You’re in a rut. I’m trying to help you out of the rut. Pop on in.

Another HN comment to blog post. Original post here Ask HN: How do you rekindle the excitement of tech/startup culture circa ’90s?

Startups were being built in garages. People were moving into startup houses. There was an electricity, an excitement, a childlike giddiness for new ideas and products.

Where are the “weirdos”? Where are the garage hackers? Has tech permeated society so much so that those times are behind us for good? If so, what is the new “tech”?

I want to be that excited 16 year-old again.

Anticipate stuff, stuff happens, repeat. It’s all just dopamine.

Dive head first into AI or something new (to you). Hell, go start a business in your garage. Read up on those earlier weirdos (I’m currently reading Make Something Wonderful about Steve Jobs) and how they did it, and patch in the current AI hotness.

You can’t introduce 3D to desktop computing in 2023 for sure, but what could you introduce to the world that involves AI? Think Different :P

Maybe you fancy building some hardware. Cram a decent stt/tts engine into a raspberry pi and recreate everything Alexa can do. Maybe that idea is crap but while doing it you come up with your actual idea.

The weirdos are hiding at the front of whatever is going on. Web3, AI, whatever the next thing will be. They’re partying over there. Have a search for the #buildinpublic hashtag on Twitter. There’s a lot of noise (lots of people are on the internet now) but you’ll likely find something interesting.

You don’t need to jump into AI, that is an example. Don’t get caught on the example.

It’s really hard to get excited from a standing start, step 1 is to get inspired. If you can’t find inspiration, look back to see what last inspired you and literally do that again.

Chase the dopamine.