What is still exciting in tech?

科技领域还有什么令人兴奋的事物吗？

A comment on a lobste.rs post about the tech culture stagnating made me think. 20-15 or even 10 years ago, tech was really exciting. Sure, monopolies were bad, I was fighting them, but tech by itself was very interesting. New versions of software were expected, we were skimming through changelogs to find novelties, installing beta or alpha versions of totally unknown projects. And I had lived that excitement since the 90’s. 在 lobste.rs 上看到的一条关于科技文化停滞的评论引发了我的思考。在 20 年、15 年甚至 10 年前，科技确实令人兴奋。当然，垄断现象很糟糕，我也曾与之抗争，但科技本身非常有趣。那时我们期待着软件的新版本，浏览更新日志以寻找新奇功能，安装那些完全不知名项目的测试版或 Alpha 版。从 90 年代起，我就一直沉浸在这种兴奋之中。

When you think about it, today feels really bleak in comparison: Changelogs of commercial projects now all have that pseudo-humorous tone to tell you that “they improved performance and fixed bugs” The best smartphone I ever had is now 10 years old (and was not an expensive one, see https://ploum.net/2026-09-02-i_dont_have_a_smartphone.html ) Around me, at least 3 totally unrelated people left a decade-long career in tech to do woodworking. And they are way happier. 仔细想想，相比之下，今天的感觉真的很凄凉：商业项目的更新日志现在都带着那种伪幽默的口吻，告诉你他们“提升了性能并修复了漏洞”。我用过最好的智能手机现在已经 10 岁了（而且当时并不贵，详见 https://ploum.net/2026-09-02-i_dont_have_a_smartphone.html）。在我身边，至少有 3 位完全没有关联的朋友放弃了长达十年的科技职业生涯去从事木工，而且他们现在快乐多了。

My main interest in looking at changelogs is now to see how the projects I use will be enshitified with AI integration. Even my beloved Free Software stack is now heavily tainted by slop. Lot of people that could have been doing very cool things (or were doing very cool things) are now outspoken fascists (see https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware/tree/main/item/README.md or https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/). Even if you are interested by AI, the ecological consequences and the way it is used are simply awful. 现在我查看更新日志的主要兴趣，是想看看我使用的项目会如何因为集成 AI 而变得糟糕（enshitified）。即使是我钟爱的自由软件栈，现在也深受垃圾内容的污染。许多本可以做出很酷事情（或者曾经做出过很酷事情）的人，现在却成了直言不讳的法西斯主义者（详见 https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware/tree/main/item/README.md 或 https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/）。即便你对 AI 感兴趣，其生态后果以及使用方式也实在令人难以接受。

All of this makes me wonder: am I just a grumpy already old man? Am I missing something? If so, what? So I would like to ask all lobste.rs: what do you find really exciting in tech today? What are you waiting with impatience? Which project are you following closely? What do you expect from them? What do you hope to see in the next few months or years? 这一切让我不禁怀疑：我只是一个脾气暴躁的老头子吗？我错过了什么吗？如果有，那是什么？因此，我想问问 lobste.rs 的所有用户：在今天的科技领域，你们觉得什么真正令人兴奋？你们正焦急地等待着什么？你们在密切关注哪些项目？你们对它们有什么期待？在接下来的几个月或几年里，你们希望看到什么？