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What happened to nerds?

mrmarket.lol

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Re: What happened to nerds?

#421

Post by KaiserPro »

Mezzie wrote: post #376
KaiserPro wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Old man here, No this was never the case. Nerds were always hysterical and used the ban hammer frequently. the difference between then and now is that there were more distinct islands of nerdary you could escape to, and they wouldn't blend together. also they generally had a "no outside opinions" rule that meant that forums were single subject. This…

God, I miss off-topic rules and their enforcement...

Off topic rule discussion are banned, you will be shadowbanned for 1 week.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#422

Post by ryandrake »

jimbokun wrote: post #399
initramfs wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Xerox Alto had a budget for 10 years. Unthinkable in today's "What did you publish?? Publish or it didn't happen. No R01 for you! (2 year funding)" culture.

Why is publishing papers an unreasonable expectation? Isn't that the primary mechanism for exchanging knowledge and driving discussion among academics? If not, what should replace it?

I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.

I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#423

Post by altairprime »

srean wrote: post #400
edu wrote: post #88

Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361

Do dupe's get necessarily de-ranked ? If it has active participation in the form of new comments, it makes sense to merge the comments and not penalize the post.

If you email the mods and ask them to do so, they’ll either agree or let you know why they didn’t. I don’t have a solid enough grasp on how their logic works to predict the outcome here.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#424

Post by altairprime »

vidarh wrote: post #340
azalemeth wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking. I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't -…

A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home (looks pointedly at Stanford) to a variation of residence halls, where the salary gift can be much less in exchange for benefits due creativity: reserved whiteboards, option for neighboring private rooms (table/bed/bath/shower) and research office, a couple of quiet floors, 120/240 and ether/fiber in every room, presentation rooms with ‘lives next door’ IT support, etc.

Hell, I’d take that IT job. Keeping projectors working for a bunch of impatient creative types in exchange for getting to listen in on their presentations and earn their confidence enough to discuss their research as an interested peer while I repair their computers? Eating good food in a mess hall as I listen to quantum physics in one ear and mathematical networks in the other?! Onto the dream jobs list it goes, impossible as it might be in today’s academia.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#425

Post by jimbokun »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #149
TFNA wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.

Seeing unscrupulous people make it while the principled pay the price can break even the most virtuous person. It causes disappointment, resentment and a sense of injustice that can very easily radicalize into actual sociopathy. Society needs to realign itself if it wants to prevent this. Good people should win and be rewarded.

You say this like it's a recent development.

Creating a society where the unscrupulous are not unduly rewarded has been a long, painstaking slog over millennia that still hasn't been solved. And whatever progress has been made is always fragile as the lessons are so very easy to forget.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#426

Post by jimbokun »

zozbot234 wrote: post #209
astura wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though. For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.

That's a lot of money out in rural country, which is where veterinarians tend to be especially useful.

But much less than most doctors make.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#427

Post by locknitpicker »

Ekaros wrote: post #73
locknitpicker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.

At least those were on technical merits. However imaginary or arbitrary those merits were... Which I think was more healthy place.

[dead]

Re: What happened to nerds?

#428

Post by anygivnthursday »

jimbokun wrote: post #410
marmarama wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#429

Post by jimbokun »

danaris wrote: post #310
zozbot234 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow pla…

His "ventures" started out with PayPal. Not exactly nerd culture. For the nerdy ones, he bought his way in; he never actually founded Tesla. Everything you think you know about him, at least as expressed in this post, is a result of his carefully crafted PR propaganda.

Suggesting nerds were never interested in electronic payment systems seems like a very No True Scotsman argument to me.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#430

Post by ranger207 »

nerds built companies largely as a byproduct of their own interests. they made a lot of money because their technologies were great, but it was always about the tech, not the person. then vcs came in and convinced themselves that actually it was about the person, and started deploying money based on the people instead of the technology
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