Things like ycombinator and their censorship, they all went someplace else.
What happened to nerds?
221–230 of 541 posts
Re: What happened to nerds?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics. Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's…
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#223>why are they doing this?? [the mafia game show]
Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
Re: What happened to nerds?
#224It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person.
This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms.
So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".
Re: What happened to nerds?
#225You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were. Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core. Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are m…
Yup, the nerds are still here. They're people like Jeff Geerling, Stefan Hermann, Andreas Spiess, Jan Roetz and many more. They're very visible if you end up on the 'right' side of the algorithm, it's a much more positive side of the internet in general IMHO.
But it's easy to slide back into the fear mongering, engagement bait side if you don't pay really close attention to how you're feeding the algorithm.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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's an analogue. It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wro…
Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#227Come on, are you really complaining that they played a game of Mafia? Please.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#228This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as alr…
> This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.
So, all of them?
Re: What happened to nerds?
#229Apart 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.
The way of Woz is how you earn the respect of fellow nerds.
The way of Jobs is how you "earn" a billion dollars.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#230This is one of those sampling bias/availability heuristic problems.
Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing.
Those are the people who are doing all the talking.
It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’
Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.