> Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own
Wait until you get older. I did! And I have identified over the years tons of applications that would help seniors that nobody gives one iota of attention to, because "no get rich quick money in it"
The simplest example of all. Shopping.I can't read price labels on the lowest shelf [0], and as for use-by date and ingredients, my OE nearsighted as hell lenses can't read any of them. Seniors who didn't have a career in engineering and computers get scammed regularly, get information from the internet that is either garbage or outright malicious, the list goes on and on. I am using my remaining time to address these.
And how about students? Everything changed overnight. Rather than enriching them, they are using AI to cheat and avoid thinking and learning. What would you say to them? What would you teach? How would your life and work experience benefit them?
Way back when, I planned some after school labs (there was money for such things) where kids would go out and collect data, and then deal with it collectively (talking to other kids and instructors, not "Professor Claude", who didn't exist in those days, and if their computers were inadequate, give them bootable linux media (like Knoppix) or just time remotely accessible.
Hey, I'm excited at 77.
These things didn't happen because I never had a network. Great things happen when there's a Jobs and a Woz. Not in isolation.
Needs change. Invent that REALLY REAL exoskeleton now, the robotic "fetch my meds" robotic assistant now, and they'll be ready when you're ready for them.
They didn't. There was a bit of an interval between the days of diversity - the Commodores, Sinclairs, Ataris, the CP/M machines, everything from build-your-own to sleek futuristic designs, etc - and the free software revolution which saw Linux and the BSDs cement themselves as the future in some or other form. Now? Software is free and open, hardware is cheap and plentiful, hardware hacking is back, if you want to create something which has not been created before there's a fair chance of success. If you succeed you can easily publish your designs, others get to pick them up and improve upon them and publish their improvements. Computers are more capable than ever, just stay away from the walled gardens and the shiny traps created by the likes of Microsoft and Apple and Google and you're free to do what you want.
Esp32s are amazing fun. I designed boards in the 80s and I still love tinkering with microcontrollers. The reflux control for my still currently uses a brushed motor controlled by PWM and I am upgrading it to a second hand pump with a brushless motor so I am looking at driving it. I just set up an old drone ESC and am controlling the motor with dshot and it works ok. There is a little pre built board Simple FOC that is also esp32 I just ordered for 20 bucks to give a try.
I've been a developer for 45 years and I still actually like it most days.
agreed, I think much of the appeal for me is the physical element of wiring things up and seeing it do something more than changing a few pixels on my screen.
How you know me so well. I also like how cheap all of the parts and pieces are. It's like the next step after Legos. Although, they have way more interesting Legos today than what I had as a kid. I've bought components with an a specific project in mind, but once it's built I find myself taking them apart and making a new something with it combined with other parts I have lying around. Things are cheap enough that I don't mind so much if I got something wrong and release a little magic smoke.
I think it's natural to lose enthusiasm over time when a joy becomes a job.
"I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)"
I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.
If you found joy because of the craft itself, low-level hands-on stuff (breadboards, esp32s, soldering, ..) can scratch that itch too.
> I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.
I can't speak for the poster, but to me, there's no joy in either because, plan or not, it doesn't feel like I am the one building it. If I got someone (AI or human) to build a castle in Minecraft to my specifications, regardless of how detailed those specs are, it wouldn't feel like I built anything. The sense of accomplishment is just gone.
Honestly, I think I'd rather be the one getting specs and figuring out how to implement them than the other way around.
Not what most folks here are saying but the thing that brought the spark back for me was going harder into small software, not pivoting to hardware. Tiny Android apps, do one thing well, no team, shipped to actual users on Play Store within a month or two. Most fun I've had with code in a while.
Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial.
You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.
2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.
The world is full of people who get excited about things, but never, ever help. The Internet brings these kinds of people right to your door. They’re exhausting and toxic in a way you don’t truly appreciate until you really notice. Eject them from your life and computers become nice and fun again.
I feel this a lot too these days. The only place the fun seems to remain for me is in Linux and in devices out of China, that you can hack and experiment with — like the Anbernic consoles, or the Xteink X4, or the little mp3 player DAP things, or the Sipeed NanoKVM devices, or the Supernote. The Steam Deck probably sits in this niche too, now I think about it.
Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.
Solo and small-group computer projects used to be in a sweet spot of opportunity: feasible yet interesting to others. But opportunity-space is limited and fills.
To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)
My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).
Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.
They’re still fun, but you have to be really good at understanding what your idea of fun is, listening to that voice, and not falling prey to what other people/companies with an agenda are trying to push on you as fun (when it’s just crap designed to fill their pockets).
99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.
Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.
When smartphones took over computing and landed in everyone's pockets, and the shareholders realized they have access to every single eyeball on Earth, and so the squeezing of tech for profit began. The big watershed moment for me was when Google Reader was killed off; it signaled the end of the web for users.
How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.
Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.
Personal computers are still fun for me, although it has waxed and waned over the years since I got my first 8 bit computer in the 1980s.
Linux kep it fun. Even during a time when I worked with windows professionally I always had a Linux distribution installed somewhere.
As a short history of fun in no particular order:
First time I got XFree86 working after having to endlessly configure display settings.
Using Yggdrasil to do remote support for Sun systems.
Hacking on a cd-rom driver to get mine to work.
Building a media server on an NSLU2. My media server is still called “the slug” despite being on an RPi now. At one point my kids had repurposed PS2s in their rooms with all their favourite shows at their fingertips. Sounds lame now but back then it was magic.
Moving all my dev tools to Linux after finally realising they all ran worse on windows, including .NET core
Endless fiddling with wine to get games to start, now completely solved but it was educational at the time.
Wacky shenanigans with wifi drivers and binary blobs back when wifi was still emerging.
I don’t know how you get the spark back once it’s lost though, I’d only suggest that the reward centre in your dome doesn’t fire properly unless you’ve been challenged and worked hard to solve whatever you’re faced with.
I remember the moment distinctly, it was the winter early in the year 2000. We had just survived the Y2K incident and I was in a VW camper van roving around, at the particular moment I was visiting a Twisted Python developer in the San Jose area.
I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.
I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.
He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.
Im changing targets. I've started to hack around with a play.date devices. It's pretty cool.
Every industry has a regression to the mean such that a normal workforce can support it. This is, good thing, but it makes the commercial side very boring (which is also a good thing).
With AI, I think makes it more permissible to do odd and unique things that see fun. Like, why not?
Ignoring any cultural dynamics that may be at play: maybe sometime after you started getting paid to do it. Personally, I find it enjoyable relative to other jobs, but I've lost most of the recreational enjoyment since I started making a living from it.
> Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.
You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).
I've noticed the same thing. IMO, the heyday of computing coincided with the peak of WiReD Magazine. Around 1995 interconnected computers and the WWW bootstrapped a revolution in spreading+sharing information that seemed certain to reshape cultural norms, organically, bottom up, for the better. It seemed the world would never be the same. Heady times. That sense of optimism lasted until the computer unicorns morphed into monopolies. After that the roles reversed and all us net denizens became unicorn fodder. It's hard to stay upbeat after you realize you're no longer in charge and are constantly being manipulated wherever you go online.
IMO it's still fun to hand-write C and Makefiles targeting an extremely resource-constrained device that's connected to an oscilloscope and a gunshot-wound worth of capacitance on your bench. YMMV
I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.
After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.
I'm still having a ton of fun with computers, even moreso with the advent of halfway usable AI.
Being able to plug a little intelligence into software with little effort makes many things a lot more convenient. One of my favorites is having an LLM monitoring a long running task and doing something about it if something goes off the rails.
The hurdle to seeing what an idea what look like in implementation has also decreased a lot, so I don't have to worry about picking something small enough to finish over a weekend or two.
It's kind of touched on elsewhere, but when phones became computers.
Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting.
It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature.
You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spectrum, nothing is too complex now.. learn from the LLM if you don't want to just let it run with the code.
Shit.. it's fun to finally build out a good portion of the never ending ideas list (and to realise half of those ideas just aren't worth the effort)
25 years ago, we were still trying to milk as much as possible out of autoexec.bat and config.sys.. maybe we'd moved on slightly, but we were definitely still trying to get the damn 56k modem to give us the best ping possible.
All this to say.. it was fun because it wasn't easy. We were learning.
Computers are amazing because they are still open doors, to doing so much, to endless creativity.
As for me, really enjoying the wide diversity of bespoke well considered creature comforts people are building with Home Assistant. I love the various casting technologies & how it finally gave us a networked ubiquitous & pervasive cross device opening (very excited for Open Screen protocol).
My local area has a pretty active group of people doing LoRa and now wifi halow meshing, which is so cool to see: actual person to person connectivity.
I love seeing the huge variety of apps being built around atmospheric computing. Having one ur-connected Personal Data Server that we are sovereign over that atproto hosts (some technical quibles about use of "hosts" allows here) all kinds of different online apps is incredible, and it's wild what people are cooking up. The pace, the care, the community, now that we have a omni-purpose social networking software that respects the users is amazing, breathtaking. https://atstore.fyi
The whole agent era is amazing, with incredible agentic and/or vibe coding things on demand. We can learn and see so much more than before. People are going wild building systems they access remotely by phone, by ssh, by voice, that have so much on tap, that run such incredible and affordable models (deepseek flash rocking the house). Computing's form is in total review.
> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)
Hahaha. Ok. You destroyed your spark a long time ago & are never ever ever getting it back with an attitude like that. You've grey bearded every drop of glamor out from the world if that's what you've let yourself think. That is the corporatized atittude you just decried! Dry and cut.
> Any suggestion on getting it back?
You have built all manners of walls and inhibitions that keep you from being involved, from considering possibility, from seeing progress. I have technical things I think are amazing that I've shared. But you need to work on tearing down the walls that you have walled yourself into, and finding a will within yourself that is able and interested in engaging the world.
The 80s and 90s were fun, with Atari, Commodore, DEC, SGI, Sun, HP, Next, even IBM all going at it. I guess widespread Wintel and internet access, plus Google going for commodity hardware for their servers sealed the deal - consolidation was the way forward, competition was dead.
The internet and computing started to eat the world. Monetization lead to enshittification.. social issues popping everywhere. What used to be a smaller things with lots of promise ended up as the bedsoil for a special kind of hell, and it makes me want to stay away from mainstream webdev / computing for a while (unless it's for a real benefit for some people or society)
When you were young the internet (or substitute for whatever actually was the new thing) was the new thing, you loved it, you loved trying to push it to it's limits, what can it do? why don't I try this? I can break this! fun!
Now you are older, AI is the new thing, young people[0] are having a blast, pushing it to it's limits, what can it do?! they're hacking. But you're older so you're not interested in shiny new thing.
[0] and some older people to be clear, I admire them most, they keep their mind and curiosity young
I know what you mean, I think that happened when Corporations took over the internet.
Plus, when Smart Phones came out, most were locked down. If they were not locked down I think it would have been lots of fun for the young hacking them. Now, almost all devices are in the process of following the Cell Phone Trend.
But some fun can be had with the *BSDs and some Linux Distros, hopefully that can continue in spite of these new Age Verification Laws.
Seems the young of today cannot hack, break, fix computers now, they seem to be on a Assembly Line to Corporate boredom.
It was fun when the Commodore Amiga came out and outshone the Macintosh, until the Mac II came out, of course. But the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST had emulators for all kinds of computers.
Of course, when Commodore went bankrupt, the fun ended. They didn't innovate or market like the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC Clones.
> Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own
Wait until you get older. I did! And I have identified over the years tons of applications that would help seniors that nobody gives one iota of attention to, because "no get rich quick money in it"
The simplest example of all. Shopping.I can't read price labels on the lowest shelf [0], and as for use-by date and ingredients, my OE nearsighted as hell lenses can't read any of them. Seniors who didn't have a career in engineering and computers get scammed regularly, get information from the internet that is either garbage or outright malicious, the list goes on and on. I am using my remaining time to address these.
And how about students? Everything changed overnight. Rather than enriching them, they are using AI to cheat and avoid thinking and learning. What would you say to them? What would you teach? How would your life and work experience benefit them?
Way back when, I planned some after school labs (there was money for such things) where kids would go out and collect data, and then deal with it collectively (talking to other kids and instructors, not "Professor Claude", who didn't exist in those days, and if their computers were inadequate, give them bootable linux media (like Knoppix) or just time remotely accessible.
Hey, I'm excited at 77.
These things didn't happen because I never had a network. Great things happen when there's a Jobs and a Woz. Not in isolation.
Needs change. Invent that REALLY REAL exoskeleton now, the robotic "fetch my meds" robotic assistant now, and they'll be ready when you're ready for them.
They didn't. There was a bit of an interval between the days of diversity - the Commodores, Sinclairs, Ataris, the CP/M machines, everything from build-your-own to sleek futuristic designs, etc - and the free software revolution which saw Linux and the BSDs cement themselves as the future in some or other form. Now? Software is free and open, hardware is cheap and plentiful, hardware hacking is back, if you want to create something which has not been created before there's a fair chance of success. If you succeed you can easily publish your designs, others get to pick them up and improve upon them and publish their improvements. Computers are more capable than ever, just stay away from the walled gardens and the shiny traps created by the likes of Microsoft and Apple and Google and you're free to do what you want.
Microcontrollers are fun. The specs of modern MCs are similar to home computers 30 years ago. The community aspect is there. They’re cheap, too.
Interesting — why does this post get penalized from any top HN page even after 40+ points in two hours?
Esp32s are amazing fun. I designed boards in the 80s and I still love tinkering with microcontrollers. The reflux control for my still currently uses a brushed motor controlled by PWM and I am upgrading it to a second hand pump with a brushless motor so I am looking at driving it. I just set up an old drone ESC and am controlling the motor with dshot and it works ok. There is a little pre built board Simple FOC that is also esp32 I just ordered for 20 bucks to give a try.
I've been a developer for 45 years and I still actually like it most days.
Agreed. OP, get a CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) and run wild.
agreed, I think much of the appeal for me is the physical element of wiring things up and seeing it do something more than changing a few pixels on my screen.
Soldering is very relaxing as well.
How you know me so well. I also like how cheap all of the parts and pieces are. It's like the next step after Legos. Although, they have way more interesting Legos today than what I had as a kid. I've bought components with an a specific project in mind, but once it's built I find myself taking them apart and making a new something with it combined with other parts I have lying around. Things are cheap enough that I don't mind so much if I got something wrong and release a little magic smoke.
I think it's natural to lose enthusiasm over time when a joy becomes a job.
"I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)"
I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.
If you found joy because of the craft itself, low-level hands-on stuff (breadboards, esp32s, soldering, ..) can scratch that itch too.
> I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.
I can't speak for the poster, but to me, there's no joy in either because, plan or not, it doesn't feel like I am the one building it. If I got someone (AI or human) to build a castle in Minecraft to my specifications, regardless of how detailed those specs are, it wouldn't feel like I built anything. The sense of accomplishment is just gone.
Honestly, I think I'd rather be the one getting specs and figuring out how to implement them than the other way around.
Not what most folks here are saying but the thing that brought the spark back for me was going harder into small software, not pivoting to hardware. Tiny Android apps, do one thing well, no team, shipped to actual users on Play Store within a month or two. Most fun I've had with code in a while.
Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial.
You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.
2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.
The world is full of people who get excited about things, but never, ever help. The Internet brings these kinds of people right to your door. They’re exhausting and toxic in a way you don’t truly appreciate until you really notice. Eject them from your life and computers become nice and fun again.
Help the younger generations find the same fun you did. That's where satisfaction is often found as we age.
I feel this a lot too these days. The only place the fun seems to remain for me is in Linux and in devices out of China, that you can hack and experiment with — like the Anbernic consoles, or the Xteink X4, or the little mp3 player DAP things, or the Sipeed NanoKVM devices, or the Supernote. The Steam Deck probably sits in this niche too, now I think about it.
Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.
Solo and small-group computer projects used to be in a sweet spot of opportunity: feasible yet interesting to others. But opportunity-space is limited and fills.
To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)
My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).
Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.
They’re still fun, but you have to be really good at understanding what your idea of fun is, listening to that voice, and not falling prey to what other people/companies with an agenda are trying to push on you as fun (when it’s just crap designed to fill their pockets).
99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.
Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.
When smartphones took over computing and landed in everyone's pockets, and the shareholders realized they have access to every single eyeball on Earth, and so the squeezing of tech for profit began. The big watershed moment for me was when Google Reader was killed off; it signaled the end of the web for users.
How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.
Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.
Personal computers are still fun for me, although it has waxed and waned over the years since I got my first 8 bit computer in the 1980s.
Linux kep it fun. Even during a time when I worked with windows professionally I always had a Linux distribution installed somewhere.
As a short history of fun in no particular order:
First time I got XFree86 working after having to endlessly configure display settings.
Using Yggdrasil to do remote support for Sun systems.
Hacking on a cd-rom driver to get mine to work.
Building a media server on an NSLU2. My media server is still called “the slug” despite being on an RPi now. At one point my kids had repurposed PS2s in their rooms with all their favourite shows at their fingertips. Sounds lame now but back then it was magic.
Moving all my dev tools to Linux after finally realising they all ran worse on windows, including .NET core
Endless fiddling with wine to get games to start, now completely solved but it was educational at the time.
Wacky shenanigans with wifi drivers and binary blobs back when wifi was still emerging.
I don’t know how you get the spark back once it’s lost though, I’d only suggest that the reward centre in your dome doesn’t fire properly unless you’ve been challenged and worked hard to solve whatever you’re faced with.
I remember the moment distinctly, it was the winter early in the year 2000. We had just survived the Y2K incident and I was in a VW camper van roving around, at the particular moment I was visiting a Twisted Python developer in the San Jose area.
I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.
I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.
He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.
Im changing targets. I've started to hack around with a play.date devices. It's pretty cool.
Every industry has a regression to the mean such that a normal workforce can support it. This is, good thing, but it makes the commercial side very boring (which is also a good thing).
With AI, I think makes it more permissible to do odd and unique things that see fun. Like, why not?
It coincides significantly with YC, Zuckerberg, and Amazon. Internet is becoming soulles by the day.
In my view, this period surprisingly correlates with the first leg of the Fed's balance-sheet expansion [1], from ~$800B to ~$2.2T in 2008.
As a reminder, this was the era of the early iPhones and the first MacBook Air [2] — tech was mature enough, but not yet overcrowded with VCs.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080223071127/http://www.apple....
Reminds me of winamp skins. Such wacky designs would be unthinkable today.
Ours is a culture that can no longer whip the llama’s ass.
Ignoring any cultural dynamics that may be at play: maybe sometime after you started getting paid to do it. Personally, I find it enjoyable relative to other jobs, but I've lost most of the recreational enjoyment since I started making a living from it.
> Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.
You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).
I've noticed the same thing. IMO, the heyday of computing coincided with the peak of WiReD Magazine. Around 1995 interconnected computers and the WWW bootstrapped a revolution in spreading+sharing information that seemed certain to reshape cultural norms, organically, bottom up, for the better. It seemed the world would never be the same. Heady times. That sense of optimism lasted until the computer unicorns morphed into monopolies. After that the roles reversed and all us net denizens became unicorn fodder. It's hard to stay upbeat after you realize you're no longer in charge and are constantly being manipulated wherever you go online.
IMO it's still fun to hand-write C and Makefiles targeting an extremely resource-constrained device that's connected to an oscilloscope and a gunshot-wound worth of capacitance on your bench. YMMV
For me it's the advent of LLMs. AI is boring.
For me, AI made tech interesting again.
I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.
After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.
I'm still having a ton of fun with computers, even moreso with the advent of halfway usable AI.
Being able to plug a little intelligence into software with little effort makes many things a lot more convenient. One of my favorites is having an LLM monitoring a long running task and doing something about it if something goes off the rails.
The hurdle to seeing what an idea what look like in implementation has also decreased a lot, so I don't have to worry about picking something small enough to finish over a weekend or two.
Computer fun is inversely proportional to number of investors.
Simply because people prior to VC used time to make fun stuff. After VC came in and bought up that time to make more money, the fun stuff disappeared.
It's kind of touched on elsewhere, but when phones became computers.
Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting.
It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature.
You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spectrum, nothing is too complex now.. learn from the LLM if you don't want to just let it run with the code.
Shit.. it's fun to finally build out a good portion of the never ending ideas list (and to realise half of those ideas just aren't worth the effort)
25 years ago, we were still trying to milk as much as possible out of autoexec.bat and config.sys.. maybe we'd moved on slightly, but we were definitely still trying to get the damn 56k modem to give us the best ping possible.
All this to say.. it was fun because it wasn't easy. We were learning.
Computers are amazing because they are still open doors, to doing so much, to endless creativity.
As for me, really enjoying the wide diversity of bespoke well considered creature comforts people are building with Home Assistant. I love the various casting technologies & how it finally gave us a networked ubiquitous & pervasive cross device opening (very excited for Open Screen protocol).
My local area has a pretty active group of people doing LoRa and now wifi halow meshing, which is so cool to see: actual person to person connectivity.
I love seeing the huge variety of apps being built around atmospheric computing. Having one ur-connected Personal Data Server that we are sovereign over that atproto hosts (some technical quibles about use of "hosts" allows here) all kinds of different online apps is incredible, and it's wild what people are cooking up. The pace, the care, the community, now that we have a omni-purpose social networking software that respects the users is amazing, breathtaking. https://atstore.fyi
The whole agent era is amazing, with incredible agentic and/or vibe coding things on demand. We can learn and see so much more than before. People are going wild building systems they access remotely by phone, by ssh, by voice, that have so much on tap, that run such incredible and affordable models (deepseek flash rocking the house). Computing's form is in total review.
> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)
Hahaha. Ok. You destroyed your spark a long time ago & are never ever ever getting it back with an attitude like that. You've grey bearded every drop of glamor out from the world if that's what you've let yourself think. That is the corporatized atittude you just decried! Dry and cut.
> Any suggestion on getting it back?
You have built all manners of walls and inhibitions that keep you from being involved, from considering possibility, from seeing progress. I have technical things I think are amazing that I've shared. But you need to work on tearing down the walls that you have walled yourself into, and finding a will within yourself that is able and interested in engaging the world.
Thanks for the great question! I think they used to be so much fun because they were an unexplored frontier.
Perhaps we need a new frontier?
Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant is really fun, especially if you try to create your own self-hosted voice assistant and connected speaker system
The 80s and 90s were fun, with Atari, Commodore, DEC, SGI, Sun, HP, Next, even IBM all going at it. I guess widespread Wintel and internet access, plus Google going for commodity hardware for their servers sealed the deal - consolidation was the way forward, competition was dead.
The internet and computing started to eat the world. Monetization lead to enshittification.. social issues popping everywhere. What used to be a smaller things with lots of promise ended up as the bedsoil for a special kind of hell, and it makes me want to stay away from mainstream webdev / computing for a while (unless it's for a real benefit for some people or society)
When you turn 30
When you were young the internet (or substitute for whatever actually was the new thing) was the new thing, you loved it, you loved trying to push it to it's limits, what can it do? why don't I try this? I can break this! fun!
Now you are older, AI is the new thing, young people[0] are having a blast, pushing it to it's limits, what can it do?! they're hacking. But you're older so you're not interested in shiny new thing.
[0] and some older people to be clear, I admire them most, they keep their mind and curiosity young
Get a uConsole!
Or any of the trending variants.
Little computers are still fun.
Get back into computers that have limited ability but are fun to use, such as the MNT Reform.
When you got old :)
I know what you mean, I think that happened when Corporations took over the internet.
Plus, when Smart Phones came out, most were locked down. If they were not locked down I think it would have been lots of fun for the young hacking them. Now, almost all devices are in the process of following the Cell Phone Trend.
But some fun can be had with the *BSDs and some Linux Distros, hopefully that can continue in spite of these new Age Verification Laws.
Seems the young of today cannot hack, break, fix computers now, they seem to be on a Assembly Line to Corporate boredom.
It was fun when the Commodore Amiga came out and outshone the Macintosh, until the Mac II came out, of course. But the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST had emulators for all kinds of computers.
Of course, when Commodore went bankrupt, the fun ended. They didn't innovate or market like the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC Clones.
You can still program in BASIC with PC-BASIC: https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ BASIC was always fun to use.
>Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.
You got old. The thing you loved became work. That's when most things stop being fun. Don't know what to tell you. Maybe collect stamps or something.
loving is laborious
They’re still fun? Why not? It’s more magical than ever now, even if it’s changed a lot from the “glory days” which is nostalgic thinking mostly.