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6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#131

Post by poincaredisk »

ryandrake wrote: post #46
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

While this author is of a younger generation, this really resonated with me as a Gen Xer. I feel there is so much disillusionment among folks that came of age during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then, and it didn't quite turn out like we envisioned. Two things made me think about this recently: 1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make…

I used to love computers and software. When the next great thing came out, I’d be an enthusiastic early adopter, and enjoyed the new powers the technology gave me. Now, whenever something new comes out, my first thought is: “how is this thing going to suck up my personal data and monetize me?” And my second thought is “how is this going to wreck some part of life and/or humanity and turn it into profits for the rich?…

>You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore.

You can be, we're just getting old. LLMs are very exciting! WASI (and a bit older WebAssembly) is a bold idea! Rust is a breath of fresh air and ancient tools are finally being rewritten! Edge computing may change the way we write programs! Hardware is finally ready for VR!

Now, I'm quite sceptical and pessimistic about all of the above. But I think this says more about me than about the world. Younger me would be prototyping a LLM in Rust and compiling it to webassembly to use in his VR game right now. Current me thinks similarly to you.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#132

Post by leocgcd »

imiric wrote: post #119
leocgcd wrote: post #115

Sort of a vapid piece. The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it.…

> A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality. Wow. Don't you see the problem with selling something that doesn't exist? There's a thin line between making up a story to make people buy a product, and straight up scamming people with a nonexistent product. Elizabeth Holmes was a genius ma…

Marketers necessarily sell something that doesn't exist because part of their job is creating that thing.

Theranos is an example of a failed project through and through, but even something unarguably successful like the iPhone was built through market strategizing-- not just technical engineering. Identifying what consumers wanted, conveying that vision, shaping a compelling brand, these are all things that can easily be written off as "fake" by people who cannot buy into the vision, but when done well they are just as important as the technical innovations.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#133

Post by mihaaly »

extr wrote: post #24

This person acts like they were disseminating propaganda for the reich. I get that doing corporate PR probably feels very cynical in general but coaching founders not to fumble the bag in an interview or writing blog posts about funding rounds are on the lesser evils side I think. Who is the victim of manipulation there? VCs? Lol

They are disseminating propaganda! Not for the reich but for an other evil: greed.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#134

Post by achenet »

lukan wrote: post #53
thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That viral quote that was making the rounds, "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." We developed machines that would do your laundry and dishes decades ago. The current trend is to make them less and less functional over time.

You still have to load and unload the machines. Sort it, organize it. Still lot's of work. It is just not a trivial problem, to solve.

brb, founding AI startup to solve this important, non-trivial problem via burning through large stacks of VC cash.

:DDDDDD

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#135

Post by leocgcd »

sirspacey wrote: post #127
leocgcd wrote: post #115

Sort of a vapid piece. The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it.…

This is a popular misconception. Tech has always been built in the face of massive distrust, mischaracterization, and dismissiveness - especially by media outlets. PR was not how tech overcame that. It was charismatic founders (who often broke the rules of PR at the time) and massive break-throughs in adoption by winning customers over directly. It’s honestly amusing that so many believe that marketers were the reaso…

Charismatic founders are PR lol. Steve Jobs was a market strategist.

>To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value.

Positioning yourself as punk, as pro-consumer, as an alternative to the corporate hegemony... This was all carefully developed by marketers and brand strategists to grow their vision of selling tech. You are not immune to propaganda, it was not some granola revolution that gave the people iPhones. And that's ok! It's ok to admit that marketing is an important force that should be leveraged for change and innovation.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#136

Post by yellowapple »

nickff wrote: post #103
mordae wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it's not money. It's inequality. To build a stable business, you need to carer to the rich more then to anybody else.

This is palpably false, as Schumpeter described: “Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man.”

This is palpably false, as evidenced by the tendency for rich people to want to make themselves richer. Notice how the overwhelmingly-vast majority (if not entirety) of the rich happily did away with those candle-lighting servants in favor of electric lighting; why pay a bunch of servants, after all, when that money could be invested elsewhere? Likewise with the cheap cloth and cheap cotton and rayon fabric and boots and motorcars and so on; the ultra-rich have adopted these in droves because the alternatives require money better spent elsewhere. Yeah, candles and silk garments and horse-drawn carriages do still exist, but for the rich they are nothing more than novelties for occasional enjoyment; for their day-to-day lives it's all lightbulbs, cotton, and cars.

Not only that, but the rich tend to be the early adopters of these very innovations - that is, capitalism begot these innovations specifically to cater to those able to afford them, and only later (after the requisite infrastructure and economies of scale took hold) did they serve as any sort of boon to the common man. Electric lighting and automobiles are two particularly-egregious examples, and they continue to be examples to this day; it ain't the rich who are still reliant on candlelight and animals pulling wagons, after all, but rather the poorest of the poor.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#137

Post by achenet »

keiferski wrote: post #67
extr wrote: post #24

This person acts like they were disseminating propaganda for the reich. I get that doing corporate PR probably feels very cynical in general but coaching founders not to fumble the bag in an interview or writing blog posts about funding rounds are on the lesser evils side I think. Who is the victim of manipulation there? VCs? Lol

You don’t need to be not-doing evil things to feel dissatisfied with your work. There was a line in the post about not having written anything they actually believed in for a long time. That kind of thing weighs one’s soul down, even if it’s not “evil” in a grand sense.

this.

I imagine the author found themselves approaching their job like many of us here would approach a highly paid job where you have to write COBOL or caricaturally bad entreprise Java all day.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#138

Post by yellowapple »

daseiner1 wrote: post #6
XorNot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." Except this quote is just...internet clickbait. As though technological development is a straight line with easily predictable outcomes. Hell it's even engaging in a bait and switch argument: "I want to art and writing" -> well, AI isn't stopping you from doing those…

If wanting to reduce menial tasks in my life is classist, then sign me up.

I'm pretty sure the point is that the exact sort of "art" companies are using AI to create is included in the "menial tasks" category, and that we're therefore better off letting AI take over said menial tasks so that we can spend time on actual creative endeavors rather than soul-crushing corporate drudgery like (in the article author's case) press releases.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#139

Post by mmarian »

GJim wrote: post #120
keiferski wrote: post #61

It would be interesting if someone analyzed the “California communication style” and its effects on the startup industry. As someone that grew up on the East Coast, I often notice how the communication style on the West Coast is much less confrontational and more “everything is awesome”, which I think leads to the sort of fake enthusiasm the author grew tired of projecting. Of course, there’s no lack of hype and BS i…

> I often notice how the communication style on the West Coast is much less confrontational and more “everything is awesome”, which I think leads to the sort of fake enthusiasm the author grew tired of projecting. I raise you British cynicism and the sarcastic piss taking that pervades our every day conversation. Frankly we are truly a world and culture away from California.

I'm afraid it's pervasive here as well. Just talk to people about AI :)

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#140

Post by dudul »

flohofwoe wrote: post #83
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

While this author is of a younger generation, this really resonated with me as a Gen Xer. I feel there is so much disillusionment among folks that came of age during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then, and it didn't quite turn out like we envisioned. Two things made me think about this recently: 1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make…

> during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then Was there? I remember the 90s as an intermittent software dark age we had to crawl out for the next decade until things started to improve around 2010. The unbearable OOP hype, turds like CORBA and Itanium, UML, "Enterprise scale" software development with Java, the first big VR hype cycle, the worst of the desktop operating systems won (Windows), and I…

You're talking about how it was to be in tech as opposed to using the tech - what the parent meant I think.

From the consumer's point of view, the parent is completely right. In the 90s/early 00s there was a real feeling that tech was trying to improve your life and make it easier without necessarily controlling every aspects of it.

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