As I get older, I just care about boring technology.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time.
Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hundreds. I'm trying to use this approach wherever possible.
>As I get older, I just care about boring technology.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
There's something intellectually alluring about new technology or new shiny in general that I think appeals to your general technologist, it's a trait the draws such people to various fields. I know when I was young I drank the Kool-aid every turn.
As I got a little older, and after I was burned several times adopting shiny things either wasting my time or never seeing them widely adopted to a point of reasonable usability, I came to the very realization that everything we create, including technology, exists to serve human needs. It's stupidly obvious, it shouldn't need to be stated but I think it does. Law exists for humans, medicine exists for humans (even medicine for animals, it exists to serve altruism or empathy in humans) and so on. Technology is absolutely no different.
There's a few ways technology can serve humans. It can appeal to the general intellectual interest but ultimately, few if any pay money for that. People in general don't care about it, it's neat for a few minutes then gone. So ultimately what functional need does technology really serve? What does it enable me to do that I otherwise couldn't? How does it make my life easier?
If it doesn't do these things, I frankly don't care about it anymore. I have plenty of places to tap into serving my intellectual interest, places where the things I learn aren't as vanishingly ephemeral in nature and entirely artificial, be it learning something about physics of the world, medicine, whatever. There's well over a lifetimes worth of other mature and well established things to learn about you won't waste your time in like NewWebFramework with NewSyntacticSprinklings.
To me, this is why I similarly only care about new well crafted tech. Your thing needs to either help me do something I otherwise couldn't or make my life easier. A huge amount of new tech does neither, it pedals novelty and the ambiguity of some type of miniscule improvemen in quality of life, all while trying to make a buck.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time.
Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hundreds. I'm trying to use this approach wherever possible.