A comment on a lobste.rs post about the tech culture stagnating made me think.
20-15 or even 10 years ago, tech was really exciting. Sure, monopolies were bad, I was fighting them, but tech by itself was very interesting. New versions of software were expected, we were skimming through changelogs to find novelties, installing beta or alpha versions of totally unknown projects. And I had lived that excitement since the 90’s.
When you think about it, today feels really bleak in comparison:
- Changelogs of commercial projects now all have that pseudo-humorous tone to tell you that "they improved performance and fixed bugs"
- The best smartphone I ever had is now 10 years old (and was not an expensive one, see https://ploum.net/2026-09-02-i_dont_have_a_smartphone.html )
- Around me, at least 3 totally unrelated people left a decade-long career in tech to do woodworking. And they are way happier.
- My main interest in looking at changelogs is now to see how the projects I use will be enshitified with AI integration
- Even my beloved Free Software stack is now heavily tainted by slop
- Lot of people that could have been doing very cool thing (or were doing very cool things) are now outspoken fascist ( see https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware/tree/main/item/README.md or https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/ )
- Even if you are interested by AI, the ecological consequences and the way it is used are simply awful.
All of this makes me wonder: am I just a grumpy already old man? Am I missing something? If so, what?
So I would like to ask all lobste.rs: what do you find really exciting in tech today? What are you waiting with impatience? Which project are you following closely? What do you expect from them? What do you hope to see in the next few months or years?