world.hey.com adding up the chalk marks on the cantankerous & troublesome but not wrong chalkboard.
we direly need creativity & exploration of what computing could be, what tech could be, of opening new less-entrenched avenues. but my god, the last decade has been a horror-show of the very massive titans swallowing all the young, stealing all the talent, sucking all the oxygen from the room.
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.
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.
