[davidw]

The 90ies weren't perfect, but it felt more idealistic to me, with the rise of open source software. People thought about ethics a bit more. It felt like the ultimate tide rising to empower people locally on their own computers, and that tide has been going out for some years. A bit with cloud computing, and now a lot more with LLM's. And the company a lot of SV people keep these days is pretty gross.

[the_snooze]

I wouldn't necessarily say "idealistic," but certainly constrained. Microsoft has always been scummy in one form or another, but always-on internet connectivity has allowed them to be scummy in persistent ways long after your purchase of their product. It's a serious money-maker, but I think that explosive growth has bred a whole generation of tech "professionals" these days that think more like Wall Street bros than sober engineers: make line go up, damn the consequences.