Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

krapp

>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.

smt88

Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant is really fun, especially if you try to create your own self-hosted voice assistant and connected speaker system

orionblastar

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.

jmclnx

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.

luqtas

loving is laborious

djeastm

Help the younger generations find the same fun you did. That's where satisfaction is often found as we age.

Dumblydorr

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.

gyomu

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.

ktallett

Get back into computers that have limited ability but are fun to use, such as the MNT Reform.

gdulli

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.

frio

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.

muge

It coincides significantly with YC, Zuckerberg, and Amazon. Internet is becoming soulles by the day.

yepyoukno

Get a uConsole! Or any of the trending variants. Little computers are still fun.

throwawa14223

For me it's the advent of LLMs. AI is boring.

teamonkey

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.

smackeyacky

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.

hnthrowaway0315

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.

jauntywundrkind

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.

MaKey

> 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).

bvanderveen

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