sengork

You may not be looking for discipline but persistence. One doesn't necessarily depend on the other.

Irix and SGI computers 90s era design in general.

Search for "IBM Z DevOps" they're trying to revitalise the platform with modern development practices.

Also banks are large users of Cobol so that ecosystem wpuld be good to keep an eye on.

I think that what you're experiencing is pretty common. Internet itself has changed but perhaps more crucially people with whom you've interacted with changed their habits or simply lack the time they used to have (their age groups are different so there's insufficient critical mass to maintain the old community).

There's an added problem of general noise on the Internet which limits the 90s early 00s type of 'signal'. Another aspect is that services used to be quite often hosted by or aimed at the technical/enthusiastic audience, nowadays it is predominantly aimed towards commercial general public.

The internet suffers from centralisation which for the early(ish) adopters creates overall noise.

I'd also like to add that abundance of bandwidth and endless content easily take the aim and focus on doing the cherry picked and well curated things that you used to do. Bandwith has also contributed to ease of bloat, for example today I can't imagine surfing the net without an adblocker, back then ads were fine and served their purpose without impacting the client side.

More generally I believe that larger populations, whether they be large cities or large online communities, will paradoxically make it harder to find others with very specific non-majority interests.

From the mobile marketplace ecosystem point of view this isn't good for the consumer. That being said the entry barrier is quite high for anyone, even essential...

Since Google Reader retired, I've moved to www.netvibes.com

It is time for green web design and green application design (eg. lite versions of applications which are otherwise bloated like Skype with large emoticon animations).

One of my desktops keeps failing to update Windows 10 for 2 years now, the recent v1803 doesn't fix it either. Too ineffective to do a fresh install and just about tried everything out there to fix it. Complete waste of time.

On the other hand the desktop which always worked flawlessly now cannot even get past the initial installation boot screen from a freshly made v1803 DVD/USB (within 5sec of booting) likewise the update from inside Windows itself fails. Waiting to see if MS address this issue before I waste any more time trying to fix it myself.