The Bay Area in the early 2000's and even into the early 2000-teens was NOT like this.

You could go out to lunch and have a technical chat and the people at the table next to you might chime in with a solution!

When you get enough passionate people and pack them into one location things get interesting for them (networking, friendships etc)... Much of the passion is gone (lots of people see tech as a path to a paycheck), and everyone wants to WFH.

That's because it's not a good vision for the future, it's literally either building shit that everyone knows doesn't matter or plugging away at pointless automation on overcomplicated piles of steaming crap. Or the next fad.

People have lost the vision and do not understand the soul of the machine is to improve our state of existence not enslave us further.

Fuck 'em. I'm taking the money and doing what makes me feel good (wine, floozies and travel).

Ah good ol’floozies

There's still good stuff going on at local meet ups. I have experienced it myself.

Honest truth is there were always folks without passion in tech.

Meetups are bloody amazing. I keep meeting middle aged divorced women there with loose sense of morals and a drinking problem, which is perfect :)

I can't talk with my colleagues exactly because I'd like to talk about tech 24/7. HN helps.

How about starting a reading group, say a Linux kernel and device driver source code reading group? ;)

I'd join - not joking either! I'm willing to bet that most technically-minded people have devices that act strangely, and yet are powerless to fix them due to, say, the difficulty of getting GDB to connect via the non-existent serial port to capture the stack trace of a once-a-week glitch. I'm in that category with a few of my devices right now, so a group where people could explain device drivers to each other would be really interesting to me.

Been there. Wears off when you get to your early 40s.