What happened to nerds?

because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.

It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)

As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.

With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.

So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.

BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more

For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...

So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)

You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!

Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.

Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.

I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.

The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).

If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?

So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.

Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.