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What happened to nerds?

mrmarket.lol

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Re: What happened to nerds?

#521

Post by jimbokun »

greycol wrote: post #490
jimbokun wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Persona is very much the outward facing acts and image of a person and could be orthogonal to personality. So to parse the posters comment you need to assume that being a charitable person is more than the act of given money to people in need and can also be a personality trait (or at least constituent virtues that expressing charity indicates can be part of personality). For instance if there was a homeless person o…

Well fuck the charitable personality of it doesn’t result in actually giving to people in need. I’ll take the charitable actions over that any day.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#522

Post by jimbokun »

lossyalgo wrote: post #453
jimbokun wrote: post #408

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?

It’s the only path for being able to pay your rent or mortgage without leaving the technology field altogether.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#523

Post by PaulHoule »

oliculipolicula wrote: post #496
plaidthunder wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill. It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death. If that were the…

Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle ( From not overly much to sometimes less than zero , or its counterpart There and back again ). For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"an…

Asimov trashed that word!

Foundation is so disappointing because the science of civilization turned out to be a front for mind controllers armed with the psychic powers that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell

insisted stories in Astounding Science Fiction had to have. (Also disappointing because it wasn't really finished but filled in with 1980s sequels that revealed more lies behind the lies instead of following the thread through the 1000 year interregnum)

Re: What happened to nerds?

#524

Post by thenthenthen »

sunaookami wrote: post #91
thenthenthen wrote: post #45

“Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan

Their founding story is also very interesting, highly recommend reading it! Did you know that one of the founders (Liu Wei) personally did customer support in the early years? https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo

Sure this story is bigger than Huawei, Xiaomi, BYD, Tencent etc. among ‘young’ Chinese (20-40). But prolly not here, thanks for sharing!

Re: What happened to nerds?

#525

Post by anygivnthursday »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #464
anygivnthursday wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And isnt that management job also tomorrow's disappearing IC role? A management agent seems quite possible to me.

What’s hard to automate about management is getting employees on board, not the concrete tasks. If an AI instructed you to spend 5 minutes a day talking to it about your day, would you do it?

No, thats not what gets automated. My comment was for the parent where IC roles transformed to agent managment roles, which I think just another role for agents to manage - themselves. In other words coordination of other agents, not humans, who are now out of the loop.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#526

Post by anygivnthursday »

fragmede wrote: post #451
anygivnthursday wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.

Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.

And there are also papers that tell thats effective https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950

Re: What happened to nerds?

#527

Post by iwontberude »

mystraline wrote: post #435
iwontberude wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you were black then you might think good god these yts gonna displace us again with a new new deal.

I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate. US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned. And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took ano…

I pray you are right, this country deserves a good spanking.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#528

Post by Spooky23 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #517
Spooky23 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a ZIRP problem. You didn’t have massive sprawl communities until the investment was there to build systems to keep Nazis and trolls away. Slashdot really highlighted this for me - if you followed the site and the core forum of founders, dealing with moderation was horrible. The writing of CmdrTaco over the years really made it sound like it just made him miserable.

If suffering more trolls is the price of not sterilizing the things that make humanity interesting then we've made the wrong trade off.

Agreed.

Re: What happened to nerds?

#529

Post by oliculipolicula »

PaulHoule wrote: post #523
oliculipolicula wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle ( From not overly much to sometimes less than zero , or its counterpart There and back again ). For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"an…

Asimov trashed that word! Foundation is so disappointing because the science of civilization turned out to be a front for mind controllers armed with the psychic powers that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell insisted stories in Astounding Science Fiction had to have. (Also disappointing because it wasn't really finished but filled in with 1980s sequels that revealed more lies behind the lies instead of f…

Y'all not gonna like this..

https://youtube.com/shorts/tp0vpuQxNpc

Re: What happened to nerds?

#530

Post by plaidthunder »

oliculipolicula wrote: post #496
plaidthunder wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill. It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death. If that were the…

Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle ( From not overly much to sometimes less than zero , or its counterpart There and back again ). For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"an…

Sure, but Turchin's overproduction of elites doesn't suggest a birth and death cycle right?

It's a system that gets out of balance and needs to adjust over time. He calls the process that moves the system out of whack the "wealth pump". I don't think tech oligarchs are responsible for the wealth pump, they just benefit from it.

Whatever causes organizational structures to decay seems like something more general than that. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Or maybe it's just some Nth level effect of entropy itself. Except so far removed from simple physical measurements that it feels intellectually lazy to just label whatever is happening as "entropy" and move on.

Unknown. Fun to think about. It also makes aging a little more interesting, because it creates a framework for me to the world events I live through within--even if it's all bs in the end.

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