"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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I teach computer science at a public university. Every semester I have kids who come to classes but never turn in any homework. They also don't withdraw either. I'm literally forced to fail them because I have nothing to grade them on.
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.
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.
I mean I'm literally a compiler engineer who's worked on dependable systems in the past, and I think this article is a load of crock to be honest. As is usual for many Americans (a great disease in the American mind, IMO), they greatly value the random lunatic over the person actually doing something. Calling people driven to do things as having strange 'psychosexual neuroses' is just shaming people without any evidence. What's wrong with having a drive to do things? That is literally what America was set out to do. It's hard to read these sorts of critiques as anything other than racism against the latest class of American migrant (mainly Asians) who are driven to not fall into the very poverty their parents sought to escape. Yes, if the answer is becoming shit-ass poor or being well off via pursuing success, then you are going to be highly motivated to take the route of success.
I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.
I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing
I agree with your fundamental point. However, I don't think steady erosion of mastery is the only way that these next years have to go, even if it looks the most likely at present. Supposing LLMs or whatever future architecture surpass even the greatest human minds in intelligence, why is that situation fundamentally different to living in a world with Einstein, i.e. a level of mastery I'll never reach before the end of my life? As one interested in the depths, I prefer to live in a world with peaks ever greater than myself---it doesn't prevent me from going as deep as I can, inspired by where they've reached, and doing the things that matter to me.
Turing's view, in fact, is similar: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals [read programmers in the context of this thread] who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."
[0] Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a fantastic account of the opposite standpoint---of the second best piano student, who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.
I think it’s opposite. The general population always has nothing with outstanding engineers thru the history. It’s hard to say that VC bubbles of recent decades really drove the amount of outstanding engineers, it’s just an overall increase of prosperity, while hot capital in addition incentivesed quite terrible ways to get rich quick, effectively balancing back this freshly activated dev capital. So now ai takes back monopoly on dev capital from bigbiz, and general youth population is weird like it always has been, but in reality doing less drink/smoke/drugs, and sometimes their values are better than ours, just need some more time to polish. I think we are not doomed.
And what value has the current state of AI added to society in any meaningful way? Truly? Even as someone who understands the space very strongly, and has published several top-tier ML papers, I cannot help but to conclude the primary destination of the current tech sector and Silicon Valley is the ruthless exploitation of the rest of society.
Taking a sober look at the state of software, we observe a few things.
The services offered by modern software to users, as a whole, have remained largely the same over the past ~5 years. The state of software quality is in rapid decline, with enshittification and rent-seeking running extraordinarily rampant. Software security has been in the same disaster-state it has been for the past 20 years, where software resilience is in stagnation, governments and private institutions stockpile vulnerabilities, and security researchers and auditors can consistently find new vulnerabilities. The rest of American society outside of the tech sector is currently facing a standards of living nosedive, and clearly they have not benefited from the tech sector's financial proliferation in the AI space.
Realistically, I cannot help the feeling that we're headed towards a reality where the 4th amendment is dead, and machine learning models process everything about you to ultimately extract more from you. No privacy for you! No agency for you! Only indentured servitude, and constant fear.
I fully recognize my take is ahead of its time, but I concur that the systems-oriented point of view is our way out of this hell. Specifically, software should be conceived under the following ideals: (1) software should be as simple as possible, and provide its intended services with as little bloat as possible; (2) specifications of software should be as concise and simple as possible; (3) specifications should be should be expressive enough to capture security-relevant guarantees, e.g. cryptographic security properties; (4) proofs verifying that software satisfies its specifications should live intrinsically to the implementation, and should be as simple as possible; (5) proof-checkers should be verified. I feel the academic Formal Methods, Programming Languages, Systems, Security, and Cryptography communities, as well as the internet standardization community, are slowly converging to this ideology consensus, but I also think in other ways we are farther off than ever. With respect to these ideals, the "building" mindset that twitter has adopted is deeply toxic. And obviously Silicon Valley has their heads in the sand when it comes to this.
I do have faith the state of software (and society) will improve, but whether that future is compatible with the rent-seeking hyper-capitalist reality Silicon Valley and Wall Street have synthesized is yet to be seen.
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.
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.
<< 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.
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.
True, but now that's all it has for large swathes of urban landscape. It's tremendously alienating, nothing but startups texting each other. I figure it's only a matter of time before we see billboards with QR codes or interference patterns designed to make self-driving taxis halt in their tracks so that some security/ alignment/ infrastructure startup can get its brand amplified by giving people something to complain about.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are great. This is coming from someone who used BSD 4.2 on a Vax 11/780 in the mid-80s. They don't lack in terms of 'technical architecture'.
What these dialects of the Unix operating system do lack is a licence which ensured their success.
Linux won in the end as much from its copyleft licence as from its development methodology or personalities involved.
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.
> * 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.
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.
It occurs to me a highly-automated UBI future should increase risk tolerance for average people. We (probably) won't have to work to survive with a baseline level of comfort, but it would be meagre.
If there's nothing but upside to enterprising, and less opportunity-cost (vs subsistence), we might see some innovative or very strange things.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
The author is describing it, not necessarily ensorsing it.
But whether they really believe this or not, the point is that most wouldn't be given any opportunity to "harness is potential", whether they're "obscenely talented giga-nerds" or not, because they'd be economically redundant.
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 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.
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 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.
So you're saying migration changes a society's culture, sometimes to the point of ruination?
There was a high-profile example of this phenomenon recently in NYC, where a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
And it was telling how differently his opponents presented themselves, emphasizing, in their dying outer borough accents, their "toughness"--an attribute once thought essential for the mayor of America's largest city to possess, especially for anyone with a memory of the city before (and during) 9/11. Now? Apparently superfluous. And the victor's ever-present smile, rather than off-putting to the city's voters, who in the past might have perceived it at best as phony, and at worst, as more befitting one the city's countless mentally ill transients, instead unexpectedly found it endearing.
> a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
Ignorant on so many levels, I truly feel sorry for people who have been brainwashed by their media to think so uncritically.
And why does it matter in any way whatsoever what would have happened if immigrants who gained citizenship couldn't vote? They can vote, and did. So? That is about as relevant as the observation that if Mamdani wouldn't have won if he ran for mayor of Tampa. So? What's the point? I'm truly curious.
America is a multiracial democracy fueled by waves of immigration, NYC especially. Those people live there and are citizens. What's your point?
What has changed the city's culture is money. As mentioned in the article, virtually every billboard and advertising surface downtown is for some SAAS or B2B company. Every startup that gets capitalized dumps a load of money into saturation advertising making itself look like the new hotness, and the corresponding rise in advertising prices means nothing is advertised but tech and ways to make money with tech. A lot of the adverts even look the same.
That's not the product of migrants. SF is turning into a ghost town because the entire downtown area increasingly feels like the inside of a conference center. There isn't anything fun to do or places to go besides work, nothing that might appeal to youth, nothing that isn't business focused. Can you imagine being a teenager in SF? You go to the middle of town and every advert is just an elevator pitch for HR services or devops or model training, and most of the them aren't even visually interesting to look at. Entire subway stations are taken over with adverts touting how agentic or accelerant some new brand is. It's boring. A Japanese acquaintance of mine who visited SF recently asked 'don't people here think about anything but work?'
How you ended up blaming this humanity-free environment on 'too many migrants' is beyond me.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 91.3 ms ] threadWhat people really think about Silicon Valley. Not so fun to devalue people now is it? Tech is biggest group of assholes.
I recently traveled to San Francisco and as an outsider this was pretty much the reaction I had.
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.
Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.
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.
I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.
I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing
Turing's view, in fact, is similar: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals [read programmers in the context of this thread] who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."
[0] Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a fantastic account of the opposite standpoint---of the second best piano student, who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.
P.S. but these chinese robots are really scary
Taking a sober look at the state of software, we observe a few things.
The services offered by modern software to users, as a whole, have remained largely the same over the past ~5 years. The state of software quality is in rapid decline, with enshittification and rent-seeking running extraordinarily rampant. Software security has been in the same disaster-state it has been for the past 20 years, where software resilience is in stagnation, governments and private institutions stockpile vulnerabilities, and security researchers and auditors can consistently find new vulnerabilities. The rest of American society outside of the tech sector is currently facing a standards of living nosedive, and clearly they have not benefited from the tech sector's financial proliferation in the AI space.
Realistically, I cannot help the feeling that we're headed towards a reality where the 4th amendment is dead, and machine learning models process everything about you to ultimately extract more from you. No privacy for you! No agency for you! Only indentured servitude, and constant fear.
I fully recognize my take is ahead of its time, but I concur that the systems-oriented point of view is our way out of this hell. Specifically, software should be conceived under the following ideals: (1) software should be as simple as possible, and provide its intended services with as little bloat as possible; (2) specifications of software should be as concise and simple as possible; (3) specifications should be should be expressive enough to capture security-relevant guarantees, e.g. cryptographic security properties; (4) proofs verifying that software satisfies its specifications should live intrinsically to the implementation, and should be as simple as possible; (5) proof-checkers should be verified. I feel the academic Formal Methods, Programming Languages, Systems, Security, and Cryptography communities, as well as the internet standardization community, are slowly converging to this ideology consensus, but I also think in other ways we are farther off than ever. With respect to these ideals, the "building" mindset that twitter has adopted is deeply toxic. And obviously Silicon Valley has their heads in the sand when it comes to this.
I do have faith the state of software (and society) will improve, but whether that future is compatible with the rent-seeking hyper-capitalist reality Silicon Valley and Wall Street have synthesized is yet to be seen.
JFC kill me now that is NOT a future I want to live in.
Sucks to be a wordcel. The school yard bullies won.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And of course, there's no downside for the investors. If you backed a con artist, you're not culpable - you're a victim.
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.
What these dialects of the Unix operating system do lack is a licence which ensured their success.
Linux won in the end as much from its copyleft licence as from its development methodology or personalities involved.
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.
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.
If there's nothing but upside to enterprising, and less opportunity-cost (vs subsistence), we might see some innovative or very strange things.
> 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.
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.
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.
Maybe if you read past these paragraph it would have been clearer?
The first time an LLM solves a truly significant, longstanding problem without help is when we will know we are at AGI.
The author is describing it, not necessarily ensorsing it.
But whether they really believe this or not, the point is that most wouldn't be given any opportunity to "harness is potential", whether they're "obscenely talented giga-nerds" or not, because they'd be economically redundant.
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.
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.
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.
But if you're immersed in the modern tech world, you're just ignoring all that.
So you're saying migration changes a society's culture, sometimes to the point of ruination?
There was a high-profile example of this phenomenon recently in NYC, where a 35yo nobody managed to win the mayoral election with fake smiles and empty promises, because 40% of the city is now foreign-born. Had only native-born Americans (not even just those born in NYC) voted, he would have lost.
And it was telling how differently his opponents presented themselves, emphasizing, in their dying outer borough accents, their "toughness"--an attribute once thought essential for the mayor of America's largest city to possess, especially for anyone with a memory of the city before (and during) 9/11. Now? Apparently superfluous. And the victor's ever-present smile, rather than off-putting to the city's voters, who in the past might have perceived it at best as phony, and at worst, as more befitting one the city's countless mentally ill transients, instead unexpectedly found it endearing.
Ignorant on so many levels, I truly feel sorry for people who have been brainwashed by their media to think so uncritically.
And why does it matter in any way whatsoever what would have happened if immigrants who gained citizenship couldn't vote? They can vote, and did. So? That is about as relevant as the observation that if Mamdani wouldn't have won if he ran for mayor of Tampa. So? What's the point? I'm truly curious.
America is a multiracial democracy fueled by waves of immigration, NYC especially. Those people live there and are citizens. What's your point?
What has changed the city's culture is money. As mentioned in the article, virtually every billboard and advertising surface downtown is for some SAAS or B2B company. Every startup that gets capitalized dumps a load of money into saturation advertising making itself look like the new hotness, and the corresponding rise in advertising prices means nothing is advertised but tech and ways to make money with tech. A lot of the adverts even look the same.
That's not the product of migrants. SF is turning into a ghost town because the entire downtown area increasingly feels like the inside of a conference center. There isn't anything fun to do or places to go besides work, nothing that might appeal to youth, nothing that isn't business focused. Can you imagine being a teenager in SF? You go to the middle of town and every advert is just an elevator pitch for HR services or devops or model training, and most of the them aren't even visually interesting to look at. Entire subway stations are taken over with adverts touting how agentic or accelerant some new brand is. It's boring. A Japanese acquaintance of mine who visited SF recently asked 'don't people here think about anything but work?'
How you ended up blaming this humanity-free environment on 'too many migrants' is beyond me.