We're doomed
Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
61–70 of 284 posts
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#62>The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something. I recently traveled to San Francisco and as an o…
I've been to SF three times, and each time the oddest thing was going down 101 from the airport and seeing cURL commands and "you sped past that just like we sped past Snowflake" and such on billboards. It's like being on another planet where everyone is at work. (on the other hand, in DC there's ads on the metro for new engine upgrades for fighter jets, and i've gotten used to that.)
I don't miss billboards. Cows, trees, mountains, and lumberyards make better scenery.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#63The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris.
In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the same city which Kerouac, the Beats or Hippies ran around in. Or even the historically wealthy but cultural old money class, like Lewis Lapham’s family, or Michael Douglas’s character in The Game. Nope, all gone, and certainly no one there has ever read On the Road.
I suppose you could probably just blame this on how the people at the top behave: totally uninterested in funding culture, unlike the billionaires of yesteryear that built concert halls and libraries. And so a city which is hyper focused on one economic activity has no space for anything else.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#64> "The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage." (From the Cluely ad) JFC kill me now that is NOT a future I want to live in.
Has the world ever rewarded effort?
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#65Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#66Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.
Building a successful startup is very hard, and not just in the "it's a lot of hard work" sense, but also in terms of making good decisions. For the average person who went to college and worked in some other industry/capacity, the good decisions are very counterintuitive. Most VCs have no idea how to accuratly judge startups based on their core merit, or how to make good decision in startups (though they may think t…
Salesmanship all the way down.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#67The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…
You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers th…
Anyway, the original “power grid” guy was not some master craftsman or engineer, he was the original STEM influencer: Edison. He also popularized short videos.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#68> "The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage." (From the Cluely ad) JFC kill me now that is NOT a future I want to live in.
Has the world ever rewarded effort?
No. Not once in the entire history of the human race, from the time we were dwelling in caves to today, not in any tribe, village, hamlet, city, state, kingdom or nation, in no culture or circumstance, has effort ever been rewarded.
It's weird that homo sapiens sapiens has been around for approximately 300,000 years and it's never happened once. Not even once.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been to SF three times, and each time the oddest thing was going down 101 from the airport and seeing cURL commands and "you sped past that just like we sped past Snowflake" and such on billboards. It's like being on another planet where everyone is at work. (on the other hand, in DC there's ads on the metro for new engine upgrades for fighter jets, and i've gotten used to that.)
And in LA, every billboard is about Hollywood. It's something you just have to take in your stride. I do get that it is not nice to be constantly reminded of work. Trees would make a nicer view.
I visited L.A. in 2023 and the thing that shocked me was how many billboards were for products that I only ever heard advertised on podcasts. MeUndies, for example.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
GP didn't say it's not a problem and not worth fixing. They're claiming this is not a good fix.
They invented a dumb fix and complained that it wasn't good. Or, since we're being artistic in this thread: pulled a straw man out of their ass and complained that it smelled foul. I did the same with cancer/mortality to demonstrate the same trick in a setting where its flaws were more obvious. It's true that I said the quiet part out loud in a way that the post I was mocking did not, but the quiet part is especially…
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