> there are entire corners of instagram devoted to people with a few hundred followers sharing daily chicken drama from their farms.
Difference is that when FishCam went live, it was "Wait. What? You can do that?" Now: "Of course you can share video on the internet."
We still get the occasional "Wait. What? You can do that?" moments — when we witnessed LLMs, for example — but we aren't inundated with them on a near-daily basis like we were in the age of the old internet, when everything about it was new and people were continually testing its limits.
In other words, it is mature now. There is no bringing back the magic.
> We still get the occasional "Wait. What? You can do that?"
1. From the perspective of a kid, everything is like that.
At 17 I was amazed by all sorts of things that my older peers yawned at and said "Yeah we could do that 10 years ago on desktop/mainframe/whatever". I now work with a lot of youngins. Their minds are blown by all sorts of things I find boring because we (the industry) started working on them 10+ years ago.
2. There's a lot of "wow you can do that!?" out there but it's locked in niches.
Right now I'm working on bringing bioinformatics tools to the web. It is blowing people's minds. To me the tech feels boring and obvious, to the biotech researchers it's like their whole world is revolutionizing (and they tell us as much).
> 1. From the perspective of a kid, everything is like that.
To some degree, but, for example, the car wasn't as mind blowing to my generation as my parents' and grandparents'. And the kids today don't seem to recognize it as anything special at all. I expect you can say that about any technology. The telephone (not to be confused with a pocket computer) meant nothing to me, but was one of the greatest inventions ever known to people from an earlier time. There seems to be a natural decline as something reaches greater and greater maturity. Who here is thrilled by, say, the threshing machine? Who here even knows what a threshing machine is...?
> 2. There's a lot of "wow you can do that!?" out there but it's locked in niches.
Like I said, we're not inundated with it anymore. There are still special moments here and there, to be sure, but they don't come around often, so it is not the same continual high we once lived when the internet was new. Again, I think you can say that about anything becoming more and more mature. Going back to the car, in the early days they quickly improved with new features and better technology. Cars too lived the same "Wait. What? You can do that?" period. Now? A slightly larger infotainment screen is the biggest selling feature. Boring.
Admittedly, the driverless car hype got us really excited for a while, but the ball was kind of dropped on that one. Quite possibly the greatest marketing blunder of all time, and as a result I'm not sure the emotions have been able to recover as we start to see the technology actually be realized.
Difference is that when FishCam went live, it was "Wait. What? You can do that?" Now: "Of course you can share video on the internet."
We still get the occasional "Wait. What? You can do that?" moments — when we witnessed LLMs, for example — but we aren't inundated with them on a near-daily basis like we were in the age of the old internet, when everything about it was new and people were continually testing its limits.
In other words, it is mature now. There is no bringing back the magic.