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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

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Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#261

Post by whatever1 »

emteycz wrote: post #257
whatever1 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. The vast majority of the above are fields where ML failed spectacularly. If you had any idea about medical diagnosis, biomedical research, supply chain optimization, politics and journalism you would know that machine learning is a laughing stock in these fields. ML had 2 big wins: (image & data) Classification & NLP. It is stupid to not use ML for these problems, but it equally stupid to try to fit ML in fie…

Let's not claim something has failed when it has just begun... Given today's hardware and given that it's a very new topic of research, IMHO the accomplishments are incredible. It's not yet production ready, but that doesn't mean another 10 years of progress won't get it there.

We need to invest in long term R&D to potentially achieve an ML breakthrough in one of the above fields instead of allocating enormous capital to ML unicorn businesses.

But to do so, we need to first openly admit the truth. ML is not working for the wide range the problems it is currently pitched for.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#262

Post by WalterGR »

WalterGR wrote: post #239
notsureaboutpg wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get an entry level TC of 140k and save 50% of it, you'll be a millionaire in 15 years. That's without any kind of growth, investment, stock options growing in value, raises, etc.

And if you make $65,000 a year and save 100% of it, you’ll be a millionaire in 15 years. Nobody is arguing that it’s possible .

Whoops, missed a word. I meant not possible.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#263

Post by snovv_crash »

ghaff wrote: post #223
drawkbox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, California is one of the only states that doesn't recognize non-competes [1], that is key for innovation and competitors coming up including small/medium competitors. This part is always overlooked. > A few states, such as California, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, totally ban non-compete agreements for employees, or prohibit all non-compete agreements except in limited circumstances. [1] There is…

Tons of companies that aren't in California don't have non-competes or have very limited ones. I've never had a meaningful non-compete in the course of my career. (Had a very narrow one when one company was acquired.) I'm certainly not a fan of non-competes but note that, even in California, a company can drag you into an expensive court battle over non-solicitation clauses, NDAs, etc. It's also a matter of non-compe…

I've had 3 in a row in Europe. I doubt they would have been enforceable, but from conversations with colleagues they certainly had a chilling effect.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#264

Post by rcpt »

Lammy wrote: post #256
helen___keller wrote: post #197

There are countless takes on this, but I'll add one more: Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building. For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers. Monoculturalism is a failur…

> Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building. What if it's the other way around? Public school didn't teach me about the Second Great Migration of black Americans westward during and after World War 2, and I was unaware that there was basically zero black population here until then. Check out the first graph in particular in this article: https://belonging.ber…

Prop 13 is the root of the issue. It's had an awful effect on minorities and is probably illegal as "disparate impact" under the Fair Housing Act. This paper makes it clear:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3012949

I don't know if it's wise to pursue this under Trump's supreme court though

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#265

Post by caslon »

busterarm wrote: post #42
caslon wrote: post #14

High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars putting literal lives at risk , a figurative vampire (infuses literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a company that hasn't been relevant since the 1970s all are…

Oracle is, unfortunately, extremely relevant, just in none of the places you care about. Your biases keep you from seeing it. In fact I was just recently involved in some conversations that could see the spend of tens of millions on their Cloud platform and where they are seriously looking like the strongest contender on both the technical and the business side. Second tier cloud providers should be extremely worried…

Silicon Valley's value is in innovation. Oracle doesn't innovate, and Amazon's in Seattle anyway. There's really nothing that matters as far as any of the cloud companies; they're valueless.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#266

Post by caslon »

Apocryphon wrote: post #53
caslon wrote: post #14

High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars putting literal lives at risk , a figurative vampire (infuses literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a company that hasn't been relevant since the 1970s all are…

The article neither tells anyone to leave SV nor is it talking about SV as a geographical area but rather the modern state of the tech industry, if you and so many others like you have actually bothered to read to the end of the very first paragraph. > Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? Perhaps. But other challenges to Silicon Valley’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora.

I did read the article. I'm still 100% confident that it's just a way to get people to leave.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#267

Post by busterarm »

caslon wrote: post #265
busterarm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle is, unfortunately, extremely relevant, just in none of the places you care about. Your biases keep you from seeing it. In fact I was just recently involved in some conversations that could see the spend of tens of millions on their Cloud platform and where they are seriously looking like the strongest contender on both the technical and the business side. Second tier cloud providers should be extremely worried…

Silicon Valley's value is in innovation. Oracle doesn't innovate, and Amazon's in Seattle anyway. There's really nothing that matters as far as any of the cloud companies; they're valueless.

Was.

Now it's just a myth that people perpetuate. What SV has now is a bunch of greedy people looking to give money to ideas.

It's not that SV technologists are innovators anymore, it's just that they are in proximity to money.

Now the business people and their greed and money are leaving SV en masse. What does it have left?

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#268

Post by novok »

kory wrote: post #236
helen___keller wrote: post #197

There are countless takes on this, but I'll add one more: Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building. For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers. Monoculturalism is a failur…

I think a big challenge here is single family housing with a yard is by far the most desirable housing in the US. I doubt folks would accept a significantly more dense living if they were the engineers of tomorrow. They’d expect the single family home and yard for their work. Where in the USA is this not a challenge? Single family zoning is everywhere and existing residents in most American cities have little reason…

Many engineers of today and tomorrow would much prefer a large apartment in tokyo with SF weather than droll american suburbia and the worst of all worlds that is american city life with bad transit, choking car life and a lack of safety and hygiene due to a failure of public institutions.

Millenials have show a preference for good cities, %50+ of SV engineers are immigrants from all over the world. A truely urban SV would be amazing.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#269

Post by novok »

helen___keller wrote: post #254
tjr225 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying SV will be the next Detroit on HN for the past 5 years. I think this might be more of a wish than based in any sort of reality. Perhaps if it _does_ go the way of Detroit then I can afford to move there!

To be clear, my position on "next Detroit" is > rising and falling in step with the industry it's built around The tech industry is definitely still rising

It might definitely be leaving, giving the same result.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#270

Post by nostrademons »

logicchains wrote: post #103
networkimprov wrote: post #47

This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimat…

The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals,…

Climate is self-solving too, just not in a way that humanity should welcome. When the climate becomes inhospitable enough, lots of humans will die. When humans die, they stop producing carbon emissions (well, technically a bit after they die, since they still need to decompose). Eventually the planet reaches a new equilibrium with fewer humans and higher temperatures.

Humanity has a self-preservation instinct in not letting that happen, just as corporations have a self-preservation instinct for not losing all their money to cybercrime. But one advantage corporations have is that they can generally act as one body, while getting all of humanity to agree on something is usually not possible until it's too late.

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