How do you rekindle the excitement of tech/startup culture circa '90s?

Anticipate stuff, stuff happens, repeat. It's all just dopamine.

Dive head first into AI or something new (to you). Hell, go start a business in your garage. Read up on those earlier weirdos (I'm currently reading Make Something Wonderful[1] about Steve Jobs) and how they did it, and patch in the current AI hotness.

You can't introduce 3D to desktop computing in 2023 for sure, but what could you introduce to the world that involves AI? Think Different :P

Maybe you fancy building some hardware. Cram a decent stt/tts engine into a raspberry pi and recreate everything Alexa can do. Maybe that idea is crap but while doing it you come up with your actual idea.

The weirdos are hiding at the front of whatever is going on. Web3, AI, whatever the next thing will be. They're partying over there. Have a search for the #buildinpublic hashtag on Twitter. There's a lot of noise (lots of people are on the internet now) but you'll likely find something interesting.

You don't need to jump into AI, that is an example. Don't get caught on the example.

It's really hard to get excited from a standing start, step 1 is to get inspired. If you can't find inspiration, look back to see what last inspired you and literally do that again.

Keep your flywheel spinning and chase the dopamine!

[1] https://stevejobsarchive.com/

I think that is just endemic to getting older. Things can't thrill you the same way they did when you were young.

You've got more experience. Also the world was more optimistic back then.

I was born in 81 so growing up in the 90s was great. It was a optimistic time and in general things were no where near as decisive as now.

The internet was ushering in a new age and we didn't know how it would change the world.

Fast forward to now when the internet and smart phone revolution has happened and we are in a much more dark and bitter place.

We've seen some real negatives on society because of these in innovations and with ai there is more of an existential dread about what it means for society than any optimism.

It's just not possible to recapture those times IMO.

Pump another $100B (adjusted for inflation) from pension funds into the startup economy, give $60M to anyone who can spell TCP/IP, then invent a language that's a small subset of C++ and SmallTalk and insist that everyone will be using it for everything in 2 years.

Bonus points if you rail against government interference while taking 60% of your revenue from the DoD.

You’re looking for a green field industry where individuals and small teams can have outsized impact, barriers to entry are low, and the guard rails are down. AI has that potential if it escapes the arbiters of truth, morality, and entrenched corporate profits. That seems likely as computing and methodology improve. Biotech has high entry costs and will always move a bit slower due to human safety. AR/VR to me feels like the internet in the early 90’s, I know it will be a huge industry at some point in the future, but can’t really tell if that’s 10, 20, or 30 years in the future. Apple might manage kickstart it to some degree soon, but it won’t be the slam dunk the internet was, not in my lifetime at least.

I wouldn’t expect anything substantial for the mobile/desktop web pretty much ever. Too much money in the status quo for Apple/Google/Microsoft to risk transformational browser improvements.

I think it's just about having something new and lots of people getting excited about it. Part of the problem today is that there's too much cynicism floating around especially on sites like Reddit which has seeped into HN also. Or maybe it was always there but the optimists don't comment anymore.

Crypto was that for a lot of people. Leave aside all the cynicism it is still cool as a tech. I think the LLM developments feel like that right now. Tomorrow there will be something else.

But the places where people will be geeking out will not be probably the open internet but closed ones like Slack or Discord. I think this is a shame but it cannot be helped probably.

Jonathan Blow just tweeted:

"Something to understand, about all the excitement around AI and how fast things seem to be moving...

This is what computers in general used to feel like, across the board. New cool stuff was happening all the time in all sectors. This started slowing down in maybe 1994, maybe more in 2004, but people who remember, remember.

I was listening to the latest All In Podcast, where they were breathlessly talking about how ChatGPT was going to super change every aspect of everything (some plausible, some not), and I was just thinking, "It's like it is 1992 and I am reading an issue of Mondo 2000."

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1647303924507086849

I think the problem is back then, American society was more open, accepting of differences on a larger scale, free to experiment, less segregated on class and generally "nicer" in a genuine and not superficial way. That, along with the post Cold war economic boom and the rise of the internet fostered that kind of openness and optimism you talk about.

Nowadays the internet has reduced that openness, people self-segregate and are much more prone to constructing narratives of grievance and deservedness, which doesn't foster the open, optimistic thinking. It's become a game of rich-get richer and cutthroat exclusionism vs the make things better for everyone approach that was more common back then.

How do you rekindle it? Become young again.

There are plenty of people like you describe, only they're also the same age as you once were, so they have the same feeling of techno-optimism and hacker mentality.

You're asking what are the cottage industries? Places you won't think to look. Things that may be distasteful. Vtubers are an example of a recently-commercialized idea. Look for stuff that's just getting going.

The frustrating part is that billions in investment money is performing the same search, and so these ideas don't remain small for long anymore, before they get bootstrapped to their "too big to enter easily but too small/young to solve hard problems" phase by people looking for quick returns.