I grew up as a eighties tech geek kid. I learned BASIC on a SHARP programmable calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403), then moved on to an Atari 800, then to an Amiga, and finally to a PC. Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. Well, that didn't quite turn out the way 20 year old me imagined unfortunately. Of course, technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago". SpaceX rockets look practically indistinguishable from rockets that flew 50-70 years ago. Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). Same with self-driving cars and other potentially exciting stuff.
We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed.
My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especially all the robotics and drone stuff. Plus, the amount of info on the internet is amazing and quickly accessible anywhere.
I agree that the old days were a lot of fun, but if I had to choose, I would want to be 13 nowadays instead of the 80s or 90s.
I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago, there just hadn't been that wave of marketing around microcontrollers as a hobby that happened around the time of Make magazine. $2 for a PIC and $45 for a programmer, maybe? Waiting excitedly for the next issue of Nuts & Volts? Idly flipping through the Jameco and Small Parts catalogs? Toolboxes filled with TTL?
The internet is certainly an advantage, but it also ain't too new.
edit: randomly posting the Small Parts catalog so we can reflect on and celebrate what was lost https://web.archive.org/web/20160323004150/http://www.smallp...
NO MINIMUM ORDER
Also, a shout out to American Science & Surplus, off to the suburbs after 84 years.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/10/13/american-science-sur...
But as a late 70s Gen Xer, I would never trade living through that transition period from pre-Internet to Internet. You can't pay to have had that experience or perspective, and what transpired through those years from BBSes to pre-Web to Web adoption, from technological and sociological standpoints, was _insane_.
(Yeah, there was radio shack and Heathkit, but the barriers to entry are MUCH smaller today)
That happened in the 80s.
Sure, we didn't have "drones" in the 80s, since the battery tech and digital integration wasn't there yet to make it feasible. There were radio controlled cars with digital PCM signals, servos for steering, and heavy 6 or 7 cell NiCd battery packs. There were also radio controlled aircraft, but they were generally using an internal-combustion engine, unless they were gliders. These ranged from toy to rather extravagant hobby depending on the size and capability. My neighbor would fly his glider, which had a roughly 2-3 foot wingspan, for what seemed like hours on thermals on a slope behind our houses.
Edit to add: I don't remember the details, but I believe that he told us the radio control was the most expensive part and not much different from what people used in the fancier car kits. The rest was cheap and easily replaced, which was necessary to be light but also to be able to repair after inevitable crashes. Think of a vacuum-formed plastic skin filled with expanded foam, a bit like the structure of a surfboard but with much lower strength.
As a kid I sometimes went to a RC airfield here close by. Those things were crazy expensive. And then we're not even talking about model helicopters yet. Those things were not on batteries but on gasoline. As a kid I dreamed of having one, but those were just too expensive to give as a toy to a kid. Nowadays? Buy a drone 'helicopter' for $20. It's really crazy if you compare this to the 90's.
Drones that self hover were not even remotely possible. Or at least not as far as I know, unless you know more than me. And drones with camera's? No way!
> The internet is certainly an advantage, but it also ain't too new.
I remember when as a kid I got stuck programming. No internet, no StackOverflow... Good luck! In a sense it was cool to find solutions yourself, but it definitely wasn't quick! :)
Don't give up on tech and keep an open mind. It's true that flying drones are not exciting to you, but flying a drone could be a first step in finding something more interesting to do with drones.
Boredom is functional. It can be a guide towards more interesting things so as long as you don't let it run the show. Tolerate it and follow (intelligently) where it takes you, don't avoid it.
I don't know how helpful this will be to you, but it bothered me to see people dismiss your interest because you value doing something unique. Those same judgements held me back for years.
Was this the reason I loved tech? No, that's the reason I DID tech. The reason I loved tech is because I believed that tech will make our lives exponentially better. And up to a certain point, it did...
As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on.
> Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together.
There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.
> Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle").
The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.
He talks about functionality. Not power. Yes, computers are more powerful now. But the point is that old computers were way more flexible and "powerful" in an usability sense. New computers are full of arbitrary (and natural (1)) barriers to stop you from having full control of your pocket CPU.
(1) The natural additional barrier is also complexity. Early computers were simple. Some hobbyist could write a system from scratch just by having some knowledge about computers and electronics. Now you have a lot more factors, an OS, a plethora of drivers and a browser that's closer to a VM than a HTML parser.
> There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.
You are right. But that kind of connection is disappointing to our 20 year old geek self. We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.
Arguably, we got both. Even basic computer literacy is a huge value added right now. Journalists are telling coal miners to "learn to code" if they want a job, and being told to "learn to code" in return. Tim Apple is expressly saying that every kid should learn to code. This is astounding from a 1980s and 1990s perspective.
It delivered lots of pork, but at the cost of actual progress.
I’ll admit I enjoyed the exclusivity that my interests evolved into, but I definitely wish I had more people around me to share my interest in technology when I was younger.
In a way I think I grew into this expectation of exclusivity, as that was the only way my adolescent self could tell myself it was a cool hobby.
Age might play a factor in this equation, as others are saying. I say this because I have found enjoyment in simplicity more than complexity these days, and I’m told that’s something that happens with age. Writing a website that runs purely on html+ css, text based communication (as in not slack or discord), and things that I can work on for a few days and complete. I’ve taken a recent interest in sailing. My former self wanted to take on massive undertakings of complexity that required months or years of planning and doing to accomplish. To go on a bit of a tangent, I remember having an idea years ago to find a way to build a computer into a boat which would take real-time measurements of the water and weather conditions. These days I’m interested in reading my surroundings to understand the environment.
In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automated which wasn't feasible for a hobbyist before.
TL;DR The modern equivalent of a programmable calculator is an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi not a smartphone.
Confining more strictly to $1.00, STM32F030F4P6 (48MHz 32-bit M0) is in spitting distance to a 386 or 20MHz 68030 for some workloads. (50 MHz 486-DX2 was introduced in ‘92, but the typical desktop PC of 1992 was much lower spec.)
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon...
To compete with a high end 486 desktop from 1992 you might have to pay a bit more than $1, particularly if you want floating point.
> Nowadays I'm a software dev and tech entrepreneur.
Doing anything as a job is an excellent way to kill your enjoyment of it as a hobby. Subconsciously, you start looking at projects in a business light ("can I turn this into a side gig", "will this advance my career", etc) and that kills off a lot of the excitement that comes with doing things just because you want to.
What kills enjoyment it's not proffesionalism but efficiency. You stop exploring new things and start doing things the fastest and least effort consuming way. You stop wondering what new cool things a technology could offer and start thinking what's the shortest path to a functional product.
Being playful is the opposite of that. Being playful is about going out of your way to explore a new thing, setting your curiosity high and your expectations low, and coming back with a new experience. Let it be a spark of excitement or a total bummer because that new thing turned out being crap.
But don't expect that to happen in your job. Any company will always optimize for profits over cool tech. Even if you only have 1 hour a day to spend in a tech hobby, that hour will be more exciting then the previous 9.
Another problem is that, when you have a solid knowledge about the foundations, there's a tendency to disregard abstractions or quality of life advances. If for every new language you say "It's slow and heavy compared to C and its advantages are crap" well, you are killing your excitement yourself.
I think a huge factor I haven't seen mentioned is continuous delivery. How often were new operating systems released? How often were new products announced? When you bought software, the devs would be hard at work working on the next version with the incentive to make it good enough that people would buy again.
Now software is continually released. "Major" updates are expected every year, and they're often free and people are expected to upgrade. Subscription models have rolled out, so while directly interacting with your customer probably leads to a better product, there's less incentive to re-invent the wheel - you don't need to upsell all your previous clients.
I would assume that all of this is leading to better products, but all of the baby steps make it all seem so lacklustre.
For example, compare the iPhone 13 Pro's camera to, say, the iPhone 8's camera. Had Apple waited 5 years to release the upgrade, the new camera would have blown. peoples. freaking. minds. However, since it's been getting slightly better each year, we instead have people complaining about how the only difference is a slightly better camera.
Like you say, in the days of yore the product cycles were long. It was many years between updates. The innovation that took place over that long period was significant, so it was much more wowing when all that behind the scenes work appeared in view.
There are waves throughout history where, at times, it's the Wild West and the opportunities and possibilities abound. One such time was when the Internet had become a global backbone, hardware prices were racing to the bottom, we were seeing new display (LCD) technology, battery tech....
But then Corporations happened.
Ads moved in to dominate the web, dollar-chasing sites (also often corporate) drowned everything else out. Search engines too started directing you there — toward the mainstream, dollared sites. As other posters have noted, the devices themselves locked down. Hobbyists go pro?
It's difficult to imagine something like the BBS culture taking off now. But I do believe these things are cyclical, so I am still going along for the ride, hoping to find the fun niches (Raspberry Pi perhaps?).
Some tinkerers do it because they just enjoy the tinkering but for most I think it's a combination of enjoying it some while also getting some tangible benefits out of it. When any device you could easily DIY is available off the shelf, the cost-benefit changes. You have hard DIY left, but not easy tinkering for moderate gains.
I'm also old enough to remember when cell phones became a thing, and then when smart phones became the thing after that. The fact that the thing in my pocket could simultaneously emulate several copies of the computer I had as a kid, while running on a battery? And I can talk to people and access the internet from anywhere? This is amazing stuff, and again we just don't even think about it anymore. Like, I fiddled around programming with my TI-84 and TI-92, but that's nothing compared to the capabilities of this smartphone.
And, speaking of which, don't even get me started on the internet. The fact is that I don't even remember what it's like to not have a thing in my pocket that can answer pretty much any question I have, whenever and wherever I have it.
By the 2010's there is a totally different culture. Call it 'All Birds' culture.
1990's there were a lot of weird folks, hippies etc.
2010's 'All Birds' is more commercial, fashionable, a totally different kind of culture.
1990's tech was about tech, it's upstack now, so more like tech applied to classical business problems.
AirBnB isn't really a tech company, it happens to be because other, more established companies were not able to integrate tech quickly enough to develop those kinds of markets, where you want to have strong tech / IT instead of relegating them to the back office.
Even Facebook, it's a social media company really. Which is different than Oracle, Sun, Microsoft.
'nerd nerds' don't know what they are doing in terms of presentation or communication.
If 'nerd nerds' are 'hip' it's completely by accident.
I also think 'nerd nerds' just say whatever, meaning that occasionally they will say something un-PC, or lacking in empathy and be 'pushed out' for that reason.
There was a time (and some people are still like this) where utterances didn't imply an ideological alignment, it's just something that's said.
In 'All Birds Culture' everyone is careful how they communicate.
I'm sure there are some nerd nerds at AirBnB and frankly not everyone in All Birds Nerd culture is the prototype either but the 'mainstay' at AirBnB would be All Birds Nerds.
Someone who wears a 'Metal' T-shirt, completely un-ironically, because they like Metal, and wore it 5 times without washing it, because they forgot, and have disgusting greasy sideburns just 'because they like it' ... and an article of clothing made out of snakeskin ... that's probably a nerd nerd.
Neurodivergent people tend to have a bit less of a social filter, they are more direct and honest, often to the point of bluntness (leading to the 'just say whatever' behavior you mentioned)
They also tend to be pretty unfiltered when it comes to their passions, and hyperfixate on them to the detriment of other areas of their life, like laundry.
And yes, these people are often excluded basically anywhere they go, and they have to mask their behaviours to appear more normal to get jobs. In that respect, the All Birds culture has absolutely pushed them aside, or pushed them under.
This is just my 2 cents, attempting to put some definitions around the All Birds and Nerd Nerds groups you described. I could be entirely mistaken.
The progression seems to be the decline of the nerd-nerd monoculture in the professional tech environment. With some irony, the increase in diversity is from the non-neurodiverse. Product managers, engineering managers, vertically integrated teams.
I believe on the most part this creates healthier productivity for the business – but likely at the social expense of the neurodiverse. Their technical skills can be more readily exploited by the hustlers.
At least that's my experience.
A neurodiverse, even introverted kid who went to private school then Ivy League, and had 'a lot of money / no fears' growing up ... probably will have been socialized in the political sense.
Grow up in a small town or the burbs, people are 'judgy' about some stuff, but not anything complicated or nuanced.
I'm not in any camp, but really not until I was 30 did I notice how much stock people put into small signals. Like 'likes fishing' or 'football' etc..
Especially in such a competitive environment, people are I think looking for flaws.
Torvalds, James Gosling, Wozniack, Sergei Brin - those are nerd-nerds.
(I once saw Sergei Brin walking down the street in what looked like a back brace and mime outfit. Serious. WTF? Middle of the day.
Sundar is All Birds Nerd, but he's a business guy anyhow.
I feel a lot of YC culture errs on the side of All Birds Nerds.
Remember that college educations, especially highly skilled STEM ones, were very rare for their parents' generation (born in the 30s - 50s)
Torvalds - Father was a politician, grandfather a famous statistician
Wozniak - Father was an engineer for Lockheed
Brin - Father a math professor, mother a NASA researcher
Gosling was the only one in this bunch who really just came out of nowhere. I agree with what you're saying about Nerd Nerds and All Birds Nerds but the founders of Silicon Valley were always well-heeled. I think the culture changed for rank-and-file engineers mostly because of the money in the field. While founders would certainly make it big (Moore, Gates, etc) the average engineer was payed well but not fantastically.
One could feasibly work in other white-collar fields (law, accounting, airline pilot, etc) to make similar money and those who were interested in the largest pay packages and large amounts of prestige went into fields like finance or medicine. Folks who went into tech typically chose tech because they liked the problems that you could solve in tech or liked the people who chose to go into tech (often somewhat neurodiverse). Nowadays tech salaries are insane and most people who enter tech are doing it for money and prestige foremost. These folks are going to be the All Birds Nerds; smart folks who are more interested in making money and rising the ranks rather than playing around with tech.
As a former “maker” and electronics hack I think lot of maker stuff has devolved into “cool” stuff that consists of wire hangers and servos with RGB lighting and very little actual value. But coolness doesn’t really mean much when everything is hyped as such.
That same mindset is ruining many a good hobby. Astrophotography is going down a shameful route where the only thing your peers want to see is the misery of all the debt you have to out fancy someone else.
as for 3d printers.. they have come a long way and have become a core part of creativity and engineering for programs like First Robotics.. hardware is improving, safety is improving, reliability is improving - so much so that if you give up on the creative aspect you can just print away and get started with little effort.
If people enjoy astrophotography then that's fine, but the most magical part of Astronomy to me is seeing Saturn (easily the visual crown jewel of our solar system) through the telescope with my own eyes and realizing that it really is hanging out there in the sky for all to see.
but astrophotography, it used to be able the wonder of capturing it - regardless if you prefer visual with your eye or assisted seeing with a camera. There used to be a aura of DIY - find a camera, adapt it, take some photos, share them, have people say good job.
Now its really about memes, trolling and who can get the most Instagram's.. and that's kind of depressing.
The people doing citizen science are way outnumbered by the vocal ones comparing their debt, their investment and their preference of equipment as a superiority complex and social media feeds into that and supports it with the algo favoring the controversy and the fights
It was a bitter sweet day to sell off my remote observatory and get my nights back...
but the passion for the heavens is still there
however, that "eyepiece vs a camera" thing is very much part of the problem with the hobby... it just shouldn't matter.
Like you mentioned, its hard to go from "hah, I can make a cool thing" to "Let me make this super useful mechatronic contraption" but this is the bread and butter of industry.
You see production lines and they're just a long string of such contraptions working in unison.
Makers nowadays have amazing resources that were previously reserved only for industry so heck yeah, maybe go make a fish fillet machine or something just for kicks but also maybe a brand new small business
But there's rarely a 'wow' factor to new tech any more. Everything is incremental improvement and the era of huge leaps forward is well behind us. The step up from a C64 to an Amiga, or a SNES to a Playstation, or an early iPhone from a feature phone, or Win3.1 to Win9x - those were serious upgrades.
But going from a PS5 Pro to PS5, an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 13, 1080p to 4K, an i7 to a 5-generations-newer i7, or a GTX1080 to an RTX3080 - they're nice incremental steps, but not revolutionary leaps forwards.
John Deere started commercially selling a self-driving tractor this year. That's a pretty big wow. Something straight out of the sci-fi books.
I think it doesn't pop because the internet has been streaming the development of such tech for the last decade or more. It seems incremental because we have had insights into the development process, which is something the masses didn't have access to when Windows 3.1 or the C64 landed.
Gone are the days of decades of behind the scenes R&D suddenly landing in our laps to amaze us. We now watch the R&D unfold in realtime.
But, again, it's boring because we watched the development of those sensors as it was happening. In the past the masses would have been unaware of the development going on. But nowadays we know what's coming and it seems old hat by the time it hits the market.
But that also creates an inherent opportunity for open, 'hackable' versions of the broken, locked down crap. You can see this in much of the embedded ecosystem, where much stuff is unusably locked down simply out of short-term laziness and convenience but many of the most popular products are open.
This is a tangent, but I've heard that children who grew up in the "space age" after Apollo thought we would be on Mars right now, or colonizing the solar system. It was their childhood dream.
Hence a lot of men (especially rich men) in that era are interested in flying planes and going to space. Bezos was born in 1964 and Musk was born in 1971.
On the other hand my first memory of the space program was literally the Challenger disaster ... that's when the myths started dying down, and when America stopped going to space very much. I never really had that dream, and it feels like many/most people my age and younger don't.
Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.
Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.
The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.
Also, remember, people in 2005 had same thoughts as you're having right now! Throughout my entire life, people have been saying that tech and science is basically done. They've always been wrong, and I don't see an end in sight.
It's the nature of exponentials. They seem slow and then suddenly the world changes. Only a handful of people actually can see that it is going to happen. We're just linear creatures with no intuition for exponential growth.
Imagine sitting in a dark room and someone about to turn on a switch - up until the switch is flicked, it doesn't seem like anything is going to happen, and then suddenly you are reeling at the brightness. That's how tech innovation happens now. I bet in a decade you'll be looking back saying, holy shit, I did not see that coming about something! "Remember when we used to drive gas vehicles?" or "Remember when we thought fusion was impossible?" or "Remember when nobody owned a robot?" Who knows what it is, but there will be something!
In 2014, almost nobody thought about having an app on their phone to summon a car to take them somewhere. Now it is everywhere (and struggling!). In 2014, speech recognition was awful. Now we have an automated robot lady that will answer spam calls for you!
But on the other hand, space accessibility is quickly opening up, it's very likely that I would be able to take a trip to space in my lifetime too, maybe even Mars. VR has opened up an amazing new frontier for hanging out with friends on the other side of the world. Medicine is opening up all sorts of scifi technologies, gene therapy with CRISPR, massive strides in protein structure prediction, mRNA vaccines. Synchrotrons and particle accelerators are starting to improve all sorts of observations. Fusion energy is making progress, quantum computing is just getting started. We even took a detailed image of a black hole millions of light years away just a few years ago!
Yes, specifically computer related improvements are starting to slow down a little, but with costs only getting lower, there's so much room to bring computers into, so many things that can be automated! AI research has generally stuck to certain niches (basic medicine, basic physics, vision), there's so much that can have breakthroughs at the level of the protein folding model.
I think with diverse enough interests, it's hard to say that things are slowing down, they're only getting faster as computers, software and AI mature and dramatically increase efficiency in other fields.
The other parts you describe are all about connectedness. Or side effects of connectedness. Largely due to the Internet and partially to cell then smart phones. Those are new tech that humans haven't quite made peace with yet.
That happens with all tech changes, belive it or not. Over a century ago electrification was jarring. All sorts of magical devices [1] used electricity. And electricity was dangerous! [2] There was also the less obvious danger of con artists, who with sufficiently technological-seeming devices are indistinguishable from magicians (apologies to Clarke!). And the whole thing was such confusing upheaval to society that Rube Goldberg [3] helped people cope by laughing about it.
[1] https://www.announcingit.com/invitations-blog/what-came-firs...
[2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questio...
I also disagree with your point that such thing happens with all tech. Electricity didn't take away the agency of humanity. Electricity doesn't go out and kill a person based on what electricity judges to be worthy. Such answers are a copout.
I watched news reports of the moon landing in 1969 as a kid. I played with tech throughout my youth ... converting a small, unused closet next to our garage as an electronics lab. I started with breadboarding (and occasionally, wirewrapping) 555 oscillators, and 741 op amps into weird circuits I'd read about.
About 50+ years later, I still build my own machines, albeit at the subsystem level versus the power supply and chip level. I am looking forward to working on automating image capture/processing for a telescope I bought last year.
I don't have a flying car (thank a deity), but I have an 8 inch telescope with automatic location and calibration. And a helluva lotta processing power, storage, and networking to do things with the images. I'm not saying I will run a 10/40 GbE optical fibre out to the deck where the telescope will sit ... but I'm not saying I won't. And yes, its nice to have 40GbE networking in my house (basement).
I've always viewed tech as a means to an end. I'm a scientist by training, a technologist and software person by choice. I've been an entrepreneur and many other things in my life. I see the tech as a way to do science more quickly, more accurately, and I really enjoy that it is an enabling function.
I got my start in HPC and supercomputing precisely because my simulations were taking too long on the workstations of the late 80s and early 90s. I stayed in HPC to build better/faster/stronger supers, and take advantage of the technological waves. Simulations that used to take a powerful (for the early 90s) supercomputer several hours, now take about a minute, on my laptop. Which has more processors, memory, and storage than the old super.
I think of technology as a wavefront that enables one to do more, better, and faster in its wake. Some people love the building of the tech, and designing new tech. Some like the applications. If you are bored with the building of tech, think of the applications that you could try, to help improve something real.
1. How can one possible claim that tech is cooler now than is was in the 60s when we were racing into space, developing semiconductors and transistors? Or the 70's when we were rapidly developing integrated circuits, computers and languages? Or cooler than maybe the coolest tech-time ever, the 00s and 1910s when we were simultaneously perfecting bicycles, developing automobiles, powered flight, electrical power networks, and mostly in folks garages or barns?! "It's an age thing." 2. Tech is always cool. 3. Don't let anyone else tell you what is cool, including me.
This reminds me of a half-joking quote I think I saw on HN years ago about CS being mostly completed by the 80s.
Every generation is doomed to discover that.
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's the tinkerer's dream right now. But because it is everywhere, we think it is boring.
It isn't! I'm Gen X and, if you let yourself, you can get re-engaged. We're the ultimate generation of apathy, so if I can do it, you can do it ;) Make sure some lifestyle choice isn'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.
In the early 2000s, right after the Dot Com Bubble burst, I had a tech friend tell me, "I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now." 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.
Oh, and you'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 ... shrug.