Not the usual people being asshats kind of negativity mind. The other sort.
I've been playing with Grayjay as a video app. Recently FUTO's fcast protocol popped up for casting. It's fairly new, or at least, new to me. Not being averse to the idea of an open protocol for casting I assumed (correctly as best I can tell) that there doesn't appear to be any apps to easily install on the awfulness that is the samsung tv we have in the house. Undeterred, I then had a quick look, expecting to find none, to see if a usb dongle type thing existed. As expected, it's way to new/niche for anyone to have bothered creating one.
My brain, being my brain n'all then obviously went to the next step of it's fairly routine thought process. Namely, how hard could it be to build one?
A quick search and I find that I'm not the only one who has asked such a question - not specifically about an fcast dongle, but about building a wireless dongle of some sort.
Of the questions of reddit, so many of the responses were along the lines of "it'd be cheaper to buy" or "you probably can't" or "why are you bothering to do this". It's been a long, long time since I've expected much from reddit, I suspect because of things like this. There's no curiosity. No one even considering the possibility that someone maybe wants to build one so as to understand how it works. Or to learn something, maybe even just to get an understanding of how hard it might be. Not a hint of considering that maybe, just maybe, the point is not about doing something as cheaply or as easily as possible. And it's not just with this, or just with reddit - I find it a common theme across many forums of late. It's all rather depressing maybe.
Sites like hackaday document curiosity, but don't really feel like a place for people to start asking questions. Maybe all the curiosity is hidden on discord or some other platform that I don't frequent.
To a degree, I even get it in real life face to face conversations. I'll be first to admit that I have more than my fair share of bat-shit insane ideas. And a list of projects that is ... probably a smidge to long. When "I want to figure out how to make lenses", "It'd be fun to build a basement" or "I wonder if I could get a LoRa signal across the harbor", are continually met with "you don't want to do that, it's to hard", "you don't want to do that, it's to expensive" or "why bother, it's pointless", it gets all little depressing.
And I get the most people probably don't mean it, but I have trouble not reading in a subtext of implied ignorance into these responses. As if I was some simpleton unaware that some things are hard, or expensive, or impractical.
So. damn. frustrating.