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What happened to nerds?
81–90 of 541 posts
Re: What happened to nerds?
#82Money happened. Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple. Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clu…
I just want enough money to retire and write interesting open source software, but doing that in my 20s made me poor, so since then I am trying to speed run retirement so I can go back to it. Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
I'm coming full circle on the AI thing, it's almost entirely useless at creating a crafted result, so counterintuitively it places a greater premium on craft just at a time the industry as a whole are running in the opposite direction. There are some pieces of software I've thought of building now that I would not have considered a worthwhile pursuit a few years ago, solely due to this idea that a crafted result may have an increasingly inherent value in its own right
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
Re: What happened to nerds?
#83Nerds 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…
Isn't it the reddit model that absorbed them? Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more importan…
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Re: What happened to nerds?
#84Nerds 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…
I’d say everyone got on the internet, and it turned into the equivalent of your local bar for discussions
Then LLM bots got on and it turned into an email spam folder.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#85Interesting that he mentions Elon as being the archetypal "phase 3" nerd, since he was fairly high profile in all 3 phases and his reputation during the "phase 1" and "phase 2" timelines pretty much matched the author's description of the archetypal founder from those periods too.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
Re: What happened to nerds?
#86I 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 identify as a nerd and think I'm virtuous, therefore other people who identify as nerds should be virtuous in order to validate me"
Re: What happened to nerds?
#87> A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
Re: What happened to nerds?
#88Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Re: What happened to nerds?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it the reddit model that absorbed them? Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more importan…
> I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept? Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about? Life is too short to talk with walls disgu…
>>Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
Re: What happened to nerds?
#90This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as alr…
None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.