Yes, it's called experience. After one has seen all those "new breakthroughs" hyped to high heaven and amounting to nothing, they have learned not to take salesmen at face value.

Of course some people remain eternally starry eyed, as if they've just came down from a bus from Nebraska to L.A. to become movie stars. Sadly, they're still not the ones doing the real innovation. Just the ones taken for a ride by one hype after another.

Tech is a means to an end; specifically a way to make a living and hopefully buy myself out of the rat race.

If that isn’t “real hacker” enough for you then that’s fine. In my book, lifestyle design is the hacker ethos applied at the meta level.

"Means to an end", "make a living", "rat race", yeah I don't think that would be considered "hacker" by any definition of the word (I think the word is "corporate"), and this site is called "Hacker News".

You don't have to be excited and bullish about every single new trend, but at least be interested enough to take a closer look. I was interested in crypto a few years ago, now I don't care much about it. Still excited about VR and AI though. I mean, it's a free country, but if this pessimism is the default attitude here on anything, I think it's time to find where all the actual hackers are hanging out.

> I don't think that would be considered "hacker" by any definition of the word (I think the word is "corporate")

Tempered passion != corporate.

> You don't have to be excited and bullish about every single new trend, but at least be interested enough to take a closer look

No, I don't owe trends anything. It's easy to trend, and much harder to deliver value over time. I wait for the wheat to separate from the chaff before investing time. This is not pessimism, this is triage of emotions and attention. It isn't a belief that what we have is best, but rather a preference to be doing the work as much as possible. Time, unfortunately, is zero sum.

I have stopped chasing relevance, and in doing so, found contentment and focus. I'll reiterate: the self-work I do is my current manifestation of the hacker ethos.

I am excited by PL stuff: Rust, Haskell, compilers, LLVM, etc. I write Rust and Haskell at work, so I scratch a lot of that itch on the job. It took a long time to get to that point. I still have too many tabs open on my computers about cool PL stuff like the u-combinator, GC implementations, cache friendliness, and other low-level esoterica.

Yet, life is much better when tech is a part of it, not the centerpiece of identity. Perhaps that is the main difference that is surfacing here.

Ah, if only that was the case... One can dream, however...

Mind you, when real hackers walked the earth (MIT, AT&T, Xerox, and so on), they weren't that hot about hypes either, and they couldn't be further from today's marketing types.

Those were hackers: programmers, scientists, enthusiasts, and so on.

Not today's used-car-salemen types touting AI, big data, VR, and the rest...

Are you really trying to convince me that the original hackers were tech-conservatives? They literally set the trends and built the future.

Who are these marketing types you talk of? I don't dispute there is a lot of fluff and hype going around, but you chose yourself who you listen to. I follow true hackers like John Carmack, Jeri Ellsworth, Andrej Karpathy, George Hotz and prominent scientists like Yann LeCun. If all you find is hype and marketing that's on you. It's like people complaining that Twitter is bad, you decide who to follow!

It's better to not extrapolate S-curves into exponential functions when you don't know what you are talking about, yes. A good advice for both DL researchers and "techno-optimists" who haven't seen unsubstantiated hype they didn't jump on yet.