Because people are stupid and market hype is dumber still.

No. The story of hardware development is a fucking legend, it’s just tarnished by how completely fucking inept we are at using the gains. And it’s apparently getting worse all the time - my mind boggled when Electron of all things turned standard, because I would’ve thought putting Chrome into everything (including low power scenarios) was an obviously fucking blitheringly idiotic idea, but here we are. LLMs have the same problem except probably orders of magnitude worse. Aside from possibly getting worse at developing better performance, we usually seem to beeline for a way to waste as much of it as we can. Moore’s law, of course, is long dead.

It’s probably natural - unless some big site like Reddit shits its pants yet again, there’s not going to be a major influx of new users. Even if something like that happens, parts of the fediverse are just a hard sell - relentless negativity, poor browsability and discoverability, trolling and bitchiness, and a lot of the content that’s left is just… dull.

I’m bored out of my mind too, and even then hanging here is only occasionally worth it.

I was already vaguely interested, and when I was desperate for a pandemic hobby, it was a fairly natural choice. I can recommend “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat as a good introduction - recipes, but, more importantly, explains a bunch of basic concepts and “whys”. Then, if you can stomach youtube (ublock origin or some other adblocker + sponsorblock are basically mandatory), check out e.g. Food Wishes (Chef John, aside from a râthër wéîrd spèàking style, is good at explaining things in an accessible way), Helen Rennie, Frank Proto and others.

Trial and error is a must eventually, but starting off that way is very likely just wasting food, effort and motivation because failing at cooking can be pretty demoralizing.