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What happened to nerds?

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Re: What happened to nerds?

#201

Post by smugglerFlynn » 

  > Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant
What is it, exactly, which inherently separates Job’s behavior from Altman’s? I’d argue that both rely/relied on available publicity, marketing and VC management tools of their era.

  > Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth
Tech co-founders like Woz are still out there, so cherry picking to paint a different picture and widely generalise immoral wrongdoings / lack of nerds in certain companies management structures to the whole industry does not help.

I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.

Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#202

Post by traeame »

bluescrn wrote: post #145
meindnoch wrote: post #69

They let in non-nerds. That's what happened.

Influencers, activists, narcissists, and grifters And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.

The sociopaths tried to abduct my friends to a Discord-Server, but my true friend rebelled against them trying to take over my DnD round and he left, saying that he won't betray me for their cult. In the end the Discord people turned out to be deadbeats without a decent GM willing to do the hard work and their posse crumbled, probably preying on the next group of nerds/geeks/whatever victim they pick.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#203

Post by TrackerFF »

abstractcontrol wrote: post #158
TrackerFF wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans. There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're wil…

> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work. You could cl…

Depends on the work. I've worked places (military intel) where you leave work at work, simply because it is impossible to take work with you home. Some of the people I worked with said that was exactly why they chose that line of work - so that they never had to think about work when they came home. Some of those were also top performers.

But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.

And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!

Re: What happened to nerds?

#204

Post by RaSoJo »

Apart from Woz, I don't consider the rest of the individuals as nerds at all. Those are loan sharks in the garb of nerds.

Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#205

Post by lukasm »

Hugsbox wrote: post #106
ferrouswheel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a new unglamorous tech, massaging floating point quants by hand in a hex editor.

At least there's still plenty of places for real nerds to be nerds. HN, hanging around in IRC, Eternal September, among other places. Finding myself more and more drifting away from "mainstream" internet stuff, and as a result I'm finding a lot more engaging and thought-provoking things and am overall happier as a result.

any examples? Even HN became too business focus. Very little software engineering.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#206

Post by traeame »

juleiie wrote: post #27

Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.

Seems illogical that you can quantify a subset of people that wouldn't even want to interact with the average joe on the clearweb. We're alive, intelligent and active on our IRC.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#207

Post by locknitpicker »

boelboel wrote: post #168
keiferski wrote: post #78

I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group. “What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing…

Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.

> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.

Indeed. Even in the middle ages rich people leaned heavily on charity to whitewash their legacy. I mean, the Catholic church even made this accessible to the masses through indulgence.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#209

Post by zozbot234 »

astura wrote: post #197
latexr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Virtuous people become doctors I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations. “Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to…

>“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though. For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.

That's a lot of money out in rural country, which is where veterinarians tend to be especially useful.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#210

Post by pjmlp »

zozbot234 wrote: post #172
zelphirkalt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.

I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.

Sure there is, offshoring, now the chat window is with my computer instead on the other side of the planet.

Not everyone wants to be a team lead not doing coding any longer.

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