Feels like an era of engineering grinding

Sorta the opposite of the dotcom boom era when there was a monolithic and simple new technology that any idiot could build on and many did

Now it’s 5-6 very distinct technologies that idiots can’t even begin to grok and takes a kind of high skill dedicated grinding to build on

I hope the rewards are correspondingly bigger for the higher effort input

One plus is that all kinds of engineering are now orders of magnitude easier to learn and tinker with due to good online resources and AI copiloting and much cheaper parts (for hardware)

In the dotcom boom you had to go to paper books. Mostly poorly written, phone-book sized, and obsolete in 6 months. You had to get paper catalogs and order parts by phone.

Jury out on whether this plus makes up for the tech itself being much harder.

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Overall, it seems like the current era of engineering requires a high level of skill and dedication to work with complex technologies, but the accessibility of online resources and cheaper parts are positives. The potential for larger rewards may make the effort worth it, but the jury is still out on whether this outweighs the challenges of the tech itself