Do we have to choose between becoming nostalgic or going all in embracing new technology? Some think a lot of developers are quietly grieving the old internet. I doubt that. Why "quietly" by the way? Some of those who do are quite vocal and they should be. I'm a known critic of what's going on in tech today, but I think we just trade improvements and deterioration. I don't see linear progress but I don't see constant decline either.
Here's what the "good old times" really felt like for me:
Staring at a CRT monitor, waiting for a very slow internet connection.
But I'm not in "team AI utopia" either.
AI is not the future
AI in its current form is an understandable reason to look back in nostalgia: slop content, spam and scam are getting better all the time. But so does anti-spam protection. AI is the industry's current excuse for layoffs. But there were waves of layoffs before. I helps military. But military was there before and it played a foundational role in the creation of the internet.
faster, but not better
AI creates boilerplate code much faster and people claim it creates working apps in minutes. They must be very proud of missing quality control and never really trying to do test-driven development or understand any of the fundamental software engineering principles established over decades. But then again, some of those principles are just opionions as well. Like functional vs. object-oriented programming paradigms, like monolith vs. microservices, like agile methodologies.
"yelling at the sky"
I remember arguing with people campaigning against the Internet. Many years later, one might think that I've become that "old man yelling at the sky". I criticised React as an overcomplicated disimprovement. I had my tinfoil hat phase using a rooted Android without any Google services at all. Now I'm the AI sceptic dismissing a new digital trend.
not in its current form
But I don't really miss the old internet at all. Those who do just glorify the days when they were young. I mean, I miss USENET in a way. I miss the imperfection and DIY diversity, but I don't want to travel back in time at all. I want fast internet, Figma designs, kanban boards, pull requests, annotated coding history, open-source-based freemium frameworks, smartphone cameras, code completion, and, yes, artificial intelligence. Only not necessarily in their current form.
I have ideas and experience. I can spot errors and smell spam and enshittification. We are not moving towards an utopia and we're not living in the best of all possible worlds. Not at all. But we didn't back then, either.
try to keep an open mind
I try to balance both and I try to keep an open mind which is what I called my blog website where I try to share a less technical perspective beyond my DEV articles.
AI art
I have been obsessed with AI art for a while, since an old friend of mine did his first psychedelic Midjourney experiments in 2022, but I mostly abstained from AI image generation until DEV launched it's cover editor.
The current cover image is so bad that it's good again in a way. AI's striking failure of irony and subtlety and its stubbornness of trying anyway, adding details like the "digital anxiety simulator" caption is in a league of its own. Placing the spectator inside the shop window instead of in front of it. Trying to draw the prompeted "modern drone" according to its retrofuturistic steampunk style preset. We'll surely feel nostalgic about that as well in a few years from now.
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I updated my prematurely published post so that the sentences should make sense now.