Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

There isn't a whole lot of new technology around. Apart from LLMs, everything else is a remix/retread/clone/speed bump with a few tweaks.

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.

You forgot electric mountain bikes, eMTB's.

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.

I'm mostly a software person and electric bikes are largely illegal where I live, so I might be biased, but isn't electric bikes just a kind of "incremental improvement"? I mean, I totally agree that it makes the biking experience much better, and those who bike might find the experience revolutionary, but the "technology"... seems to be rather incremental than new.

The endless pursuit of profit at any cost, normally by exploiting the ever living hell out of everyone, is causing us all to have a shared existential crisis. Well, some of us are anyway—-there are plenty of folks that think it’s just great as it “aligns with our base nature” or some such nonsense. I hope humanity can figure out a better system after we hit rock bottom “spiritually.” Meanwhile, our media owned by the exploiters will keep pointing our attention at other things to be angry at than what we should be angry at.

What better system would that be?

Keep chasing profit. That's completely fine.

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.

mRNA, Crispr-cas9, immune checkpoint inhibitors, etc.

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.

Yes! We switched from electronic technology to bio technology.

Where are the biotech equivalents of FAANG?

Good question.

If you're talking salary banding, no companies in biopharma pay as broadly high, but the big ones like Pfizer, GSK, Merck, Sanofi, etc. certainly compensate high.

Honestly, this is how I've been feeling lately. Everything is old now.

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.

> 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.

> Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference.

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'.

From a user perspective, I'm going to have to disagree. You have it backward.

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.

Gran Turismo 7 already plays in VR.

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.

Go review the iPhone announcement. The original iPhone was nothing compared to the recent models. Amazon in 1997 might allow you to buy some books, whereas the amount of stuff you can buy is much larger today.

The only point I get from this is that interesting technology takes a long time to get to a mature point.

This might be true for pure SW and computer tech, but what about biological sciences? Or consumer markets?

In terms of biotech and medicine, we're still developing new stuff continuously. Computers being able to do machine learning are helping us push ahead where human manpower was once wasted on busywork.

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.

LLMs too are a remix with a few tweaks. Most of the major things you listed fit under that bill too. React, just a better Angular. Facebook, just a better myspace. iOS just a better PalmOS.

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.

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