When I first heard of "Hackers" being equated with startups (viz. this very forum's name!) I was disgusted. A hacker, to me, was personified by Richard Stallman, or a phreaker, or Neo from the Matrix. But here we are.
What happened to nerds?
321–330 of 541 posts
Re: What happened to nerds?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I am suspicious of this fruit-altitude analogy due to its long history of use, and 100% failure rate.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
Re: What happened to nerds?
#323The fate of many nerdy interests: you want it to become popular and widespread. Then it does, and you realise you've lost control of it and it becomes commoditised. So went comic books, goes tech.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#324Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg were two nerds on either side of the privacy spectrum in the twenty-teens. One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire. The message was received. We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
If Julian Assange had taken his privacy principles and built a social network instead of leaking government secrets things might have turned out differently.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#325The nerds era is gone. Welcome to the era of super-villains and self-entitled smartasses.
Not gone forever though. There were nerds at the start of the industrial revolution, they were there when electrification happened, when radio became feasible, rinse and repeat to the most recent iteration of "computer nerds". A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds the…
Yes, I agree that nerds still exist… I myself am one, LOL. But there are so much noise out there that our voices can no longer be heard. :(
Re: What happened to nerds?
#326I think it started with “developers developers developers” and kids went to colleges for CS degrees to get rich not to solve problems or geek out on hard problems but to get wealthy. That dropped in a lot of new personalities some of which were highly narcissistic.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#327I 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…
> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.
> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through
This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#328I 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…
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. Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group? I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like…
>> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
> The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
To emphasize that point, I think the assumption was that being bullied and ostracized would lead nerds to have greater empathy and be nice people, because they experienced how bad it is when people aren't nice.
But I think the reality, obvious in hindsight, is that was a totally unreasonable assumption. IIRC, the experience of abuse can actually create future abusers. With geeks/nerds, I think a fairly common outcome as been a combination of arrogance with a kind of social ineptness/unawareness that is not nice.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#329Earlier 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.
You keep telling yourself that.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#330I 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 is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish. Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
Bill Gates' nerd image was as falsified as his philanthropic one. He was a shrewd businessman & knew PR well, that is all.