I am mentally burned out, I can’t read about one more ai model, i can’t read about one more surveillance, I can’t read about anything new anymore. Why can’t people just make a better battery? How about a nice sounding commercially available keyboard? I am exhausted of reading posts after posts after posts, anthropic released this master model, deepseek released this giga model, there’s a new surveillance system, new spyware, new processor, new gpu, new location software, then I avoid then people start to literally start to talk at me about how their favourite country is using their favourite technology, my peers will talk about American professors encouraging adoption of ai, my tech pilled comrades will talk about China teaching deepseek to kids in school, like of it was upto me, kids wouldn’t see a piece of tech till 5 and only get basic com sci at 6, literally please for the sake of God learn to live for a moment instead of constantly chasing the next big thing and let others live too. We don’t need more, we have more than enough in the world, this world is drowning in our garbage please let the world live and let people like me live. Please don’t drive us to death.
That’s a distinct shift I’ve noticed over the last couple decades; it used to be that keeping up on tech news and tech literacy went roughly hand in hand. First example that comes to mind is back when Mac OS X dropped, there was a lot of discussion in Apple spaces and media about it being built on a unix-type kernel and how to use the new terminal in the OS, unix commands and scripts to use.
It felt like things changed once smart devices started becoming prevalent. Tech developments, both from the developer side and the media side, stopped being about understanding and literacy and started being about hype cycles, FOMO. Like, don’t worry about the details or knowing what’s going on under the hood, you need to dive headfirst into whatever the tech bros are pushing or be left behind. AI being the most blatant example; you don’t need to know anything about what it’s doing, you just need to vibe.
That’s crazy I ain’t live long enough to remember such days but it sounds wonderful. Sad that I never got to live in that era.
It might just be technology itself becoming more prevalent. Impossible for so many laymen to really keep up with it all. I can’t keep up with the thoughtful way of using all my tech and that’s literally my chosen profession. At some point the world just becomes too overloaded for humans to keep up.
Yeah the specialization within tech has made it trickier to see the bigger pictures. I think it’s also because tech has gone from being a backend feature, the thing an industry uses behind the scenes to get the public-facing work done, to being the front and center, public-facing work itself.