Fewer programmers interested in hardware?

I see far too many programmers these days who use macbooks and prebuilt desktops. They've never assembled a computer or installed a different OS. Why is this? I thought programmers were interested in tinkering with things. I feel more and more like I'm out of place when I talk about how I assemble and overclock computers and install GNU/Linux distros.

>>32
hence, compilers are shit at generating the best machine code

>>32
Yet most of the CPU time is spent doing DSP and graphics.

For example, neural nets are SIMD-friendly, so any serious NN package will have to include hand-crafted assembly core.