Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

Post by coldtea » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #185

mayhemducks wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well." I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been tol…

Critical, individualistic thinking is what the west does best. The east seems to be better at implementation and improvement once provided with a new idea. That’s where we currently stand atleast, who knows how China will do in the future. Maybe they’re the total package but that remains to be seen.

Post by tanderson92 » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 3:57 AM UTC

krackers wrote: post #205

Fricken wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's using common language to say common things on common subjects, but he does it well, and in a way I can't quite put my finger on.

More than the prose itself, I think it's that what he's writing about isn't exactly "common knowledge" but rather shrewd, piercing observation. The way he understands and captures the dynamics makes you think he's a native to the "bay area" tech scene or immersed in TPOT. Yet here's a complete outsider, pinpointing the unstated core premises and paradoxes of these communities.

Post by anon291 » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 4:39 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #221

anon291 wrote: post #218

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I mean... no? I've worked on chips for basically my entire career, and I get paid a more than when I briefly worked in web stuff. Not sure where this idea has come from. My previous startup I worked for just got acquired for 10s of billions of dollars, which is a higher valuation than my friends who have gone through acquisitions in the web-dev / SaaS space I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff…

When I lived in the northeast, every time I saw an opportunity for embedded work, or traditional UI work (Qt, etc., almost invariably for things like screens on medical or scientific equipment and almost never for desktop applications) it paid 1/2 to 2/3 the going rate for a midlevel webshit engineer. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Post by gsf_emergency_6 » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #224

popalchemist wrote: post #206

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You clearly don't know what the term upward mobility means. It doesn't necessarily mean moving from one class to another - though that WOULD be included within its scope, however extraordinary an example it may be. It can mean moving within a class. Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.

> It can mean moving within a class. It can, but it's not how it's used most of the time, so kind of a pedantic distinction. And many do not even want to "move within a class" that much. They'd be satisfied to keep their job and retain the same constant purchasing power and ability to buy food, feed family, pay rent/morgage, year after year.

Post by gsf_emergency_6 » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 5:40 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #172

popalchemist wrote: post #161

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Yes and broadly speaking those concrete concerns can be considered in aggregate as "upward mobility."

Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach. Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for abo…