Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet.
Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.
I think that the ratio of weirdos doing stuff remained constant through the population, it's just that the whole population is now on the web, so they are harder to find.
Not to mention 20 years ago I personally (and probably others my age) had much more time to care about random weird stuff.
So, I am skeptical without some actual analysis or numbers that things really are so bad.
This is because in Web 1.0 times, only weird hacker types were capable of using the internet effectively. Normies (and weirdos who were weird in ways not related to familiarity with and interest in personal computer technology) were simply not using the internet in earnest, because it wasn't effective for their needs yet. Then people made that happen and now everyone is online, including boring normies with boring interests.
If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.
> If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.
That’s not what was said. What they said is that they wanted more people doing things for the pure joy of discovery, and to make that happen, everyone needs to have more free time and less financial stress or be able to make fun stuff WAY faster, like with LLMs!
> Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI.
True. And to some extent, I've seen more 'useless but fun' projects in the last year because they can be done in an afternoon rather than a week. We need more of that.
There's a mountain of software work you can do that doesn't involve participating in this rat race. There's nothing that says you need to make 500k and live in silicon valley. It's possible to be perfectly happy working integrating industrial control systems in a sleepy mountain town where cost of living is practically nothing. I am well qualified to make that statement.
Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.