[kalleboo]

Although at the same time, with the plateuing of computer hardware, you don't need to be a Bell Labs or PARC in order to do research. People are doing cutting-edge AI research on their gaming graphics cards. On a developer salary you can command a massive cluster on AWS (for a few minutes to run tests).

[linguae]

This is true; consumer hardware is crazy capable these days. Even less powerful hardware such as the Raspberry Pi enables various sorts of projects that can be done inexpensively. While it’s hard to find a Xerox PARC- or Bell Labs type of job these days, we have hardware that Dennis Ritchie could only dream of, not to mention a vast ecosystem of open source software to build off of that didn’t exist 50 years ago.

Thanks for giving a positive counterpoint; while there’s much to lament about modern computing, there’s also much to praise.