This is a reply to an email I wrote that I feel might have some value to others who have asked me similar questions the past.
> Hey I was lurking on lobsters and I saw this post/question "What is still exciting in tech?" And in it there is multiple references about stuff you made, from webring and the fashware list, which raised me a curiosity what would you reply in a question like that? I'm not OP of the post, but I've been following your work consistently for years, but the last years I've been like op loosing hope on tech much because on how clear is becoming that big corps just hate everything besides the money they make.
Hi R,
Before I could make up my own mind about it, I accidentally spoiled it for myself by reading comments, there were some very good replies. Obviously, a lot of the answers align with that which also interests me, seeing folks fight for their right to repair, open hardware, sabotage of AI infrastructure, personal computing explorations, permacomputing, etc. you know the ones.
https://lobste.rs/s/lcjf7c/what_is_still_exciting_tech
But there is something I'd like to add, first, I am in a very odd position to answer this. I only hear as much of tech as I'm willing to look for. It's not forced onto me through a day job, and nobody close to me is even interested in any of it, so it rarely comes up in conversation; if I'm not actively searching for tech news on my own, I'll miss out entire booms and busts cycles of new operating systems and frameworks and apple conferences and languages and all that.
From where I'm standing, it feels like tech moves at a glacial pace, and once in a while, it feels like it even goes backward a bit. How many months went been between the volume control program was deprecated and fixed in Manjaro? Months. So the question, hasn't even really occurred to me, since everything is still to be done, everything is still broken and everyone is distracted with other things. There is a LOT that excites me in tech, but it's nothing that I can wait for, I can't wait for them because nobody would or even could do them for me.
Someone could make me a new mail client to fix the broken one I use, but it wouldn't help. My appreciation of technologies often relies on my understanding them from a foundational level. In this situation, there's no cheating myself by downloading an app, or changing OS. I guess, my technological journey is like a fitness journey in some sense, sending a robot to workout in my stead defies the whole point, downloading a new version of a program? just delays the inevitable, that I'll have to try to understand it for myself at some point anyways. I can only really appreciate something by understanding how it works.
This is half a curse, and half a blessing. Sure, I'm cursed to reinvent wheel after wheel, but it shields me, at least in part, from the cynicism that says that tech is utterly fucked. I understand why someone would think that, but I can't say that I do, because I'm constantly so excited about what's ahead!
I'm excited to know that I might be on the cusp of understanding something critical to multisets, I'm excited to think that in a few days I might have a better understanding of how to encode numbers in SICs, I'm excited to imagine how that email client I build will work. Each time, someone tries to sell me onto some new gizmo, you know what I do? I secretly implement it in my own little crappy language, see what it's worth, and often enough, it's a genius idea! And knowing that these come regularly is exciting me most of all. So, I'm hyped, because I feel like my work hasn't even begun.
