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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#71

Post by KerrAvon »

cruzcampo wrote: post #2

It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems. Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic? Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Al…

> Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing

I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#72

Post by kevinventullo »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #65
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

Ain’t no trailer parks without engineers and mechanics designing trailers. Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.

Whoosh

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#73

Post by ryandrake »

swatcoder wrote: post #42
arnaudsm wrote: post #14

I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build. The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.

Unfortunately, we've reached the point where a generation of new adults take janky technology as normal, both as consumers and producers. Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter. So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as produc…

> Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects

Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality. Nobody who's ever seen really fast performing software, software that didn't crash unexpectedly, software that didn't eat your battery and storage space, software that wasn't exploitable by a 14 year old in their basement, software that didn't leak personal information all over the world. No developers who have counted CPU cycles or took the time and effort to keep a for loop in a single page of memory. Neither developers nor consumers will even believe that software can be great.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#74

Post by alchemyzach »

PaulHoule wrote: post #53

I find it amusing that behind some of these "great men" you will find a woman. If anyone is going to get us to Mars it is Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX. Similarly it was Sheryl Sandberg that helped transition Facebook from a popular service to a dominant business.

I agree with you in spirit but naming women who were appointed positions inside of companies famously founded by men is not helping

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#75

Post by twen_ty »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #65
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

Ain’t no trailer parks without engineers and mechanics designing trailers. Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.

That also created the biggest singular transfer of wealth. So your argument is that the peasants are no longer starving and well fed. If that's the ambition level you're happy to live by then there's no further comment.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#76

Post by mbrumlow »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
no_wizard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.

Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it.

Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school.

While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self.

They clearly did something different out of the very large common group they belonged to.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#77

Post by the_snooze »

ryandrake wrote: post #54
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

Silicon Valley itself came about in no small part due to direct government support: Fairchild Semiconductor selling chips for weapons targeting, ARPANET leading to the Internet, Sergei Brin and Larry Page's PhD's very likely funded by NSF and other federal funders.

And now you have Silicon Valley "leaders" looking to tear down the public institutions that seeded the place.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#78

Post by memhole »

dsign wrote: post #38

Without any hard data about anything, this is just a speculative rant. Go and read my books if you want one of those. But I do agree on one thing: we are lacking a new frontier, a meaningful one. My hope for the years I have left is to see one.

This is part of what I feel keeps driving AI/LLMs. The hope that there’s a new frontier to cash in on.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#79

Post by mixmastamyk »

monknomo wrote: post #60
no_wizard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

What I took from it is that the story about starting a company in a garage is about the humble origins. But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)

Yes, though in the eighties and somewhat to the nineties you could own a home with modest job.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#80

Post by alchemyzach »

jparishy wrote: post #41

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other. pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fa…

"Or we go backwards and just take things from each other."

This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement

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