The 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 depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.
It’s not limited to young people, unfortunately. About fifty years ago, executive leadership became far more visible in the public eye and combative with workers, all to juice share prices for their own compensation bumps. Conglomerates built on monstrous estates of interconnected business lines were gradually gutted and slashed to promote price bumps on shares, at the expense of profitable lines of business.
The net result is a (mostly) American business model predicated on Celebrity C-Suites doing highly visible things while those doing the hard work of creating value are shunted into offices and paid less compared to productivity gains over time. It shouldn’t be a surprise that social media and the internet have supercharged this, especially with groups like YC, Softbank, a16z, and other VCs splashing out Capital on flash over substance, exploitation over business fundamentals, “disruption” over societal benefit and symbiosis.
The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.
It's charitable to frame this as resentment towards capital who gets the "credit". I'm sure people would grumble about this regardless, but the real resentment stems from them systematically eroding our ability to afford housing, healthcare, and retirement.
Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach.
Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today.
but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive.
One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.
> Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity.
Got it in one. Would I like to travel First Class and stay in fancy hotels? Sure, but I’d much rather have a house that I can improve to meet my needs instead. Would I like a fancy luxury car with all the trimmings over my sixteen-year-old Honda? Absolutely, but the latter is paid off and gets us around just fine. Would I like that spiffy Hasselblad X2D and some lenses? You betcha, but I’d rather take a proper holiday for the first time in fifteen years instead of buying another thing.
The problem is that society at present isn’t organized to prioritize necessities like shelter and healthcare, favoring wealth extraction and exploitation instead. Workers don’t want megayachts and hypercars and butlers, we just want to live more than we work.
I love the idea of "downward mobility". In particular over the past 30 years we've created a new class of ultra-ultra-rich with even more wealth than the robber barons of the gilded age had, and we need to figure out how to dismantle that entire class. A puny 3% wealth tax would take over 100 years to knock them down, and that's presuming that their wealth is static and not growing at a rate much greater than 3%.
You clearly don't know what the term upward mobility means. It doesn't necessarily mean moving from one class to another - though that WOULD be included within its scope, however extraordinary an example it may be.
It can mean moving within a class.
Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.
Yep, that played a significant role in shaping how things turned out. We want a single source to blame, but rarely does history present us with such a neat villain (though god, Reagan comes so close to being one, at least for the specific issues important to me).
Understanding the interconnectedness of systems beyond your own realm of expertise is how you learn what needs to be done to fix issues - and avoid falling for snake oil “silver bullets”/“one weird trick” populist positions.
>The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.
Naturally, unmentioned are those shut out of reasonable opportunities for meaningful productivity, regardless of technical potential (but largely in line with (lack of) social capital). A few years of this maybe encourages an entrepreneurial spirit. Two decades is quite convincing that there's no place for them in the current order.
The upwardly-mobile opportunity hoarders need to understand, much as the wealth hoarders ought to, that the whole thing falls apart without buy-in from the "losers".
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 that cook themselves and everyone around them. Hurricanes that blow half the grid into the sea in 5 minutes etc etc etc. We learn things the hard way. And always have. There was never any master plan. Beauty happened inspite of it with huge hidden costs that only historians tabulate and very few have the time and luxury to study. Individual Mastery is not magic. Because complexity and unpredictability in the universe is way more than what one 3 inch chimp brain can fully comprehend or ever handle. But we create more problems by pretending limits to what chimps can do dont exist. Look up Theory of Bounded Rationality.
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.
Tesla was the real power grid guy. The scope of his invention from the generators at Niagara Falls power generation to the transformers to the motors is pretty impressive. More so given that he was eventually given the patents (originally issued to Marconi) for radio transmission.
The fact that Edison is pervasively over-credited is really another example of the highly visible executive claiming personal credit for the labors of employees.
Steinmetz contributed heavily to AC systems theory which helped understand and expand transmission. while Scott contributed a lot to transformer theory and design (I have to find his Transformer book.)
In addition to the limits of human planning and intellect, I'd also add incentives:
as cynical as it sounds, you won't get rewarded for building a more safe, robust and reliable machine or system, until it is agreed upon that the risks or problems you address actually occur, and that the costs for prevention actually pays off.
For example, there would be no insurances without laws and governments, because no person or company ever would pay into a promise that has never been held.
This is a tradeoff. There is value in being able to do upgrades to lines above ground. Underground is not automatically better. Like most things, it depends.
That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.
Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year.
Linux is still written by a couple of people.
Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire web browser behind the scenes…
Eventually you’ll have lead engineers at Apple who don’t know what computers really are anymore, but just keep trying to slop more JavaScript in layer 15 of their OS.
I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.
I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.
Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.
Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.
There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.
Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.
All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux
Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.
I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.
Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
This is certainly false. There are plenty of young people that are incredibly talented. I worked with some of them. And you can probably name some from the open source projects you follow.
I have some level of faith here. Those kids you mention may not be visible online, but they certainly deliver. Honestly, it is not a good example, because that name is well known, but Gerganov came out of the blue for me.. I am not saying we don't lose more to the social media and whatnot.. but they are there.
Young people's brains have always been mush, according to the older generation. Your brain is mush according to those older than you. The term for this is juvenoia, and it's as old as humanity.
And yet, when they worried about what television would do to a generation of brains, they were right. The Boomers, as a generation, never became wise, and their brains are mushier than ever.
Nah this isn't right. We also have access to a ton of information even regarding arcane things such as writing x86 boot sequence in real mode or writing boot loaders. More now than ever before.
In fact today on GitHub alone you can find hobbyist OSs that are far far more advanced what Linuses little weekend turd ever was originally.
You should go outside of the "web" world. Automotive, medical or heavy industries. You will see that their are plenty of low level developers/engineers our there. Yes even ones born after 2000.
I thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.
This is one consequence of removing all gatekeepers. Previously you’d only need to be known by your manager and his manager, or in the arts, by a small group of tastemakers.
Nowadays there are no tastemakers, and thus you need to be a public figure in order to even find your audience / niche in the first place.
> Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ).
That's always been the case depending on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to be Corporation Employee #41,737, or work for the government, you don't need a "personal brand"; just a small social network who knows your skills is good enough. If you're in your early 20s and trying to get 9 figures of investment in your AI startup, yeah you need to project an image as Roy from the article is doing.
It's amplified a bit in the social media world, but remember that only ~0.5% of people actively comment or post on social media. 99.5% of the world is invisible and doing just fine.
This idea seems to be lost on a lot of people. It's a shame to see mastery (and by extension, quality) becoming an anachronism and frankly, terrifying. There's a certain hubris associated with all of this that seems to be blinding people to the reality that, no, you actually do want humans around who actually know how things are put together and work.
That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.
An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.
He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.
Has it ever been any different? In school, the majority of kids just wanted to have fun. As one example, in 9th grade I took "yearbook class". This was a long time ago, no idea if they do yearbooks still but I'm old and so this was before desktop publishing, it was 1979. In any case, of 30 kids in the class ~3 of them did all the work. The others couldn't or wouldn't follow the print company's instructions for layout.
Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.
The original system that created those folks was also quite hype driven. I think more signal than "is there a lot of hype" is needed to determine if the system is broken.
I love Huygens Optica, but the mastery of one rather old Dutch man isn't really much of a counterexample when we're talking about the generation that is coming up behind us.
Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.
I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.
> secure the internet...
Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.
Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...
I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.
I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.
The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.
I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph:
> Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
Believing this feels incredibly unwise to me. I think it's going to do more damage than the AI itself will.
To any impressionable students reading this: the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well. No AI can take it away from you, and the more powerful AI will get the more you will be able to harness it's potential. Don't let these people saying this ahit discourage you from building a good life.
"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well."
I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been told that the advice to think critically wasn't meant for me.
For what it's worth, most of the pennies I've earned definitely came from my ability to think and communicate well.
I can't help but wonder whether the person who gave you advice "to think critically wasn't for [you]" didn't have YOUR best interests at heart, and/or wasn't a wise person.
I also worked jobs where I was actively discouraged to think critically. Those jobs made me itchy and I moved on. Every time I did it was one step back, three steps forward. My career has been a weird zigzag like that but trended up exponentially over 25 years.
We all have our anecdotes we can share. But ask yourself this: if you get better at making decisions and communicating with other people, who is that most likely to benefit?
Critical, individualistic thinking is what the west does best. The east seems to be better at implementation and improvement once provided with a new idea. That’s where we currently stand atleast, who knows how China will do in the future. Maybe they’re the total package but that remains to be seen.
Critical thinking is slave mentality, man. Master mentality, the mentality of the guys who FUCK, is knowing that what you want to happen WILL happen and doing everything you can to make it happen.
This. Just thinking that those with power would even allow that leveling seems on the verge of impossible. In a sense, you can already see it practice. Online models are carefully 'made safe' ( neutered is my preferred term ), while online inference is increasingly more expensive.
And that does not even account for whether, 'bozo' will be able to use the tool right.. because an expert with a tool will steal beat a non-expert.
It is a brain race. It may differ in details, but the shape remains very much the same.
In the context of the rest of the piece, I read this as sarcasm. The author is making fun of the species of narcissistic silly con valley techbro who actually believes such nonsense.
It is not sarcasm he is fleshing out this sentence earlier in the paragraph, "One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event"
Right, but in the context of this article about these wretched enfents terribles, and later when we get to the rationalist termite colony, it's clearly something to chuckle at. Like, the fact that people think this "bifurcation event" idea is real is legitimately funny.
I see your point, but I don't think he's being sarcastic in this paragraph. To me this paragraph isn't sarcasm rather he's presently a serious factual recounting of the logic driving AI evangelists that he then undermines by contrasting it with the callousness, messiness, and illogic of the people pushing this narrative. (I too had a good chuckle at the termite description)
But this is veering into lit crit territory, so agree to disagree
It's a really bad take because AI is already "superhuman" in general knowledge, but it still has trouble figuring out whether I should drive or walk to the car wash place.
I don't think that this is supposed to be a statement of the author's beliefs. The whole article is dripping with contempt for AI bros and silicon valley culture in general.
Maybe if you read past these paragraph it would have been clearer?
<< The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.
I genuinely like the author's style ( not in the quote above; its here for a different reason ). It paints a picture in a way that I still am unable to. I suck at stories.
Anyway, back to the quote. If that is true, then we are in pickle. Claw and its security issues is just a symptom of that 'break things' spirit. And yes, this has been true for a while, but we keep increasing both in terms of speed and scale. I am not sure what the breaking point is, but at certain point real world may balk.
Seeing a Substack email collection box where you have to agree to whatever its terms are to subscribe with a skip to content link of "No, I'm a coward" is... an experience. I'll take your word he's an excellent writer, if there's an RSS feed maybe I'll subscribe.
I think there has always been some truth to that, long before AI. Being driven to get up and just do the thing is the most important factor in getting things done. Expertise and competency are force multipliers, but you can pick those up along the way - I think people who prefer to front-load a lot of theory find this distasteful, sometimes even ego-threatening, but it's held true in my observations across my career.
Yes, sometimes people who barrel forward can create a mess, and there are places where careful deliberation and planning really pay off, but in most cases, my observation has been that the "do-ers" produce a lot of good work, letting the structure of the problem space reveal itself as they go along and adapting as needed, without getting hung up on academic purity or aesthetically perfect code; in contrast, some others can fall into pathological over-thinking and over-planning, slowing down the team with nitpicks that don't ultimately matter, demanding to know what your contingencies are for x y z and w without accepting "I'll figure it out when or if any of those actually happen" - meanwhile their own output is much slower, and while it may be more likely to work according to their own plan the first time without bugs, it wasn't worth the extra time compared to the first approach. It's premature optimization but applied to the whole development process instead of just a piece of code.
I think the over-thinkers are more prone to shun AI because they can't be sure that every line of code was done exactly how they would do it, and they see (perhaps an unwarranted) value in everything being structured according to a perfect human-approved plan and within their full understanding; I do plan out the important parts of my architecture to a degree before starting, and that's a large part of my job as a lead/architect, but overall I find the most value in the do-er approach I described, which AI is fantastic at helping iterate on. I don't feel like I'm committing some philosophical sin when it makes some module as a blackbox and it works without me carefully combing through it - the important part is that it works without blowing up resource usage and I can move on to the next thing.
The way the interviewed person described fast iteration with feedback has always been how I learned best - I had a lot of fun and foundational learning playing with the (then-brand-new) HTML5 stuff like making games on canvas elements and using 3D rendering libraries. And this results in a lot of learning by osmosis, and I can confirm that's also the case using AI to iterate on something you're unfamiliar with - shaders in my example very recently. Starting off with a fully working shader that did most of the cool things I wanted it to do, generated by a prompt, was super cool and motivating to me - and then as I iterated on it and incorporated different things into it, with or without the AI, I learned a lot about shaders.
Overall, I don't think the author's appraisal is entirely wrong, but the result isn't necessarily a bad thing - motivation to accomplish things has always been the most important factor, and now other factors are somewhat diminished while the motivation factor is amplified. Intelligence and expertise can't be discounted, but the important of front-loading them can easily be overstated.
>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 outsider this was pretty much the reaction I had.
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 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.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
Song of the Open Road - Ogden Nash
It was weirdly fascinating to read. And also now I get why tech journalism contemplates the idea of 20/40/60% people being useless -- they don't invent it, nor made scientific prediction -- they just saw those junkies in the streets of SF. The only mistake they make is that the whole world can't be SF, where many streams of money make this great flood.
This hits especially hard for projects like OlenBSD and FreeBSD. The unsung heroes.
Linux gets some fame and recognition, meanwhile OpenBSD and FreeBSD are the ones they power routers, CDNs and so many other cool shit while also being legit good systems that even deserve attention for the desktop.
It's a numbers game. You only need one in twenty con artists to become wildly successful before they're caught, and your overall con artist portfolio is guaranteed to win out.
And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.
Salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Con artists are the easiest to swindle. The people who believe they're immune to being tricked are always the ones who get tricked the most.
Have you been paying attention to what has been happening for the last year? Now is the era of con artists: break the law, pay a small vic, and you're free to scam again.
Why wouldn't investors give these people money? It's not like being an investor implies having morales, all they care about is making money whether it's legal or not and luckily for them crime not only pays but it's legal now too.
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 they do), so instead they focus on things like "will this founder be able to hype up this startup and sell the next round so I can mark it up on my books".
So... You think it's because the VCs are conning their investors and those con-man are the best extend and pretend opportunities?
I can believe in that. But just a couple of years ago it was clearly happening because the VCs wanted those people to sell the companies into some mark and return real money to them. I wonder when did the investors became the marks?
Mayb in some extreme cases, but I wouldn't go so far as using the "con" word most of the time.
The hardest part of startups is probably the making good decisions part. To be a good VC you need to be better at founders at judging startup decisions, AND you need to be good at LP deal flow AND you need to be good at startup deal flow. LP deal flow has to come first (otherwise there is no fund), and because of zirp a lot of VCs got funds up without good startup deal flow or the ability to judge startups well.
In other words it's hard to be good a VC too, but for a while it was artificially easy to be a bad VC.
I mean whenever things like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and SoftBank came into existence. They've been the biggest marks to unload your dumbest equity into for as long as I've been paying attention (so at least 10-15 years now), and at least as long as Jim Cramer and his ilk have been hyping dog shit IPOs to drop on clueless retail.
This reminds me of the vacuum substory in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, except vacuums replaced by AI.
Basically: nobody wants AI, but soon everyone needs AI to sort through all the garbage being generated by AI. Eventually you spend more time managing your AI that you have no time for anything else, your town has built extra power generators just to support all the AI, and your stuff is more disorganized before AI was ever invented.
The 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.
SF is quite small compared to the other cities you mentioned, both in land and population density, and is quite a young city in comparison. The beats and hippies were a flash in the pan. They left a mark, but many dispersed rather quickly, and the rest have been ironed out for many decades.
The exact same thing is true of smaller cities like Pittsburgh, as well. The point is that their cultural histories still manage to exist today, even at some level, whereas tech has turned SF into a historical culture-free zone, entirely detached from what SF was even 25 years ago.
I can't say I know much about Pittsburgh's culture, but I wonder how it would have held up over decades of insane money being pumped in and wild rent increases? SF has changed a lot over time, but it has a boom town history of being invaded by hustlers looking for money, so I guess that's something. Gay pride has persisted in SF as well, strong pockets of Asian culture, a saucy underground, etc... Tech has definitely left a mark, maybe not physical libraries and concert halls, but Long Now and the Internet Archive are doing good work to preserve culture.
There's a famous paper called The Californian Ideology (1996) that shows how all these seemingly incompatible elements of the Bay Area's past created the culture at the time of the dot com boom:
I don't think that's true at all. There's plenty of weird post hippies around, including Burning Man culture and the libertarian roots of a lot of the tech world.
But if you're immersed in the modern tech world, you're just ignoring all that.
The author managed to find the strangest people & phenomena in San Francisco and make it sound like they’re a complete picture of life there. But there are packed brunch spots and parks on sunny weekends that would disagree very strongly.
San Francisco is a tolerant place. Tolerance is how you get Juicero or Theranos and whatever Cluely seems to have pivoted to, but it’s also how you get Twitter, Uber, Dropbox.. and thousands of others.
So it is crucial to consider proportionality. Taking some bad with some good results in getting a little bit of bad and a hell of a lot of good. But if you aren’t careful, all you’ll see is the bad.
Please, they're ngmi with no fat. The unhealthy frat boy office sounds like a throwback to the early '10s. What woman would work there? They seem poised to crash and burn out.
Historical aristocracy were defined by eating meat, while their subjects ate grain. "Beef" for the Normans, "cows" raised and slaughtered by the Anglo-Saxons.
Great article. I recently went through Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon; the sequence of eccentric personalities in this article reminded me of a similar section that Pynchon has in the bay area. Unfortunately the personages interviewed here are not only real but climb beyond any fictional parody.
> Not long before I arrived in the Bay Area, I’d been involved in a minor but intense dispute with the rationalist community over a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction
Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?
In general long meandering semi-factual pieces like this, with odd historical excursions, are one of his things and I don't know anyone else that does it quite the same. (Hmm... oddly enough Scott Alexander, who he cites here, also does some similarly Borgesian stuff, but with a different bent.) One of my favorite writers and I recommend pretty much everything he's done since the early 2010s.
I'm skeptical that this fully replaces thinking, though. It may replace certain forms of effort, but historically every increase in leverage just shifts where the bottleneck is
> The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window.
Witnessed this first hand on the train the other day. A woman on her laptop. On the left half of the screen, Microsoft Word. On the right, ChatGPT. Text being dragged directly from one to the other.
I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that people with useless bullshit jobs have found a way to become even more useless than they already were before. It's impressive, in a way.
I used to "spam" (as you call it) about nuclear fission on Hacker News. But this the wrong crowd. Hopelessly wrong.
Poison Fountain is top of mind currently so it's understandable I talk about it constantly. Even to my wife. Also I think it's highly relevant to the excellent Harper's article we're reading today.
Whether the Redditors "like the project or not" reflects whether or not they think there is a problem with mindlessness.
What they actually say is almost immaterial. Either it's FUD about malware or illegality or something they imagined without evidence about how easy the poison is to filter. These fictions are just a manifestation of their opposition to the idea.
You can see that among the bot-heads on r/programming (perhaps forced to embrace mindlessness by career considerations) there's nothing that can be said without attack. A dozen downvotes immediately. They actually logged into Hacker News and posted FUD directly to the HN post I linked to. Spectacular.
The opposite is true on r/hacking. Except for a few in opposition (some of whom did unsuccessfully attempt to DDOS the fountain) most people sympathize and agree. They don't want to be dependent on Sam Altman or Elon Musk for their cognition.
Consumers have accepted any addictive non-essential or useless web app until 2023. This time CEOs like Pichai and Nadella are going too far.
There is a red line and it is AI. People viscerally hate it and pushing it will just make people question whether they need computers or the Internet at all (hint, they do not).
CEOs fell validated by the mediocre psychopath parts of their developers who always push the latest fad in order to gain an advantage and control better developers. Fads generally last about two years, and this is it.
It will be very gratifying if the AI hubris is Silicon Valley's downfall and completely needlessly ruins the industry just because the same CEOs who read a couple of science fiction books and had rocket envy now have AI envy.
I can't tell if I find it funny or sad how obvious it is that Roy needs to be on several psychiatric medications that he isn't on, and that he's on a fair amount of cocaine (or insert whatever uppers the kids are into nowadays) that he shouldn't be on.
I'm not sure I can trust the author's characterization of Roy, though. I got the impression that they don't like any of the people they interviewed (which, you know, fair), but that doesn't get even close to the depths of hatred towards Roy that they sub-textually exude throughout the article.
If their portrayal is even half accurate, though, that's a perfectly reasonable amount of hate.
"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.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."
I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.
It'll benefit established folks as the pipeline withers but at the expense of society - things were already sufficiently borked before this phenomenon.
> A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation.
Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.
I think the "agency" the article talks about is really just "willingness to take risks". And the reason some people are high outliers on that scale is a combination of:
* Coming from such a level of privilege that they will be completely fine even if they lose over and over again.
* Willingness to push any losses onto other undeserving people without experiencing guilt.
* A psychological compulsion towards impulsive behavior and inability to think about long-term consequences.
In short, rich selfish sociopaths.
Some amount of risk-taking is necessary for innovation. But the level we are seeing today is clearly unsustainable and destructive to the fabric of society. It's the difference between confining a series of little bangs to produce an internal combustion engine versus just throwing hand grenades around the public square. The willingness to take chances needs to be surrounded by a structure that minimizes the blast radius of failure.
Interesting to compare to 2008. At least here, I think we're building something? Whereas then, it was pure, unabashed, siphoning as much as possible out of the financial system from the average American into the pockets of a privileged, self-righteous few, followed by an immediate burning down and parachute out of the whole thing once the cracks started to form.
> * A psychological compulsion towards impulsive behavior and inability to think about long-term consequences.
To be a little more generous, this third point is actually a classic symptom of ADHD. I've known some (non-CEO) folks like this and the kind of risks they take in their personal lives seemed completely alien to me.
This became clear to me over the last few years. We are quickly returning to a world of entrenched social hierarchy where there are lords and peasants and little room even for social mobility.
With the corpse of meritocracy too rotted to deny at this point the elite simply seem to have run out of lies for placating the people.
Or, more likely the people are so sickeningly impotent, that’s there’s no need for the lies anymore. The new aristocracy will prevail over liberalism and everything the west lied of being part of the their values for years.
The west had been fighting this since it's founding.
“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
― Ulysses S. Grant
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.
Everyone knows someone who worked for years on a project only for it to go nowhere. Pour years into a business that failed. Spend years getting a degree that was useless. Effort might be a part of many people's success stories, but it's not the thing that literally gets rewarded. And conversely, many people get rewarded for things that require relatively little effort.
I suppose I should have said that the correlation between effort and reward has never been 1.0 and has often been a lot lower than we like to believe.
More than the prose itself, I think it's that what he's writing about isn't exactly "common knowledge" but rather shrewd, piercing observation.
The way he understands and captures the dynamics makes you think he's a native to the "bay area" tech scene or immersed in TPOT. Yet here's a complete outsider, pinpointing the unstated core premises and paradoxes of these communities.
> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.”
Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?
It seems people have figured out that sociopathy and self-promotion are rewarded in the current culture and that being a con artist has essentially no consequences anymore. And all of it is done by ambitious people who are p-zombies, lacking an inner life or curiosity about anything but how to make more money.
the article treats agency like it's new but founders have always been delusional risk takers. the difference is VCs used to demand a working prototype before writing the check
Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, LLMs are "simply" pseudo-semantic search engines; if you know what you're looking for, they work pretty well for fulfilling "satisfiable" searches, that is, those aimed at content produced by some other human scattered across the infosphere.
The generation of code and images fits right into this; the famous, historical "astronaut on a horse" is, in substance, a collage of images, images produced by other humans and "assembled".
On a broader scale, this means that humanity will more or less be able to count on Conrad Gessner's Universal Library/Biblioteca Universalis/Library of Babel, and generally speaking, we can aim for a future where humans produce knowledge and machines put it into practice. Like any evolution, this will lead to some losses while gaining something else.
The current explosion is mostly hype and a nazi-managerial wet dream; as for universities, the reality is that they are largely obsolete, so it's only natural that students, rather than seeking knowledge, which is of little use to them as it's disconnected from the present, are just looking for a piece of paper to build a career otherwise.
"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines."
What people really think about Silicon Valley. Not so fun to devalue people now is it? Tech is biggest group of assholes.
It's all about the pathetic rationalization we have placed on greed and profit. We can make millions redundant with AI and still have a social safety net that keeps society stable and healthy.
But no, that wouldn't be "fair" to the people who generate millions of net worth every 5 minute.
Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and the level of billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich
And I believe this is useful and thought-provoking reading in this context of how unbridled Capitalism is exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots.
Wage slavery: The illusion of freedom: Exploitation Under Capitalism: Marx’s Analysis of Labor and Profit:
And no, the solution to the problems are not blind unchecked communism (which itself leads to fascism), but perhaps some more ethical & humane methods are needed for an overhaul of world society, and economic & geopolitical regimes.
If you could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire in the country, and sell all of them for market rate without putting any downward pressure on prices at all, that sum would not fund 10 months of the federal government's current spending levels, and even less if you wanted new programs.
If you cured 100% of all cancer it would only reduce US deaths by 20%. Clearly we should conclude that cancer isn't a problem and isn't worth curing, and also that heart disease and unintentional injuries and so on are also not problems and also not worth trying to 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 important to debunk so I make no apology for doing so.
Once we did that we'd have a lot less personal influence over that spending budget, at least.
But focusing on current assets and not accumulation of wealth is misleading. You'd also have to allocate the ongoing wealth accumulation to get a better sense of things.
You could make 900 people go from billionaires to high net worth individuals and nearly fund the exorbitant spending of the US government that directly supports 330 million people for a year.
I think you might be overselling how good that is.
Trump has added 2 trillion (unilaterally and illegally) to the debt with today's Supreme Court decision, while giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.
The Republican policy for 40 years had been to create unsustainable and unworkable Federal government funding/spending instead of to work to creating a working, fiscally sane Federal government. It's hard to build a working government in a two party system when one side is malicious/duplicitous.
This article is a portrait of three Sociopathic Zoomers : the twitter poster, the cheating app guy and the teenage scammer. All three are net negatives to society.
Hahah, I had the same thought. My eyes rolled out of my skull after the second paragraph.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers.
I'm fascinated by hackernews' etiquette, both explicit and implicit, that think 10,000 words of turgid prose that reek with dismissiveness and contempt "(Rationalists, like termites, live in eusocial mounds.)" are valuable, but your curt dismissal of it is rude.
This but unironically. The future is for "shape rotators" which is unironically the skilled blue collar trades people who are about to mog the rest of white collar work that dies in 24 months.
Sucks to be a wordcel. The school yard bullies won.
I had an AI summarize this article, and it said it's super pessimistic. It’s basically arguing that summarizing is a bad idea. yet I did it. ( I am happy )
The 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 depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.
It’s not limited to young people, unfortunately. About fifty years ago, executive leadership became far more visible in the public eye and combative with workers, all to juice share prices for their own compensation bumps. Conglomerates built on monstrous estates of interconnected business lines were gradually gutted and slashed to promote price bumps on shares, at the expense of profitable lines of business.
The net result is a (mostly) American business model predicated on Celebrity C-Suites doing highly visible things while those doing the hard work of creating value are shunted into offices and paid less compared to productivity gains over time. It shouldn’t be a surprise that social media and the internet have supercharged this, especially with groups like YC, Softbank, a16z, and other VCs splashing out Capital on flash over substance, exploitation over business fundamentals, “disruption” over societal benefit and symbiosis.
The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.
It's charitable to frame this as resentment towards capital who gets the "credit". I'm sure people would grumble about this regardless, but the real resentment stems from them systematically eroding our ability to afford housing, healthcare, and retirement.
Yes and broadly speaking those concrete concerns can be considered in aggregate as "upward mobility."
Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach.
Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today.
This discussion circles around it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074389
but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive.
One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.
> Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity.
Got it in one. Would I like to travel First Class and stay in fancy hotels? Sure, but I’d much rather have a house that I can improve to meet my needs instead. Would I like a fancy luxury car with all the trimmings over my sixteen-year-old Honda? Absolutely, but the latter is paid off and gets us around just fine. Would I like that spiffy Hasselblad X2D and some lenses? You betcha, but I’d rather take a proper holiday for the first time in fifteen years instead of buying another thing.
The problem is that society at present isn’t organized to prioritize necessities like shelter and healthcare, favoring wealth extraction and exploitation instead. Workers don’t want megayachts and hypercars and butlers, we just want to live more than we work.
I love the idea of "downward mobility". In particular over the past 30 years we've created a new class of ultra-ultra-rich with even more wealth than the robber barons of the gilded age had, and we need to figure out how to dismantle that entire class. A puny 3% wealth tax would take over 100 years to knock them down, and that's presuming that their wealth is static and not growing at a rate much greater than 3%.
You clearly don't know what the term upward mobility means. It doesn't necessarily mean moving from one class to another - though that WOULD be included within its scope, however extraordinary an example it may be.
It can mean moving within a class.
Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.
> About fifty years ago
Many things changed around that specific time, and I think it does deserve scrutiny. Implied cultural factors seem to be merely correlates of greater historical tide, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Nixon_sho...
My take here is a monetarist.
Yep, that played a significant role in shaping how things turned out. We want a single source to blame, but rarely does history present us with such a neat villain (though god, Reagan comes so close to being one, at least for the specific issues important to me).
Understanding the interconnectedness of systems beyond your own realm of expertise is how you learn what needs to be done to fix issues - and avoid falling for snake oil “silver bullets”/“one weird trick” populist positions.
>The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.
Naturally, unmentioned are those shut out of reasonable opportunities for meaningful productivity, regardless of technical potential (but largely in line with (lack of) social capital). A few years of this maybe encourages an entrepreneurial spirit. Two decades is quite convincing that there's no place for them in the current order.
The upwardly-mobile opportunity hoarders need to understand, much as the wealth hoarders ought to, that the whole thing falls apart without buy-in from the "losers".
Tang ping bai lan.
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 that cook themselves and everyone around them. Hurricanes that blow half the grid into the sea in 5 minutes etc etc etc. We learn things the hard way. And always have. There was never any master plan. Beauty happened inspite of it with huge hidden costs that only historians tabulate and very few have the time and luxury to study. Individual Mastery is not magic. Because complexity and unpredictability in the universe is way more than what one 3 inch chimp brain can fully comprehend or ever handle. But we create more problems by pretending limits to what chimps can do dont exist. Look up Theory of Bounded Rationality.
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.
Tesla was the real power grid guy. The scope of his invention from the generators at Niagara Falls power generation to the transformers to the motors is pretty impressive. More so given that he was eventually given the patents (originally issued to Marconi) for radio transmission.
The fact that Edison is pervasively over-credited is really another example of the highly visible executive claiming personal credit for the labors of employees.
Two others who come to mind are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Scott_(engineer)
Steinmetz contributed heavily to AC systems theory which helped understand and expand transmission. while Scott contributed a lot to transformer theory and design (I have to find his Transformer book.)
Very valuable point!
In addition to the limits of human planning and intellect, I'd also add incentives:
as cynical as it sounds, you won't get rewarded for building a more safe, robust and reliable machine or system, until it is agreed upon that the risks or problems you address actually occur, and that the costs for prevention actually pays off.
For example, there would be no insurances without laws and governments, because no person or company ever would pay into a promise that has never been held.
It would all be undergrounded and made resilient, if it weren't for perverse incentives.
This is a tradeoff. There is value in being able to do upgrades to lines above ground. Underground is not automatically better. Like most things, it depends.
> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.
That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.
Just look at current software.
Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year.
Linux is still written by a couple of people.
Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire web browser behind the scenes…
Eventually you’ll have lead engineers at Apple who don’t know what computers really are anymore, but just keep trying to slop more JavaScript in layer 15 of their OS.
I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.
I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.
Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.
Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.
There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.
Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.
All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux
Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.
I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.
Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
This is certainly false. There are plenty of young people that are incredibly talented. I worked with some of them. And you can probably name some from the open source projects you follow.
I have some level of faith here. Those kids you mention may not be visible online, but they certainly deliver. Honestly, it is not a good example, because that name is well known, but Gerganov came out of the blue for me.. I am not saying we don't lose more to the social media and whatnot.. but they are there.
Young people's brains have always been mush, according to the older generation. Your brain is mush according to those older than you. The term for this is juvenoia, and it's as old as humanity.
And yet, when they worried about what television would do to a generation of brains, they were right. The Boomers, as a generation, never became wise, and their brains are mushier than ever.
Nah this isn't right. We also have access to a ton of information even regarding arcane things such as writing x86 boot sequence in real mode or writing boot loaders. More now than ever before.
In fact today on GitHub alone you can find hobbyist OSs that are far far more advanced what Linuses little weekend turd ever was originally.
Their success is not gated by technical aspects.
> Linux is still written by a couple of people.
How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).
You should go outside of the "web" world. Automotive, medical or heavy industries. You will see that their are plenty of low level developers/engineers our there. Yes even ones born after 2000.
Windows is being deliberately enshittified by rent-seekers.
Rent-seeking and Promo-seeking is the only motivation for the people with the power.
None of that class wants to make a better product, or make life better or easier for the people.
I thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.
This is one consequence of removing all gatekeepers. Previously you’d only need to be known by your manager and his manager, or in the arts, by a small group of tastemakers.
Nowadays there are no tastemakers, and thus you need to be a public figure in order to even find your audience / niche in the first place.
> Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ).
That's always been the case depending on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to be Corporation Employee #41,737, or work for the government, you don't need a "personal brand"; just a small social network who knows your skills is good enough. If you're in your early 20s and trying to get 9 figures of investment in your AI startup, yeah you need to project an image as Roy from the article is doing.
It's amplified a bit in the social media world, but remember that only ~0.5% of people actively comment or post on social media. 99.5% of the world is invisible and doing just fine.
That's a force you move away from, not towards.
Maybe publicly invisible, but a personal network and resume have always been important in a career.
This idea seems to be lost on a lot of people. It's a shame to see mastery (and by extension, quality) becoming an anachronism and frankly, terrifying. There's a certain hubris associated with all of this that seems to be blinding people to the reality that, no, you actually do want humans around who actually know how things are put together and work.
That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.
An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.
He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.
You should ask your friend what they do with all of the half cents that are floating around in the banking system.
> Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails.
This has to be an exaggeration.
If the banking system failed? Would be pretty bad...
I can personally attest that I'll die if my bank's COBOL mainframe fails. Really got a lot riding on this.
Has it ever been any different? In school, the majority of kids just wanted to have fun. As one example, in 9th grade I took "yearbook class". This was a long time ago, no idea if they do yearbooks still but I'm old and so this was before desktop publishing, it was 1979. In any case, of 30 kids in the class ~3 of them did all the work. The others couldn't or wouldn't follow the print company's instructions for layout.
Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.
The original system that created those folks was also quite hype driven. I think more signal than "is there a lot of hype" is needed to determine if the system is broken.
The scary part is that you can't just "hire mastery" on demand. You have to grow it
Have you seen "Tech Ingredients"? People like that and Dutch scientist/engineer who runs "Huygens Optics"
I love Huygens Optica, but the mastery of one rather old Dutch man isn't really much of a counterexample when we're talking about the generation that is coming up behind us.
No that is an example of the former
Just wanna say, I love this paragraph so much, I created HN account just to upvote it.
Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.
> The folks who keep the power grid running ...
I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.
> secure the internet...
Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.
Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...
I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.
I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.
The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.
stacking turtles????
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
We have AI now. The machines will manage their own infrastructure.
I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph:
> Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
Believing this feels incredibly unwise to me. I think it's going to do more damage than the AI itself will.
To any impressionable students reading this: the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well. No AI can take it away from you, and the more powerful AI will get the more you will be able to harness it's potential. Don't let these people saying this ahit discourage you from building a good life.
This part was a long description of the zeitgeist in SF; it was not meant to be the author’s own opinion.
I realize that now, and feel a bit foolish for being triggered by it. It's too late for me to edit my comment now though.
"the most valuable and important thing you can learn will be to think critically and communicate well."
I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been told that the advice to think critically wasn't meant for me.
For what it's worth, most of the pennies I've earned definitely came from my ability to think and communicate well.
I can't help but wonder whether the person who gave you advice "to think critically wasn't for [you]" didn't have YOUR best interests at heart, and/or wasn't a wise person.
I also worked jobs where I was actively discouraged to think critically. Those jobs made me itchy and I moved on. Every time I did it was one step back, three steps forward. My career has been a weird zigzag like that but trended up exponentially over 25 years.
We all have our anecdotes we can share. But ask yourself this: if you get better at making decisions and communicating with other people, who is that most likely to benefit?
Critical, individualistic thinking is what the west does best. The east seems to be better at implementation and improvement once provided with a new idea. That’s where we currently stand atleast, who knows how China will do in the future. Maybe they’re the total package but that remains to be seen.
Why conflate critical thinking with individualistic values?
It seems you are unnecessarily muddying the water.
In my opinion there is a correlation there. I think individualistic societies are better at thinking of new paradigm shifting ideas.
Critical thinking is slave mentality, man. Master mentality, the mentality of the guys who FUCK, is knowing that what you want to happen WILL happen and doing everything you can to make it happen.
/s if not obvious
<< Believing this feels incredibly unwise to me.
This. Just thinking that those with power would even allow that leveling seems on the verge of impossible. In a sense, you can already see it practice. Online models are carefully 'made safe' ( neutered is my preferred term ), while online inference is increasingly more expensive.
And that does not even account for whether, 'bozo' will be able to use the tool right.. because an expert with a tool will steal beat a non-expert.
It is a brain race. It may differ in details, but the shape remains very much the same.
In the context of the rest of the piece, I read this as sarcasm. The author is making fun of the species of narcissistic silly con valley techbro who actually believes such nonsense.
Ah, I struggle with sarcasm sometimes and I was a bit distracted while reading. I'll give it another chance.
It is not sarcasm he is fleshing out this sentence earlier in the paragraph, "One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event"
Right, but in the context of this article about these wretched enfents terribles, and later when we get to the rationalist termite colony, it's clearly something to chuckle at. Like, the fact that people think this "bifurcation event" idea is real is legitimately funny.
I see your point, but I don't think he's being sarcastic in this paragraph. To me this paragraph isn't sarcasm rather he's presently a serious factual recounting of the logic driving AI evangelists that he then undermines by contrasting it with the callousness, messiness, and illogic of the people pushing this narrative. (I too had a good chuckle at the termite description)
But this is veering into lit crit territory, so agree to disagree
You may have a point! And you've given me a great excuse to read this one again later this evening :)
I suspect the author is struggling with their own sarcasm.
There's no worth in sarcastically repeating memes like "giga nerd" or whatever except for propagating this line if thinking / the meme.
Imagination knows no negation.
It's a really bad take because AI is already "superhuman" in general knowledge, but it still has trouble figuring out whether I should drive or walk to the car wash place.
Declaring something as "superhuman" requires a hierarchy of inherent human value.
I'm not saying this for social reasons, just for the definition:
"superhuman intelligence" at what?
Calculations? Puzzles? Sudokus?
Or more like...
image classification? ("is this a thief?", "is this a rope?", "is this a medical professional?", "is this a tree?")
Oh, applying the former to the latter would be a pretty stupid category error.
It's almost as if people had this figured out centuries ago...
I don't think that this is supposed to be a statement of the author's beliefs. The whole article is dripping with contempt for AI bros and silicon valley culture in general.
Maybe if you read past these paragraph it would have been clearer?
Yep you're right, but it's too late for me to edit my comment. The idea triggered me, and I tend to struggle with sarcasm.
I mean it’s theoretically true. Will we get there? Who knows.
The first time an LLM solves a truly significant, longstanding problem without help is when we will know we are at AGI.
Historically, tools that made thinking cheaper didn't eliminate thinkers...
<< The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.
I genuinely like the author's style ( not in the quote above; its here for a different reason ). It paints a picture in a way that I still am unable to. I suck at stories.
Anyway, back to the quote. If that is true, then we are in pickle. Claw and its security issues is just a symptom of that 'break things' spirit. And yes, this has been true for a while, but we keep increasing both in terms of speed and scale. I am not sure what the breaking point is, but at certain point real world may balk.
He writes an excellent blog: https://samkriss.substack.com/
One of the best writers of our generation. There’s no better deconstruction of UK lad culture than this: https://samkriss.com/2015/05/20/cheeky-nandos-or-what-wet-wr....
Seeing a Substack email collection box where you have to agree to whatever its terms are to subscribe with a skip to content link of "No, I'm a coward" is... an experience. I'll take your word he's an excellent writer, if there's an RSS feed maybe I'll subscribe.
Oh, I just edited it with developer tools to "No thank you, and I'm brave" so that clicking it wouldn't turn me into a coward
Most Substacks have an RSS feed (I'm not sure if one can disable it or not); in this case: https://samkriss.substack.com/feed
I think there has always been some truth to that, long before AI. Being driven to get up and just do the thing is the most important factor in getting things done. Expertise and competency are force multipliers, but you can pick those up along the way - I think people who prefer to front-load a lot of theory find this distasteful, sometimes even ego-threatening, but it's held true in my observations across my career.
Yes, sometimes people who barrel forward can create a mess, and there are places where careful deliberation and planning really pay off, but in most cases, my observation has been that the "do-ers" produce a lot of good work, letting the structure of the problem space reveal itself as they go along and adapting as needed, without getting hung up on academic purity or aesthetically perfect code; in contrast, some others can fall into pathological over-thinking and over-planning, slowing down the team with nitpicks that don't ultimately matter, demanding to know what your contingencies are for x y z and w without accepting "I'll figure it out when or if any of those actually happen" - meanwhile their own output is much slower, and while it may be more likely to work according to their own plan the first time without bugs, it wasn't worth the extra time compared to the first approach. It's premature optimization but applied to the whole development process instead of just a piece of code.
I think the over-thinkers are more prone to shun AI because they can't be sure that every line of code was done exactly how they would do it, and they see (perhaps an unwarranted) value in everything being structured according to a perfect human-approved plan and within their full understanding; I do plan out the important parts of my architecture to a degree before starting, and that's a large part of my job as a lead/architect, but overall I find the most value in the do-er approach I described, which AI is fantastic at helping iterate on. I don't feel like I'm committing some philosophical sin when it makes some module as a blackbox and it works without me carefully combing through it - the important part is that it works without blowing up resource usage and I can move on to the next thing.
The way the interviewed person described fast iteration with feedback has always been how I learned best - I had a lot of fun and foundational learning playing with the (then-brand-new) HTML5 stuff like making games on canvas elements and using 3D rendering libraries. And this results in a lot of learning by osmosis, and I can confirm that's also the case using AI to iterate on something you're unfamiliar with - shaders in my example very recently. Starting off with a fully working shader that did most of the cool things I wanted it to do, generated by a prompt, was super cool and motivating to me - and then as I iterated on it and incorporated different things into it, with or without the AI, I learned a lot about shaders.
Overall, I don't think the author's appraisal is entirely wrong, but the result isn't necessarily a bad thing - motivation to accomplish things has always been the most important factor, and now other factors are somewhat diminished while the motivation factor is amplified. Intelligence and expertise can't be discounted, but the important of front-loading them can easily be overstated.
be honest, how much of this big comment was "expanded" with AI?
>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 outsider this was pretty much the reaction I had.
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.
Who can forget the billboards that launched a "career"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelyne
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.
I don't miss billboards. Cows, trees, mountains, and lumberyards make better scenery.
The trees are canonical though.
It was weirdly fascinating to read. And also now I get why tech journalism contemplates the idea of 20/40/60% people being useless -- they don't invent it, nor made scientific prediction -- they just saw those junkies in the streets of SF. The only mistake they make is that the whole world can't be SF, where many streams of money make this great flood.
This hits especially hard for projects like OlenBSD and FreeBSD. The unsung heroes.
Linux gets some fame and recognition, meanwhile OpenBSD and FreeBSD are the ones they power routers, CDNs and so many other cool shit while also being legit good systems that even deserve attention for the desktop.
Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.
It's a numbers game. You only need one in twenty con artists to become wildly successful before they're caught, and your overall con artist portfolio is guaranteed to win out.
And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.
Salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Con artists are the easiest to swindle. The people who believe they're immune to being tricked are always the ones who get tricked the most.
Have you been paying attention to what has been happening for the last year? Now is the era of con artists: break the law, pay a small vic, and you're free to scam again.
Why wouldn't investors give these people money? It's not like being an investor implies having morales, all they care about is making money whether it's legal or not and luckily for them crime not only pays but it's legal now too.
the dot-con era
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 they do), so instead they focus on things like "will this founder be able to hype up this startup and sell the next round so I can mark it up on my books".
So... You think it's because the VCs are conning their investors and those con-man are the best extend and pretend opportunities?
I can believe in that. But just a couple of years ago it was clearly happening because the VCs wanted those people to sell the companies into some mark and return real money to them. I wonder when did the investors became the marks?
Mayb in some extreme cases, but I wouldn't go so far as using the "con" word most of the time.
The hardest part of startups is probably the making good decisions part. To be a good VC you need to be better at founders at judging startup decisions, AND you need to be good at LP deal flow AND you need to be good at startup deal flow. LP deal flow has to come first (otherwise there is no fund), and because of zirp a lot of VCs got funds up without good startup deal flow or the ability to judge startups well.
In other words it's hard to be good a VC too, but for a while it was artificially easy to be a bad VC.
I mean whenever things like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and SoftBank came into existence. They've been the biggest marks to unload your dumbest equity into for as long as I've been paying attention (so at least 10-15 years now), and at least as long as Jim Cramer and his ilk have been hyping dog shit IPOs to drop on clueless retail.
Salesmanship all the way down.
Status anxiety.
This reminds me of the vacuum substory in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, except vacuums replaced by AI.
Basically: nobody wants AI, but soon everyone needs AI to sort through all the garbage being generated by AI. Eventually you spend more time managing your AI that you have no time for anything else, your town has built extra power generators just to support all the AI, and your stuff is more disorganized before AI was ever invented.
Great article.
I do have a deep fondness for SF billboards being building-stuff oriented. I don't care for consumerism.
The vapidity of the products created is remarkable, however.
The 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.
SF is quite small compared to the other cities you mentioned, both in land and population density, and is quite a young city in comparison. The beats and hippies were a flash in the pan. They left a mark, but many dispersed rather quickly, and the rest have been ironed out for many decades.
The exact same thing is true of smaller cities like Pittsburgh, as well. The point is that their cultural histories still manage to exist today, even at some level, whereas tech has turned SF into a historical culture-free zone, entirely detached from what SF was even 25 years ago.
I can't say I know much about Pittsburgh's culture, but I wonder how it would have held up over decades of insane money being pumped in and wild rent increases? SF has changed a lot over time, but it has a boom town history of being invaded by hustlers looking for money, so I guess that's something. Gay pride has persisted in SF as well, strong pockets of Asian culture, a saucy underground, etc... Tech has definitely left a mark, maybe not physical libraries and concert halls, but Long Now and the Internet Archive are doing good work to preserve culture.
There's a famous paper called The Californian Ideology (1996) that shows how all these seemingly incompatible elements of the Bay Area's past created the culture at the time of the dot com boom:
https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...
Today's Bay Area has a direct lineage to all of that. Blank Space by W. David Marx does a great job of explaining how the post-2000 parts happened.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXMVK94H
It's all part of the same long, strange trip.
I don't think that's true at all. There's plenty of weird post hippies around, including Burning Man culture and the libertarian roots of a lot of the tech world.
But if you're immersed in the modern tech world, you're just ignoring all that.
Hey, I had to read On The Road once for college, and I am currently sitting in SF.
To be fair to Jack Kerouac, I was young when I read it but even at my advanced age I don't think I want to reread it.
Also, the old hippie culture sort of moved out of SF and into the surrounding bay, I think especially toward East Bay.
The author managed to find the strangest people & phenomena in San Francisco and make it sound like they’re a complete picture of life there. But there are packed brunch spots and parks on sunny weekends that would disagree very strongly.
San Francisco is a tolerant place. Tolerance is how you get Juicero or Theranos and whatever Cluely seems to have pivoted to, but it’s also how you get Twitter, Uber, Dropbox.. and thousands of others.
So it is crucial to consider proportionality. Taking some bad with some good results in getting a little bit of bad and a hell of a lot of good. But if you aren’t careful, all you’ll see is the bad.
> "We're big believers in protein," Roy said. "It's impossible to get fat at Cluely. Nothing here has any fat."
Clueless.
I hope they have fiber or, failing that, miralax.
The brain needs fat to function - that explains a lot
Sounds like they're sitting around eating rabbits wondering why they're starving, or just fill up on sugar when no one's looking.
Fat was demonized to push sugar. "Protein" was then pushed because you can just load up stuff like "protein bars" with sugar.
These people will be your new lords lmao
Please, they're ngmi with no fat. The unhealthy frat boy office sounds like a throwback to the early '10s. What woman would work there? They seem poised to crash and burn out.
Historical aristocracy were defined by eating meat, while their subjects ate grain. "Beef" for the Normans, "cows" raised and slaughtered by the Anglo-Saxons.
They have a table full of Labubus though. Women love those.
This was good. The author found a way to say what we are all thinking - and isn't getting canceled for it. That's true talent.
I read Sam Kriss' substack and he's a wildly unique and talented writer.
agreed - I was shocked how quickly I became immersed reading this relatively simple story.
To be fair SF has had incomprehensible (to normies) billboards since at least the early 90's.
Great article. I recently went through Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon; the sequence of eccentric personalities in this article reminded me of a similar section that Pynchon has in the bay area. Unfortunately the personages interviewed here are not only real but climb beyond any fictional parody.
The quote "this...is...necessary" reminded me about this song. Wonder if the person who as singing it:
https://youtu.be/CmJYZ1NIn1Y?t=150
I immediately heard this as well. Great song, great album!
Nice, there are three of us whose minds immediately went to Disgustipated.
> Not long before I arrived in the Bay Area, I’d been involved in a minor but intense dispute with the rationalist community over a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction
Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?
This one IIRC: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is... He writes about it here, a little: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-truth
In general long meandering semi-factual pieces like this, with odd historical excursions, are one of his things and I don't know anyone else that does it quite the same. (Hmm... oddly enough Scott Alexander, who he cites here, also does some similarly Borgesian stuff, but with a different bent.) One of my favorite writers and I recommend pretty much everything he's done since the early 2010s.
I think it's this one: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is...
But in general, Sam Kriss tends to weave fiction and nonfiction together in his writing.
Probably the burning man essay, which is one of the best things I've ever read online.
https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/numb-at-burning-man
Sounds self-referencial
I had always thought that Kai Lentit's characters were at least somewhat exaggerated and not a 1:1 copy of the real thing...
I'm skeptical that this fully replaces thinking, though. It may replace certain forms of effort, but historically every increase in leverage just shifts where the bottleneck is
> The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window.
Witnessed this first hand on the train the other day. A woman on her laptop. On the left half of the screen, Microsoft Word. On the right, ChatGPT. Text being dragged directly from one to the other.
I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that people with useless bullshit jobs have found a way to become even more useless than they already were before. It's impressive, in a way.
We're doomed
Brilliant article.
Now consider Reddit.
On r/hacking people tend to understand the danger of mindlessness and support war against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...
In constrast r/programming is full of, let's call them "bot-heads", who are all-in on mindlessness: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r8oxt9/poison...
Your opinion on the two subreddit seems to be just influenced by how much they like your project or not.
A project that you spam in every of your comments.
I used to "spam" (as you call it) about nuclear fission on Hacker News. But this the wrong crowd. Hopelessly wrong.
Poison Fountain is top of mind currently so it's understandable I talk about it constantly. Even to my wife. Also I think it's highly relevant to the excellent Harper's article we're reading today.
Whether the Redditors "like the project or not" reflects whether or not they think there is a problem with mindlessness.
What they actually say is almost immaterial. Either it's FUD about malware or illegality or something they imagined without evidence about how easy the poison is to filter. These fictions are just a manifestation of their opposition to the idea.
You can see that among the bot-heads on r/programming (perhaps forced to embrace mindlessness by career considerations) there's nothing that can be said without attack. A dozen downvotes immediately. They actually logged into Hacker News and posted FUD directly to the HN post I linked to. Spectacular.
The opposite is true on r/hacking. Except for a few in opposition (some of whom did unsuccessfully attempt to DDOS the fountain) most people sympathize and agree. They don't want to be dependent on Sam Altman or Elon Musk for their cognition.
Consumers have accepted any addictive non-essential or useless web app until 2023. This time CEOs like Pichai and Nadella are going too far.
There is a red line and it is AI. People viscerally hate it and pushing it will just make people question whether they need computers or the Internet at all (hint, they do not).
CEOs fell validated by the mediocre psychopath parts of their developers who always push the latest fad in order to gain an advantage and control better developers. Fads generally last about two years, and this is it.
It will be very gratifying if the AI hubris is Silicon Valley's downfall and completely needlessly ruins the industry just because the same CEOs who read a couple of science fiction books and had rocket envy now have AI envy.
I can't tell if I find it funny or sad how obvious it is that Roy needs to be on several psychiatric medications that he isn't on, and that he's on a fair amount of cocaine (or insert whatever uppers the kids are into nowadays) that he shouldn't be on.
I'm not sure I can trust the author's characterization of Roy, though. I got the impression that they don't like any of the people they interviewed (which, you know, fair), but that doesn't get even close to the depths of hatred towards Roy that they sub-textually exude throughout the article.
If their portrayal is even half accurate, though, that's a perfectly reasonable amount of hate.
"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.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."
I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.
Not sure about the end of thinking, would say that this is the start of managing ever more stochastic systems
The description of cluely's office makes me think of Sugar Ape magazine in Nathan barley.
AI can’t function without instructions from humans, but an increasing number of humans seem incapable of functioning without AI.
A really weird symbiotic relationship.
I'm glad I went to school when people learned how to think.
It'll benefit established folks as the pipeline withers but at the expense of society - things were already sufficiently borked before this phenomenon.
Does it become circular?
A 2-cycle ouroboros. Man-machine-man-etc. Consuming each-other's secretions. Forever.
Devolution.
Not necessarily stoned but mutatious.
> A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation.
Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.
Beautiful article.
I think the "agency" the article talks about is really just "willingness to take risks". And the reason some people are high outliers on that scale is a combination of:
* Coming from such a level of privilege that they will be completely fine even if they lose over and over again.
* Willingness to push any losses onto other undeserving people without experiencing guilt.
* A psychological compulsion towards impulsive behavior and inability to think about long-term consequences.
In short, rich selfish sociopaths.
Some amount of risk-taking is necessary for innovation. But the level we are seeing today is clearly unsustainable and destructive to the fabric of society. It's the difference between confining a series of little bangs to produce an internal combustion engine versus just throwing hand grenades around the public square. The willingness to take chances needs to be surrounded by a structure that minimizes the blast radius of failure.
Interesting to compare to 2008. At least here, I think we're building something? Whereas then, it was pure, unabashed, siphoning as much as possible out of the financial system from the average American into the pockets of a privileged, self-righteous few, followed by an immediate burning down and parachute out of the whole thing once the cracks started to form.
> * A psychological compulsion towards impulsive behavior and inability to think about long-term consequences.
To be a little more generous, this third point is actually a classic symptom of ADHD. I've known some (non-CEO) folks like this and the kind of risks they take in their personal lives seemed completely alien to me.
> "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.
you can fudge it for a while...but not forever. i worry about what kind of message this sends young minds though.
This became clear to me over the last few years. We are quickly returning to a world of entrenched social hierarchy where there are lords and peasants and little room even for social mobility.
With the corpse of meritocracy too rotted to deny at this point the elite simply seem to have run out of lies for placating the people.
Or, more likely the people are so sickeningly impotent, that’s there’s no need for the lies anymore. The new aristocracy will prevail over liberalism and everything the west lied of being part of the their values for years.
The west had been fighting this since it's founding.
“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” ― Ulysses S. Grant
He was wrong about which side patriotism would end up on.
That ultimately happens from entrenched geopolitical situations as well.
However, I think we are entering an age of geopolitical chaos. And that will be a darwinian struggle of functioning governance systems.
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.
In the village, the horse works the hardest. But the horse will never be elected as the chief.
Horses tend not to run for office. Because they're horses.
Everyone knows someone who worked for years on a project only for it to go nowhere. Pour years into a business that failed. Spend years getting a degree that was useless. Effort might be a part of many people's success stories, but it's not the thing that literally gets rewarded. And conversely, many people get rewarded for things that require relatively little effort.
I suppose I should have said that the correlation between effort and reward has never been 1.0 and has often been a lot lower than we like to believe.
Wow this guy can write. I don’t even agree with his point or pessimism. I just enjoy reading this.
Sam Kriss is quite good: https://samkriss.substack.com/
He's using common language to say common things on common subjects, but he does it well, and in a way I can't quite put my finger on.
More than the prose itself, I think it's that what he's writing about isn't exactly "common knowledge" but rather shrewd, piercing observation.
The way he understands and captures the dynamics makes you think he's a native to the "bay area" tech scene or immersed in TPOT. Yet here's a complete outsider, pinpointing the unstated core premises and paradoxes of these communities.
> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.”
Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?
It seems people have figured out that sociopathy and self-promotion are rewarded in the current culture and that being a con artist has essentially no consequences anymore. And all of it is done by ambitious people who are p-zombies, lacking an inner life or curiosity about anything but how to make more money.
the article treats agency like it's new but founders have always been delusional risk takers. the difference is VCs used to demand a working prototype before writing the check
Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, LLMs are "simply" pseudo-semantic search engines; if you know what you're looking for, they work pretty well for fulfilling "satisfiable" searches, that is, those aimed at content produced by some other human scattered across the infosphere.
The generation of code and images fits right into this; the famous, historical "astronaut on a horse" is, in substance, a collage of images, images produced by other humans and "assembled".
On a broader scale, this means that humanity will more or less be able to count on Conrad Gessner's Universal Library/Biblioteca Universalis/Library of Babel, and generally speaking, we can aim for a future where humans produce knowledge and machines put it into practice. Like any evolution, this will lead to some losses while gaining something else.
The current explosion is mostly hype and a nazi-managerial wet dream; as for universities, the reality is that they are largely obsolete, so it's only natural that students, rather than seeking knowledge, which is of little use to them as it's disconnected from the present, are just looking for a piece of paper to build a career otherwise.
"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines."
What people really think about Silicon Valley. Not so fun to devalue people now is it? Tech is biggest group of assholes.
It's all about the pathetic rationalization we have placed on greed and profit. We can make millions redundant with AI and still have a social safety net that keeps society stable and healthy. But no, that wouldn't be "fair" to the people who generate millions of net worth every 5 minute.
"World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity", as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly”, says Oxfam: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor...
Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and the level of billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger. https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich
And I believe this is useful and thought-provoking reading in this context of how unbridled Capitalism is exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots.
Wage slavery: The illusion of freedom: Exploitation Under Capitalism: Marx’s Analysis of Labor and Profit:
https://philosophy.institute/social-political/exploitation-u...
https://davidlingenfelter.substack.com/p/the-normalization-o...
And no, the solution to the problems are not blind unchecked communism (which itself leads to fascism), but perhaps some more ethical & humane methods are needed for an overhaul of world society, and economic & geopolitical regimes.
If you could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire in the country, and sell all of them for market rate without putting any downward pressure on prices at all, that sum would not fund 10 months of the federal government's current spending levels, and even less if you wanted new programs.
If you cured 100% of all cancer it would only reduce US deaths by 20%. Clearly we should conclude that cancer isn't a problem and isn't worth curing, and also that heart disease and unintentional injuries and so on are also not problems and also not worth trying to fix.
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 important to debunk so I make no apology for doing so.
Once we did that we'd have a lot less personal influence over that spending budget, at least.
But focusing on current assets and not accumulation of wealth is misleading. You'd also have to allocate the ongoing wealth accumulation to get a better sense of things.
You could make 900 people go from billionaires to high net worth individuals and nearly fund the exorbitant spending of the US government that directly supports 330 million people for a year.
I think you might be overselling how good that is.
Trump has added 2 trillion (unilaterally and illegally) to the debt with today's Supreme Court decision, while giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.
The Republican policy for 40 years had been to create unsustainable and unworkable Federal government funding/spending instead of to work to creating a working, fiscally sane Federal government. It's hard to build a working government in a two party system when one side is malicious/duplicitous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
I don't think you understand how taxation works.
ok, but how about if we stop funding ICE?
I mean is it any different from 15 years ago?
Silicon Valley has been a parody of itself for long time now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
That's all satire, right? I don't believe the author describes a reality, even in a sarcastic way.
This article is a portrait of three Sociopathic Zoomers : the twitter poster, the cheating app guy and the teenage scammer. All three are net negatives to society.
Wordcel backlash, basically.
Hahah, I had the same thought. My eyes rolled out of my skull after the second paragraph.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers.
I'm fascinated by hackernews' etiquette, both explicit and implicit, that think 10,000 words of turgid prose that reek with dismissiveness and contempt "(Rationalists, like termites, live in eusocial mounds.)" are valuable, but your curt dismissal of it is rude.
This but unironically. The future is for "shape rotators" which is unironically the skilled blue collar trades people who are about to mog the rest of white collar work that dies in 24 months.
Sucks to be a wordcel. The school yard bullies won.
I had an AI summarize this article, and it said it's super pessimistic. It’s basically arguing that summarizing is a bad idea. yet I did it. ( I am happy )