[eternityforest]

The very massive titans have done a pretty great job. The smaller companies have really slowed down.

Once everything went to the cloud, P2P became mostly cryptocoinful, and privacy became the main topic, innovation seemed to really get impeded, and everything is just "Thing you need,but stripped down, and it involves a Blockchain".

Engineers hate tech at the moment, and will only work to further it if you bribe them extensively, like Amazon can afford to. Engineers choosing freely are gravitating towards "Just Enough" solutions and ways to try to keep analog processes, simple languages, and stuff without new features relevant.

Maybe Solid and co and the fall of cryptocurrency will free up some talent and create some interest in innovation. Pine64 is still doing good work.

[rektide]

This is an interesting angle. I don't know how I feel about it in net, but I definitely agree that there's been huge brain-drain to the very big. It's been enormously hard to make new things happen when the old titans pay so damned much.

I guess I'd still hoped there was lots of smaller stuff happening but I'm tending to think you're right that there's a new net scarcity of computing efforts. And many of the efforts we do see are all business to business, as that tends to be an easier way of making money, but it again rarely contributes to the greater computing pool, doesn't meaningfully change most people's relation with technology.