"they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods" - the generation before grew up in the age of not needing them because you could just run programs on hardware. Seems less open to me.

>I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.

What tech environments are you using that are more open now than in the past? It certainly seems you're conflating LLMs and their ability to 'create anything (regardless of quality or level of skill of the creator) on demand' rather than the software & services currently provided by Microsoft/Meta/Google/Amazon et al. that have slowly monopolized essentially everything and pushed the smaller players out. I'm referring to the majority of software and services available to the general tech using public.

> smug and dismissive

But then you're talking about highly privileged people being optimistic.

It's easy to be positive when you grow up with the kind of wealth that gives you access to expensive hardware, as indicated by your statements "LLMs on my laptop" and "They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with".