Thoughts

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to come up with fun and creative side projects to do. Hacker News used to be filled with a wide variety of interesting projects, but now all I see is "tech-related" news (which isn't bad, as it is called Hacker News for a reason, but my source of inspiration has now disappeared). Even last year, X would occasionally have viral posts detailing interesting projects that people have built at hackathons. I also think that expected complexity for projects to have value has also significantly increased due to how easy it is to build anything with AI. It makes the value of the project based much more on the idea, unless the project is deeply technical.

I also find it increasingly irritating with how much AI has infiltrated this "tech" world. Literally almost everything has AI in it now, and they are for use cases which definitely do NOT need AI (i.e the number of startups that YC is now backing that just mention AI in some super niche vertical).

It’s interesting that a lot of the stuff we do now, we do for the likes of the media. Many people have dreams of “making it big.” Applying this to research, of course many scientists study altruistically with the means of advancing science, but there must be some part of their head that hopes for them to be nationally or even internationally recognized later on.

Does this mean that the most pure form of research happened before globalization?