Wow, I'm surprised at the banking account from 1998. That happened rather quickly given that the web wasn't really on anyone's radar until 95/96 or so.
A practical definition of "creativity" is "can create interesting things." It's pretty clear that machines have become more "creative" in that sense over the last few years.
The "I did this cool thing" posts get way more upvotes than the "let's be startuppy" posts. I don't think the "hacker" population is as rare as you're suggesting.
I only just found out the other day that if you are playing a non-colorized GB cart on a Game Boy Color, holding down a direction on the dpad when the Nintendo logo appears will let you change the palette!
> When GNOME Shell happened, I was forced to go looking for a new window manager. I ended up installing Ratpoison.
Wow, I used Ratpoison around 20 years ago. SunOS labs in school used some window manager I couldn't stand (don't remember which) and I saw a classmate with basically no window chrome on their display, and was intrigued.
They helped me compile it (no small feat given our resource constraints) and off I went, until my hand started to cramp a year later from hitting ctrl-t so much. I switched to ion for awhile, and then ended up scavenging a linux box to do assignments from home.
I'm happy to see some folks still holding firm on the "no-pointer" front.
Mom had an issue where all her iCloud photos were syncing except the ones she'd taken after they renovated the kitchen. She had photos of everything but the kitchen synced.