461–470 of 541 posts
They let in non-nerds. That's what happened.
Playing off of it, the submission says something worth highlighting:
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon.
Luckey was perfectly happy doing VR at Facebook until he got shoved out over politics.
It's not just letting the non-nerds in--it's a decade-plus long campaign to push nerds out if they have the wrong ideology.
What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.
Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.
On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...
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Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu? Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe? I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “b…
I think you miss the point, it's not that they were morally good or only in pursuit of lofty goals. But the culture was different and the profession wasn't dominated by monetary opportunity seekers. Look back in historical newspapers and you won't find a single ad for personal injury attorneys.
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Yes. As AI improves every white collar job becomes a management job. With the previous conception of an Individual Contributor role disappearing.
And isnt that management job also tomorrow's disappearing IC role? A management agent seems quite possible to me.
> Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
This pops out at me for a few reasons.
1. The grift era started long before 2015.
2. The dotcom era (which falls in the absurdly large 1970s-2007 range) was pretty grifty.
3. Come to think of it, maybe the parable we were sold in the 2007 era was ... Wait for it... A grift?
What "charming personality", lol? Nerds always had a higher than average probability of being total assholes. That has always been my experience.
Given your blatant generalisation, I simply believe you didn't pass the vibe check of that person and they would not want to have anything to do with you. Just how bullies detect nerds, nerds detect people who shun them, they just avoid conflict because it's a legit waste of time. Anyway, I got some important coding to do now.
Maybe take some time and consider the political economical ramifications of the industry because it has been a net negative towards humanity for a good decade+ now.
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Some of nerds earned a lot, a lot of money, some of the other nerds they employed also earned a lot of money, and they all decided to screw up the world we all live in. Fuck the nerds! The jocks back in the '70s and the '80s were right, these nerds should have been bullied to hell and back, maybe that way we wouldn't have had today's Musks and Thiels, shitheads that are bringing this world over the edge.
A society that creates bullies and thinks they are right is the same one that big surprise, doesn't give a shit about you. But you're stupid enough to be a cheerleader to bullies out of envy so you deserve whatever you get from it.
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> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption. This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.
Plenty of people also hate whatever identity label you want to use for yourself.
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> There's plenty of wealthy folks who aren't especially evil or greedy in any real way, but you wouldn't know that because they don't tend to show off or spend their wealth to begin with I'm well aware, I'm personally early-retired person with financial independence, and of course I have friends too :) With that said, many of them are greedy, some in big ways others in smaller ways, even if they're generally good peo…
My first- and second- hand experience with rare counterexamples is that if you meet a Hollywood star in person they will make a good impression; as if they make a bad impression it will make an impression and you will tell your friends. Lately I’ve been doing a sort of street performance which makes it very likely people will remember me and that again motivates me to be nice. On the other hand I hear Elon Musk comes…
This 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…
Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success. Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic an…
I'm happy to report that I've observed very little of what you describe.