481–490 of 541 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Buying one's way in doesn't exactly negate being interested in the underlying venture. He still had to provide significant funding.
We won. I used to stay up all night watching Nasa launches and landings as a kid. I felt like an outcast. Now everyone’s wearing Nasa shirts like it’s cool and they don’t really have any good launches.
We used to be outcasts and now I look at youngsters and they’re doing the same things and it’s cool…? It’s like suddnely the jocks are the outcasts.
Apart from Woz, I don't consider the rest of the individuals as nerds at all. Those are loan sharks in the garb of nerds. Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.
All those C*Os and founders are good and successful politicians, not nerds. There was a colossal PR campaign to picture them as nerds for multiple reasons, but most of them never created like nerds would do (with a passion, going deep, enjoying the process & the result).
Politicians become successful due to skills incompatible with nerd mindset. Look at Linus, he could built an empire but he's a git.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.
And yet even more nerds than ever are devoting themselves to AI. I just wonder - to what end?
The logical end seems to be another case of pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb up, others be damned. Sadly seems to be a pretty universal human trait, whether intentional or not.
I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively.
Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages).
Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.
What? Elite athletes put in unimaginably more work than average athletes.
I 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…
People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans. There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're wil…
Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history. Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same cour…
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR. What do you mean by "persona"? Do you mean he's not really giving money away?
For instance if there was a homeless person on my street and I figured that giving them $500 would have good odds of having them OD and no longer being on my street... what looks like a charitable act very much isn't. So while it would contribute to a charitable persona it wouldn't reflect personality.