Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
It&#x27;s an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn&#x27;t turn into reality - dreams usually don&#x27;t. Or at least, not as you expect it.<p>Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago. But we have so much of it and it is everywhere, that we re-calibrate and think that all this amazing, cool tech is boring. You can get a 3D printer for a few hundred bucks, build it yourself, build a better 3d printer, get some awesome tech for a hundred bucks or so, and then build a really cool robot. It&#x27;s the tinkerer&#x27;s dream right now. But because it is everywhere, we think it is boring.<p>It isn&#x27;t! I&#x27;m Gen X and, if you let yourself, you can get re-engaged. We&#x27;re the ultimate generation of apathy, so if I can do it, you can do it ;) Make sure some lifestyle choice isn&#x27;t messing with your curiosity and excitement, though. Bad sleep, missing exercise, doom scrolling, too much booze or other recreational drugs, all that can suck the joy out of life and tech.<p>In the early 2000s, right after the Dot Com Bubble burst, I had a tech friend tell me, &quot;I think all the great stuff has been invented, it&#x27;s all boring now.&quot; That was in the web 1.0 days, before the web as we know it now existed. Before rockets that land on their end, before smartphones, before Deep Learning, before all this amazing stuff that exists now.<p>Oh, and you&#x27;ve just gone through a couple of churns of software ecosystem, it can seem same-y, but it is actually great in the long run. New situations mean old ideas that were discarded can become valuable, which can be odd. The complexity sucks, but ... <i>shrug</i>.