. People in general don't care about it, it's neat for a few minutes then gone. So ultimately what functional need does technology really serve? What does it enable me to do that I otherwise couldn't? How does it make my life easier?
If it doesn't do these things, I frankly don't care about it anymore. I have plenty of places to tap into serving my intellectual interest, places where the things I learn aren't as vanishingly ephemeral in nature and entirely artificial, be it learning something about physics of the world, medicine, whatever. There's well over a lifetimes worth of other mature and well established things to learn about you won't waste your time in like NewWebFramework with NewSyntacticSprinklings.
To me, this is why I similarly only care about new well crafted tech. Your thing needs to either help me do something I otherwise couldn't or make my life easier. A huge amount of new tech does neither, it pedals novelty and the ambiguity of some type of miniscule improvemen in quality of life, all while trying to make a buck.
Oddly enough, I feel like I have some friends that are the same way in their hobbies. It's crazy to me how they'll buy a new board game for $80 and play it once, maybe twice and never look at it every again.
This constant novelty-chasing is probably what both groups are really after.
I get idea that some parts of the front-end ecosystem are designed to be busy work, or at least usually turn out to be. But not all of us work in a SaaS development team that can affort 30% or 40% to just play with front-end build systems. Some of us work for clients instead, and need to make the best of the time we have. And more often than not, that means excluding risk factors like large parts of the NPM ecosystem. Limiting things to some simple gulp, dart-sass and some terser to “build” the front-end.
Instead of "As I get older, I just don't care about new technology" it's more "As I get older, I'm more skeptical of new technology"
When I was a young programmer I thought every new framework, language, innovation was amazing. These days I just look at things with a much more critical eye and a higher bar when asking the question "why does this exist?"
My general stance is that most things we are using are not ideal but are sufficient. However, most new things are not sufficiently better enough to replace what is technically sufficient enough.
Now that we're long past the peak of low hanging fruit of productivity and value, we arrive at the inevitable results of late stage capitalism - extracting the most value possible out of the end user through manipulation and coercion.
It's bloat, it's enshittification, entrapment into rampant rent seeking and it's the low key subversion that has been happening for years.
When someone says X is the modern framework for doing this or that what he really means is that X is a cleaner re-implementation of W. But the only reason it's clean is because it doesn't support all the things W did.
If X is successful it will eventually add the features that will make it as messy as W was. At that point Y will come along which is the modern (trademark pending) way of doing it.
After a while you know the fundamentals. Data structures and algorithms, common architectures, known solutions to old problems.
But job adverts tend to go for superficial things. The js framework du jour, some language that anyone adjacent can learn in a month, some new face on the same data structures.
So I opened up Android Studio yesterday to upgrade things and hopefully release a quick beta to shake things down. It's now the next day and I'm still weeding through compile-time and runtime errors caused through the upgrade.
I feel like every time I update Android libraries my code bloats out with extra conditionals and permissions checks, and generally makes my code more brittle.
Maybe this is just the nature of building a secure platform which has such a broad reach. I can't claim to know, but it sure sours the developer experience.
As a simple, non-commercial public transport app that I wrote mostly for fun and learning, it's hard to be movitated to fix it.
But "smart" phones and apps? Meh, as long as they work I couldn't care less. Never have.
And it's especially bad in the js world, where it really seems the inmates are running the asylum
(Oh but blah.js version 87 fixes that weird thing in version 86 which anyone with a modicum of experience could have predicted it would go bad) well then...
At the same time don't be the boring greybeard that can't evolve. Evolution is good, and not everything has to be the "tested and true" technology (that will make you last in the race - this should be your hint that the newer solution can be better)
AAA Games coming onto desktops needing 4090 with DLSS just to be playable at 4k just feels wrong.
On needing a 4090, I think the problem is 4K. These games are getting pretty advanced, and 4K is a very large number of pixels. I like it for the additional horizontal real estate. But I don’t like it for gaming. I would stick to 1080 or 1440. 1440 on a 27 inch screen at the average desktop view in distance is a great all around solution. That said, my next monitor is probably going to be 4K. I will just be playing a lot of games in 1080P on it.
I would not upgrade yet from this 11900K because it's the best homogeneous core design that Intel released for desktops. It includes AVX512, and is the only consumer CPU from Intel to have it. Intel engineers have stated that they are dedicated to furthering AVX512, and that it's removal is temporary. All of the errata from Skylake was finally fixed in Rocket Lake, which went on for generations until Rocket Lake.
Some people were so deadset against 11th gen that they recommended 10th gen because there were 10-core CPUs. Yet the ringbus design it inherited from Skylake was very strung out by that point with unresolvable issues like the well-known L0 parity error. There's many other reasons but I doubt you're interested in rehashing Rocket Lake as it sounds like you feel you have enough information to make up your mind.
And I certainly wouldn't use AMD due to even more bugs than Skylake and poor latency. They're improving, but it's not my choice.
GPU / Disk / CPU + Memory so a build configuration rolls into another constantly maintained.
Oh, the horror!
In all seriousness, I have been at this since the late 90s. 1996 specifically when HTML/JS/CSS all became a thing. Do I want to write another complex dynamic HTML form with validation? Not really, no. I really don't enjoy it.
Do I want to upgrade this current Angular application from 16 to 17 that I lead?
Yes, I actually do.
Because I know that will keep us from falling behind, from more tech debt, from an impossible upgrade path. Am I barking orders from on-high? No, I'm not. I'll actually do it myself, because I want to make sure we are are where we need to be.
And after all these years, obviously the front-end is only the least of it. The APIs, the database, the custom hardware, the 3rd party vendors ... the ...
Anyway, burnout is real, if you are feeling it, take a step back. But otherwise, I'd say with technology, you need to care about "new" otherwise you will fall behind.
Sure I’m getting old and it sometimes feels tiresome that software is a treadmill, but hey, it’s job security! And more importantly, change opens space for improvement, which feels good even if it doesn’t always live up to the promise.
Precisely.
Sometimes, I wonder if people are curious why after all these years am I apparently still working? Have I not become a "VP" or a "founder" or, better yet, a "VC"?
To each their own. I'll be ok.
Rationally, I appreciate it. But it's best when it disappears and I get my time back to go outside and ride a bike, converse with humans, listen to music. It's a means to an end.
Young me would have assumed “new” meant “better”. Now I’m absolutely certain that is not the case.
Sometimes life is too short to upgrade all my apps to latest standard or framework, no matter how great the new things are. I hope they could be more backward compatible.
I went all in on AI back in 2017 trying to build a chatbot for ecommerce from scratch and it went nowhere. Maybe a bit sour grapes on my end.
Now next 13 adds new route handling and API fetch changes for its major release, its not exciting. (I don't use nextjs so forgive my generalization on the new features.)
I would have regretted missing out on microcomputers and programming.
I don't regret missing out on Windows Vista.
I get excited about technologies when I find a use for them. So far I haven't found a use for LLM's, but that could change, and there will always be the next version.
Most of the time that isn't the case and it's simply more useless abstraction and time wasting and marketing and resume building and scamming and ego very clever see!.
But it is worth looking into things briefly if they pass the initial 2 second smell test in my opinion. There is the occasional diamond in the dung heap that passes for modern technology.
As an example: the newest model of iPhone looks 99% the same as the original one that came out 15-20 years ago. The iPhone 5 years from now will probably look the same.
Compare that to the difference between cars in 1960 and 1980, or telephones in 1980 and 2000. The external form is vastly different.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwd8abTO4vh2smuMzykXDOP...
1. control
2. vanity
3. ego
4. control
5. megalomania
6. compulsive urge to radically change everything you ever thought you knew about ____________
7. control
I haven't been the target audience of technology for a long time.
So pick a flavor you like and stick with it.
When you're an adult, everything is set in stone and the world is out of touch.
When you're an elder, nothing is as it was anymore and what world is this?
The most annoying is the tech that is forced upon you.
I think there is a generation of technologists that are the prime era. Not too old to have lived the simple life. And not too young to be living the simple life of the iPad. At least in regards to technology.
The modern life is very challenging if you’re doing it right. There is a lot to research and be responsible for unless you just run around signing your life away on paperwork without properly educating yourself about mortgages, real estate, housing. That on top of learning a trade is pretty tough. For the average person at least. And it takes a lot of effort out of everyone. Most people just sluff off though and settle for less. Or blame the system for their condition, since no one is making $50 an hour out of high school anymore, like how it was for decades. One of those two.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Where do the edgier Waffle House techies hang out today?
I'm learning Clojure Electric at the moment and it's wild
Top comment on the reddit post:
> Yeah. 20 year dev here.
Oh, the humanity.
And if anyone from Mexico sees this, God bless Mexico. I’m thankful for Catholic nations. The level of devotion and permeance is awe inspiring. I have a new admiration and understanding now of the Catholic world. It almost feels like home in a way.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...