17 ms·

Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

194 points by hacksilver 6y ago

ehnto 6y ago
> The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” This is all the sadder, though, since the tech industry set out to model something better. The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there... I don't buy that at all, the tech INDUSTRY was the result of attempting to extract value out of technology. I have to scoff at the inclusion of "algorithmically amplified intelligence" as one of the egalitarian core values of SV. If you hadn't caught on by then, you must have been heady off the fumes of it all.
- onethought 6y ago
  So open source was just tech people not understanding their core purpose of "extract value out of technology" ?
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Open source is an entirely different movement. OSS is written the world over, yet SV is where everyone is busy extracting orders of magnitude of value from it. From plenty of experience, SV open sources because it provides a business advantage, because it costs them nothing or because it's part of the business model of OSS+Support. Individual contributors are the heroes here, people doing it for the love of the software. The software industry will spin their work for a dollar all fucking day with no contribution back.
    - onethought 6y ago
      Oh really... So the open source code that contributed/drove the delivery of that comment wasn't written in SV? edit: To the second part of your comment... so why are the browsers all open source (at least at their core)? What's the business advantage? The non-organisational contributors are hardly the "heroes" of those projects. And they have contributed a ridiculous amount of free value to world.
      - ehnto 6y ago
        There is no doubt that the vast majority of open source software comes out of the software industry in SV. The arguing point I have is that it isn't out of an egalitarian view from the industry to provide for others and make the world better, generally speaking. Exceptions abound, sure. But the industry is busy making money, the fact that say Chromium and Webkit are open source is a very good example of how a company can use open source to leverage a competitive advantage. My main gripe with the article is that it tried to conflate the technology movement and the software industry. Tied tightly together no doubt, but they are different. The very nature of the industry is to make money and that is totally fine, but let's not pretend the industry was some utopian ideal from the outset. As I said in my first comment, the industry specifically, grew out of the attempt to extract value from the technology. That's fine. It hasn't been twisted over time, it just is what it is. I may have been flippant in my commentary.
  - jjtheblunt 6y ago
    For some business plans, open source is a means of keeping competitors some number of releases behind internal development, perpetually, while they're none the wiser.
nightshadetrie 6y ago
Maybe, at least people won’t be tied down 100% and can work remote. If you have a family you can now afford a home to raise kids in.
ping_pong 6y ago
Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. Do I like what Silicon Valley has turned into? Hell no. I like the 90s version so much better, where nerds were tinkering with cool stuff and writing software because they loved software, not because they want to increase engagement by 1%. But it is what it is, and Silicon Valley will change with the times, I'm sure. I would love to see another dot-com-bust and clear out some of the chaff, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen this time around. If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made *too* much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on. One of the factors I listed above, greed, is now missing for the most part. People have too much money, and with that they stop getting hungry. The hunger for making money, which propelled a lot of the advancement in previous decades, is absent in many people here. Even I've become a multi-millionaire over the last 5 years by doing nothing differently except buying a house and working at a tech company. This causes a financial convection current, which you're somewhat seeing, of the bored rich Googlers moving on and doing other stuff. The incentive is gone for many. But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come, that will continue to fuel things for decades to come. These days, if you get funded by a VC, you're getting $5 million for 20%, which is a lot of money. Deals like that can't be matched elsewhere and another reason why you won't see people trying to raise money elsewhere, they will just come to Silicon Valley with their greatest ideas and keep propelling it. Silicon Valley will never die.
- gxs 6y ago
  I agree, but never say never. The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt. I think there will be other critical centers of tech innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has an industry as well.
onethought 6y ago
Isn't another growing/bigger centre for technology innovation now in China/Taiwan? Are we just pretending that Silicon Valley is still Mecca?
- no_wizard 6y ago
  I think its fair to say that they're growing for sure, as the government and corporations have been investing there. What I feel makes Silicon Valley unique (backed by the history as I understand it) is the proximity of things - The foundational organizations and proximity to an intense congregation of early innovation orgs, many of which started in Silicon Valley, or always had a large presence from the early days - Proximity to a delta of good universities (large hiring pool, of ready to work post grads helps a lot) - The incubation of VCs that despite many attempts to lure them, are still largely located in Silicon Valley I think these over arching factors are the biggest reason Silicon Valley is unique. They're also not often talked about in this way very often in the 'mythos' of SV, but are very much the bedrock It also doesn't make SV unique, per say (I think for medical device startups, states like Minnesota would be a good fit for your company, since they have a lot of investment in this area by multiple entities, as well as the same university graph so the pool of students you can hire is pretty good, and I feel this is pretty key to a lot of it)
  - onethought 6y ago
    I’m guessing you haven’t been to Shenzhen. Where everything you mentioned is, and growing.
    - throwaway2037 6y ago
      > Proximity to a delta of good universities What good unis are in Guangdong (GD) province? The most famous ones I know are in Shanghai and Beijing. From my limited experience with hiring in Shenzhen, almost no one was from GD, nor went to uni in GD. Most went to uni in Shanghai or Beijing. > The foundational organizations I think the OP is referring to big gov't research (DARPA, etc.) that is the backbone of technologies behind the Internet and integrated circuits. Do similar orgs (and history) exist in Shenzhen? Again, my impression is that most of those orgs exist in Shanghai and Beijing.
EGreg 6y ago
Until 1988, California was ruled largely by Republicans. Since 1988, it gradually cane to be ruled more by Democrats, with the notable exception of the "moderate" Republican governor Schwartzenegger. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-voting-history/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-voting... In both eras, its GDP and population went up, until it became the 5th or 4th largest economy in the world. A bit of mean reversion occurs, after massive spikes in housing prices, wildfires and a pandemic and everyone loses their crap. Seriously, people... this is about as bad as cries of "CARNAGE!!" in 2016 when crime has a slight uptick after 10 years of decline.
- baloney1 6y ago
  Correlation does not imply causation, son.
  - seniorivn 6y ago
    but he clearly does
- throw-away_42 6y ago
  Perhaps you're thinking of some other state? https://governors.library.ca.gov/36-wilson.html https://governors.library.ca.gov/36-wilson.html
TedShiller 6y ago
The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who have left have all peaked in their careers. The real loss would not be of people who have peaked leaving but of people who haven’t peaked yet leaving.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  > people who haven’t peaked yet leaving. No, it is people who haven't peaked yet not even coming in the first place.
  - TedShiller 6y ago
    True. Hence the wrong focus in the article. It’s like if Bill Gates leaves Seattle. Nothing happens because Gates is done in his career.
    - ulfw 6y ago
      Bill Gates is not done at all. In fact he is doing more and better things for mankind with his career now than he did when he ran Microsoft.
      - TedShiller 6y ago
        Sure, but Bill Gates leaving Seattle would not impact the Seattle tech industry at all.
- NeverFade 6y ago
  Elon Musk has "peaked in his career"? I understand that we need to rudely dismiss everyone who left NorCal, but maybe let's try to maintain some semblance of connection to reality?
  - dang 6y ago
    Please let's not go into the Musk Wars. They're all the same and always lame.
caslon 6y ago
High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars putting literal lives at risk, a figurative vampire (infuses literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a company that hasn't been relevant since the 1970s all are leaving the Valley! I don't even live there, and I never plan on living there, but they're not citing anyone all that meaningful. Larry Ellison is somehow the person who comes off the best out of that group! Larry Ellison! A guy who can best be described with a lawnmower metaphor! Come on! And now a guy who corporatized free software to the point of it being completely unenforced and also coined Web 2.0 to sell you books is telling you to leave! I'm skeptical about this "end" of the Valley, somehow. Almost seems like they're trying to get you to leave to devalue the price of real estate, scoop it up and then advocate once more for the Valley.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Oracle is, unfortunately, extremely relevant, just in none of the places you care about. Your biases keep you from seeing it. In fact I was just recently involved in some conversations that could see the spend of tens of millions on their Cloud platform and where they are seriously looking like the strongest contender on both the technical and the business side. Second tier cloud providers should be extremely worried about Oracle eating their lunch. Eventually the big three might have to too...
  - caslon 6y ago
    Silicon Valley's value is in innovation. Oracle doesn't innovate, and Amazon's in Seattle anyway. There's really nothing that matters as far as any of the cloud companies; they're valueless.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Was. Now it's just a myth that people perpetuate. What SV has now is a bunch of greedy people looking to give money to ideas. It's not that SV technologists are innovators anymore, it's just that they are in proximity to money. Now the business people and their greed and money are leaving SV en masse. What does it have left?
op03 6y ago
Its been in decline ever since outsourcing began. Inevitable in a connected world. Time to move on. Whats the Chinese/Indian equivalent of HN?
mempko 6y ago
Overall this is a really good piece. O'Reilly is wrong that the world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it Amazingly. It's not just communist governments that did well, New Zealand and Australia did well too. However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK. O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development. And he may be right the skills needed are elsewhere.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Oceania's willingness to be bold may be a good omen for their future
  - refurb 6y ago
    Oceania will be on the front lines of the geopolitical rivalry between China and the West. Australia is already hurting because China is screwing with their exports.
- geomark 6y ago
  What you say is true, but I wonder what you mean by "failed it's people". Because from what I saw it wasn't just really poor leadership. It was the prevalent attitude of individualism above everyone else that made things really bad in many western countries. People failed themselves. And great leaders aren't going to change that culture.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development Solving climate change in relevant timescales involves severe cuts to consumption, which will cause havoc because it will mess with all the economic growth projections people expect, which will cause short term pain even if it accomplishes long term gain. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
  - lanstin 6y ago
shinkim0914 6y ago
There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and encouraged.
- earthscienceman 6y ago
  ... that's because it's not a career risk when you're a multi millionaire who will just be rehired by your friends if your venture fails.
  - WalterGR 6y ago
    Who are these multi millionaires? Clearly I know the wrong people in tech in the Bay Area.
    - opportune 6y ago
      Probably most people I work with in their 30s or 40s are multimillionaires.
      - WalterGR 6y ago
        Yeah? On paper, 401k, or elsewhere? Where have they worked and for how long? Because in my experience, the “everyone who works at a FAANG is a multi-millionaire” meme is 100% bullshit. Especially when I read things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336029
        astrange 6y ago
        What company uses the scale in this comment? (IC5 IC6 IC7 etc)
        Zanneth 6y ago
        At least Apple does. I'm not sure if other companies use it as well.
Haarisgrey 6y ago
Of course we got people like this!. I smoke and I’ve been a smoker for years. Most of the time I am surrounded by people who do not smoke at all. Doesn’t amaze me. I have some close friends, we hangout together international;y and vacation parties but they both have never smoked weed and I am a regular smoker and this thing doesn’t affect our friendship at all. It’s not about something being legal or illegal. If a thing is facilitating you either way it is totally okay for the other person to use it. I started using it for my chronic pain and eventually ended up like this. https://www.weedmarket420.us/ https://www.weedmarket420.us/ Being a marijuana enthusiast I keep on researching for good material and here I came across 5 new researches! Have a good day!
baby 6y ago
I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  There's a lot more to Silicon Valley than San Francisco. It's just as expensive with a lot of people absorbed in their work, but does away with the bad weather and crime. I've never understood why so many tech companies over the last decade went up to SF. Before that most were down the peninsula and in San Jose. I'd pick the lower peninsula over SF no question.
  - mrgordon 6y ago
    Because the younger talent they’re trying to attract prefers a lively city to the suburban sprawl with good schools
    - slimsag 6y ago
      The younger talent they are trying to recruit prefers a lively city with broad culture and opportunities, which exist in many places outside of SV - and in different forms than just the tech mono-culture that SF is today.
      - mrgordon 6y ago
        Sure but the person I was replying to was talking specifically about Silicon Valley versus SF. There are many cities out there that will attract people certainly. I don’t live in the Bay Area anymore so I can relate.
  - opportune 6y ago
    The South Bay is either boring or very expensive. SF still feels very genuine and has a lot more going on compared to Sunnyvale. Not to say there is no reason to live there, but it seems to mostly attract families who like suburban living
davmar 6y ago
LOL @ rabois being a harbinger of things to come.
networkimprov 6y ago
This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecurity-202-global-losses-cybercrime-skyrocketed-nearly-1-trillion-2020/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-hammered-by-record-50-billion-dollar-weather-disasters-in-2020/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-hammered-by...
- pjc50 6y ago
  That seems astonishing and hard to believe; the WaPo is paywalled, where are they getting that number from? Is it by any chance an organization trying to sell cybercrime solutions? SV has probably had just as much a role in enabling cybercrime as fighting it.
  - sva_ 6y ago
    > The projection of $945 billion in losses, from a new report out today[0] from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and computer security company McAfee, is almost double the monetary loss from cybercrime than the $500 billion in 2018. McAfee's report "The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime"[0] seems to be the source. [0] https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/assets/reports/rp-hidden-costs-of-cybercrime.pdf https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/assets/reports/rp-hi...
  - networkimprov 6y ago
    I can read the WaPo article in a private/incognito browser window. The IETF in particular has had a huge role in facilitating phishing via SMTP.
- logicchains 6y ago
  The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals, it's a result of really really poor security practices, a solveable problem.
armatav 6y ago
Nope.
dang 6y ago
All: please respond to the substance of the article, not the baity title. The latter leads to boring flamewar, while the article (and we all) deserve better. To help with that, we've changed the title above to the what high school English teachers would call its thesis statement.
betwixthewires 6y ago
I don't think a lot of people quite grasp how big of a scam silicon valley is. I've pieced most of the information together from articles that I have seen here. Do you know who owns the majority of rental properties in silicon valley? East coast and Midwest pension funds or investment firms using their capital. This includes office space and residential areas. Care to take a guess who's capital the majority of VC firms are investing? If you guessed east coast and Midwest pension funds, you're right. Moving to silicon valley to get a good paying job? Prepare to spend most of it on rent, basically paying a significant portion if not the majority of your salary to the very individuals that own controlling interest in the company paying you. Going to silicon valley to start a company? Prepare to pay a significant portion of that funding you got right back where you got it for office space. Imagine if you could take a significant share, potentially a controlling interest, in every major tech startup basically for free. You create an engine to suck productivity out of some of the most creative, technically proficient innovators in the US by owning land in northern California and convincing them that they have to go there and rent from you to get your money to make their big ideas happen. Now you get to own some of the most productive people on the planet. That's one hell of a profitable scam. And the funny thing, we all forgot why you had to go there in the first place, that the silicon was made there, and we just take it as gospel that you have to go there to work in tech, even though the silicon is all made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China now. And let's not even get started on the hypocrisy of pension funds that exist due to union lobbying doing this. Now, if you're still considering going there, as an added bonus consider that you'll be surrounded by people that step over homeless people on the way to work where they will write social media posts about income inequality.
- blast 6y ago
  You're not entirely wrong, but you're more wrong than right. For example, yes, a good paying SV job involves spending a lot on rent, but nowhere near "most of it"...very much the opposite. Yes there are issues, but it's not "how big of a scam", and by describing it that way you lose credibility.
  - keenreed 6y ago
    When I looked a few years back, nice houses would go around 12k/month. Maybe shared condos are not expensive, but not everyone wants to live that way.
Apocryphon 6y ago
The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” Not to mention, I would wager most commentators are not equipped to address his point about SV being unable to deal with medical regulations, seeing as there’s been medtech startups that have already attempted to flout FDA regulation. > The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley Isn’t South SF a biotech hotbed? His points about regulators actually doing able something substantive towards big tech platforms, and the end of “casino capitalism” also feel too Pollyannaish for our current lamentable moment. Maybe it has to all get worse before it’s foreseeable. O’Reilly certainly calls it out as he sees it with the social commentary: > When the “superstar firms” ruthlessly compete with smaller firms that come up with fresh ideas, not only starving them of talent but often introducing copycat products and services, there is decreased innovation from the market as a whole. Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers; wages and working conditions of workers in less profitable industries are squeezed to drive the growth of the giants. Their very jobs are made contingent and disposable, with inequality baked in from the beginning of their employment. Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance. The list is far longer than that. Honestly, this article’s a great read.
- weinzierl 6y ago
  “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds me of these tests where you are presented a list of words that are related somehow and you have to find the one word that doesn't fit in the set. For me materials science seems to almost fit at first glance, but not really when you look at it. Both the other areas have already changed our life more than anything in the past decades and there is good reason they will continue to do so even more in the near and intermediate future. I don't see this to be true for materials science. At least there seem to be at least a dozen fields that are equally influential. Does anyone know why materials science is so often included?
spoonjim 6y ago
It honestly doesn’t really matter to the world if “Silicon Valley” moves to another or multiple other locations. What’s far more important is, “does the ever-accelerating dominance of a small number of companies show any signs of weakness?” and this article doesn’t seem to think so.
- laurent92 6y ago
  It may seem unfair. However, population increases (fast, actually), so hierarchical structures grow in size, and concentration as well. A CEO of a large company in 1980 would be considered a small CEO in 2020. There are more employees everywhere and necessarily more layers of management (and the same goes for the startup/VC ecosystem, and the same goes for democratic structures which require more stringent rule so everyone lives on the same planet). Concentration is more a side-effect of population than any other trend.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I have been a long time fan of Tim O'Reilly for the past ~20 years or so. Recently I had the opportunity to interview him [0] for a podcast/videocast I run, in which we covered his friendship and work with Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, how the O'Reilly Media company came to be; but most importantly, Tim's "political" involvement in keeping the internet free and open. In particular, I really like his way of looking at good startups and good companies: the ones that don't simply intercept or capture value, but that instead create it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4
cblconfederate 6y ago
> The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there Is it? I think it's dying with the generation that believed in that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects created by young inventors? Even this article is written by someone who is of an older generation
- DaedPsyker 6y ago
  There are sv open projects but many are extentions of some company effort, i.e pytorch/Facebook, tensorflow/Google. Much of the traditional spirit of open source seems to be coming from Europe and South America.
  - lansdale10 6y ago
    The spirit is still there outside the USA, but especially developers from Europe catch on to the fact that their free labor is exploited by U.S. Foundation and Council members, who build their careers on the work of others. This is not "ideological flamewar", it is a fact that international contributions are monetized and governed in America.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
"To be sure, a great deal of content on the World Wide Web and in social media is produced and consumed with commercial intent, but a remarkable amount is produced entirely without a profit motive. Google economists have told me that only six percent of Google search result pages carry any advertising at all. The other 94% of pages are the product of the joyful exuberance of humanity, creating and sharing for the joy of it." I have been repeating the second part of this statement as a truism for decades as internet advertising keeps growing. Apparently I have have been living it too because nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero targeted ads. To the gatekeeper companies controlling the www today there appears to be no commercial/non-commercial distinction. For these companies and all those who ride their coattails, data collection for the ultimate purpose of internet advertising is fair game anywhere and everywhere. "Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and corporate governance, not the cause of it, or even the worst exemplar. (Tobacco, oil, and pharma companies vie for the top spot.)" Tobacco, oil and pharma are all highly regulated industries. SV is highly unregulated. It is curious to me why financial services did not make the the list of exemplars. Meanwhile the author then proceeds with a criticism of "casino capitalism". Perhaps there are links between the rise of "casino capitalism" and the rise of the www as a promoted commercial prospect, in the late 1990s/early 2000's and again more recently.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero Google has pretty much eaten all advertising they can eat, there is no more to eat no matter how many ads they add. They can pretty much set the prices of their ads arbitrarily high since they have control over both advertisers and publishers. > financial services did not make the the list of exemplars Yeah, from the outside , SV currently seems to be Finance #2: greed is good, morals are for losers, grow fast and gtfo mentality
sradman 6y ago
> as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said: > Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce a lab-on-a-chip. Theranos failed to combine more than a handful of microfluidics together and scrambled to find alternatives to bridge the gap. Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests. Our collective small minds couldn’t focus on anything but the people involved. The core idea is still an outstanding hard problem.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  > Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests. As I understand it, for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they were trying to use: the concentrations of the substance they were testing for were so low the statistical variation of the amount in any given small volume of blood would invalidate the test, even if you could accurately count it.
  - sradman 6y ago
    > for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they were trying to use This is exactly the right question to ask. Right from the start we should have had a scorecard of the common lab tests doctors request (under 50 I think). For each test you should ask “is it possible with microfluidics?” and then “has it been combined on a single strip/card yet?” I’m not sure if any concentrations are too low for microfluidics rather than the dilution required to meet the volumes specified in the standardized tests. Are fingerpick volumes too small or are the regulatory tests outdated? The same issue applies to self administered rapid antigen tests during the pandemic. Regulators focused on the “gold standard" PCR tests and ignored the benefit of cheap and easy unamplified tests that can be used in a daily regiment.
AussieWog93 6y ago
I started a PhD in biomedical engineering back in 2017, coming from a EEE background. The topic I was studying was the application of machine learning for neurosignal decoding. Imagine the development of a "thought keyboard" that could be used by someone with motor neurone disease to communicate with their family or drive a robotic arm - young me was excited! While it's true that the field had shifted towards machine learning in the decade preceding, that wasn't because ML techniques showed any amazing promise or were likely to be the foundation of any breakthrough. Quite the opposite, in fact - there was strong evidence to suggest that the "ML revolution" would go nowhere, but that's where all the grant money was. So day after day, year after year, hordes of researchers would churn out ML papers they knew would yield no fruit simply because that was the path of least resistance. Occasionally they would get a "breakthrough" result that never generalised to other datasets. It could be the case that ML is showing genuinely amazing results in other biomedical fields, but after going through that I'm always a bit skeptical. (For anyone wondering, I left after a year and basically gave up the right to ever study a PhD in Australia again.)
- purple-again 6y ago
  Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain. That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of a false positive is marginal. In the industry we frequently refer to it as “professional judgement” and anyone who has ever referred to that statement in the course of their work should be concerned because ML is coming for you. As far as the false positive part of it, we’ll no on bats an eye when a surgeon loses a patient, but we’re unlikely to accept the same from a computer any time soon. The biggest area where I can think of that this narrow problem space exists to be capitalized on is...search. Not surprising then that Google became a king of ML because to them it was actually a revolutionary leap forward to their core problem.
  - nikanj 6y ago
627467 6y ago
> The final, and perhaps most important, reason why Silicon Valley as we know it may be over is that its current incarnation is a product of the extraordinarily cheap capital of the years since the global financial crisis of 2009. Seems to be implying that cheap capital is ending? Isn't the narrative everywhere right now that capital will remain cheap (almost) indefinitely and one of the reasons why many fear inflation and money is rushing to wallstreet and sv-casino (SPACs)?
helen___keller 6y ago
There are countless takes on this, but I'll add one more: Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building. For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers. Monoculturalism is a failure to diversify, and it stems from an inability to build an effective dense urban region. The bay area could have had human AND financial capital rivaling NYC, a megapolis perhaps in league with Tokyo, but this failed to materialize so instead the region will likely go the way of Detroit: rising and falling in step with the industry it's built around.
- kory 6y ago
  I think a big challenge here is single family housing with a yard is by far the most desirable housing in the US. I doubt folks would accept a significantly more dense living if they were the engineers of tomorrow. They’d expect the single family home and yard for their work. Where in the USA is this not a challenge? Single family zoning is everywhere and existing residents in most American cities have little reason to want that to change.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    I don't think this is all democratic will. The legal and government structures we have that enable the NIMBYism undermine democracy. Yes, single family homes are the greater meme, but I'm convinced if we actually built the density we need (building and public transit) it would be prosperous and people wouldn't flee it. Simply put, the fact that prices go up in densest parts of SF and NYC basically confirms that there's people that enough people want real cities to bootstrap the process.
  - novok 6y ago
    Many engineers of today and tomorrow would much prefer a large apartment in tokyo with SF weather than droll american suburbia and the worst of all worlds that is american city life with bad transit, choking car life and a lack of safety and hygiene due to a failure of public institutions. Millenials have show a preference for good cities, %50+ of SV engineers are immigrants from all over the world. A truely urban SV would be amazing.
sradman 6y ago
At the heart of progressive thought is concern over the twin evils of oppression and exploitation. O'Reilly’s piece focuses on the latter but relies on the assumption that profit==exploitation. I’m not convinced it is that simple. I wish I could have had a chat with Milton about the Friedman doctrine [1]. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective, shareholder value is a relatively easy measure that acts as a proxy for the true goal of a corporation: creating sustainable customer value. Within the context of his original article, Friedman was arguing that customers, employees, and shareholders could choose to give to charity, for instance, but it is wrong for a corporation to do it on their behalf. The concept is not intuitive but it is far from promoting selfishness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
m0llusk 6y ago
Just a quick review of the four main points based on my own experience and also reworded hopefully respectfully: 1. Consumer internet founders are not great at life sciences This is a distraction. Most of the money in internet has been with automating or supporting business operations for medium to large sized businesses. Life science tech brings unique challenges which is why so many life science tech companies are based in the valley or have offices here. Just to pick out one example the highest resolution ultrasound machines made come from a company based in the valley. This statement appears to be based more on the distracting powers of social media and consumer tech. 2. Internet regulation is upon us This is good thing because regulations give consumers confidence in the reliability and safety of new technologies. Even the most care free developers do not expect that the current order of things will endure. 3. Climate response is capital intensive This is a distraction from the fact that the most promising technologies for addressing climate response are extremely well represented in the valley. Analysis of orbital and aerial sensor data, automated sensors, control systems for solar and wind generation, modernized electrical grid support systems, and more were all led in part by companies in the valley. More to the point all of these technologies were initially developed by small companies for small applications. Real progress with climate response is likely to involve some big projects, but these projects will be successful because they are based on much smaller works. 4. The end of the betting economy Economies are based on bets and consist of bets, as is said, all the way down. The difference is that the terms are changing. Instead of throwing money at pets.com or Facebook plugins or cryptocoin wallets founders are going to have to be more careful and sparing of resources. This is actually a good thing and is likely to at least in part lead to a return to business success competing with hype for available capital. The situation now is that investors can outspend customers in any sector so the venture capital space has become disconnected from genuine business success. Squeezing the slop out of the system should be good for everyone. The analogy that comes to mind is being told that the future is being researched and started at universities and then concluding that frat parties do not yield meaningful tech progress, frat parties are consistently targeted for regulation, frat parties do not address social issues, therefore universities are not actually likely to host research and development that shapes the future. And yes, in this example the current giants in the valley are what amounts to a loud frat party.
pdimitar 6y ago
SV is a bubble and it will be defended by those who benefit from that status quo for quite a while still. I do agree with the article decrying humanity's chronic inability to act on preventable crises. But it seems (a) most of humanity is much more inert and passive than we are inclined to think and (b) the vested interests and/or the powers-that-be are really that powerful so as to prevent the action of everybody else. At the same time the article is overly optimistic: it claims that the consumer internet and social media are coming to an end.
azinman2 6y ago
What I don’t understand about the article is saying that SV is doomed because other areas are likely to be so huge is to ignore that there are already so many other areas of the economy even during SV’s growth. True FAANG grew at incredible rates over the past decade. It’s unclear that’ll slow down at all as software and computerization continues its current path. But all these biotech / green economy jobs it talks about will still run on software and microchips... in R&D, manufacturing, logistics, etc. Why can’t this be an AND versus an XOR? The article also implies there’s no biotech in SV - the Bay Area is home to many world leading biotech companies. Yes there are other gravitational pulls in SD, Boston, NJ (and I’m sure others internationally), but it’s not like that mix doesn’t exist here. And once the green economy starts really going, why wouldn’t there be places for new companies for follow in SV?
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I really wish I believed this article more, but it strikes me as too optimistic :( It says a bunch of changes are coming that I wish were coming, but don’t believe we’ll get soon. Weird to come away from a “SV will die” article with that feeling.

194 points by hacksilver 6y ago

> The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” This is all the sadder, though, since the tech industry set out to model something better. The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there... I don't buy that at all, the tech INDUSTRY was the result of attempting to extract value out of technology. I have to scoff at the inclusion of "algorithmically amplified intelligence" as one of the egalitarian core values of SV. If you hadn't caught on by then, you must have been heady off the fumes of it all.

onethought 6y ago
So open source was just tech people not understanding their core purpose of "extract value out of technology" ?
- ehnto 6y ago
  Open source is an entirely different movement. OSS is written the world over, yet SV is where everyone is busy extracting orders of magnitude of value from it. From plenty of experience, SV open sources because it provides a business advantage, because it costs them nothing or because it's part of the business model of OSS+Support. Individual contributors are the heroes here, people doing it for the love of the software. The software industry will spin their work for a dollar all fucking day with no contribution back.
  - onethought 6y ago
    Oh really... So the open source code that contributed/drove the delivery of that comment wasn't written in SV? edit: To the second part of your comment... so why are the browsers all open source (at least at their core)? What's the business advantage? The non-organisational contributors are hardly the "heroes" of those projects. And they have contributed a ridiculous amount of free value to world.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      There is no doubt that the vast majority of open source software comes out of the software industry in SV. The arguing point I have is that it isn't out of an egalitarian view from the industry to provide for others and make the world better, generally speaking. Exceptions abound, sure. But the industry is busy making money, the fact that say Chromium and Webkit are open source is a very good example of how a company can use open source to leverage a competitive advantage. My main gripe with the article is that it tried to conflate the technology movement and the software industry. Tied tightly together no doubt, but they are different. The very nature of the industry is to make money and that is totally fine, but let's not pretend the industry was some utopian ideal from the outset. As I said in my first comment, the industry specifically, grew out of the attempt to extract value from the technology. That's fine. It hasn't been twisted over time, it just is what it is. I may have been flippant in my commentary.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago
  For some business plans, open source is a means of keeping competitors some number of releases behind internal development, perpetually, while they're none the wiser.

nightshadetrie 6y ago

Maybe, at least people won’t be tied down 100% and can work remote. If you have a family you can now afford a home to raise kids in.

ping_pong 6y ago

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. Do I like what Silicon Valley has turned into? Hell no. I like the 90s version so much better, where nerds were tinkering with cool stuff and writing software because they loved software, not because they want to increase engagement by 1%. But it is what it is, and Silicon Valley will change with the times, I'm sure. I would love to see another dot-com-bust and clear out some of the chaff, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen this time around. If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made *too* much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on. One of the factors I listed above, greed, is now missing for the most part. People have too much money, and with that they stop getting hungry. The hunger for making money, which propelled a lot of the advancement in previous decades, is absent in many people here. Even I've become a multi-millionaire over the last 5 years by doing nothing differently except buying a house and working at a tech company. This causes a financial convection current, which you're somewhat seeing, of the bored rich Googlers moving on and doing other stuff. The incentive is gone for many. But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come, that will continue to fuel things for decades to come. These days, if you get funded by a VC, you're getting $5 million for 20%, which is a lot of money. Deals like that can't be matched elsewhere and another reason why you won't see people trying to raise money elsewhere, they will just come to Silicon Valley with their greatest ideas and keep propelling it. Silicon Valley will never die.

gxs 6y ago
I agree, but never say never. The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt. I think there will be other critical centers of tech innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has an industry as well.

onethought 6y ago

Isn't another growing/bigger centre for technology innovation now in China/Taiwan? Are we just pretending that Silicon Valley is still Mecca?

no_wizard 6y ago
I think its fair to say that they're growing for sure, as the government and corporations have been investing there. What I feel makes Silicon Valley unique (backed by the history as I understand it) is the proximity of things - The foundational organizations and proximity to an intense congregation of early innovation orgs, many of which started in Silicon Valley, or always had a large presence from the early days - Proximity to a delta of good universities (large hiring pool, of ready to work post grads helps a lot) - The incubation of VCs that despite many attempts to lure them, are still largely located in Silicon Valley I think these over arching factors are the biggest reason Silicon Valley is unique. They're also not often talked about in this way very often in the 'mythos' of SV, but are very much the bedrock It also doesn't make SV unique, per say (I think for medical device startups, states like Minnesota would be a good fit for your company, since they have a lot of investment in this area by multiple entities, as well as the same university graph so the pool of students you can hire is pretty good, and I feel this is pretty key to a lot of it)
- onethought 6y ago
  I’m guessing you haven’t been to Shenzhen. Where everything you mentioned is, and growing.
  - throwaway2037 6y ago
    > Proximity to a delta of good universities What good unis are in Guangdong (GD) province? The most famous ones I know are in Shanghai and Beijing. From my limited experience with hiring in Shenzhen, almost no one was from GD, nor went to uni in GD. Most went to uni in Shanghai or Beijing. > The foundational organizations I think the OP is referring to big gov't research (DARPA, etc.) that is the backbone of technologies behind the Internet and integrated circuits. Do similar orgs (and history) exist in Shenzhen? Again, my impression is that most of those orgs exist in Shanghai and Beijing.

EGreg 6y ago

Until 1988, California was ruled largely by Republicans. Since 1988, it gradually cane to be ruled more by Democrats, with the notable exception of the "moderate" Republican governor Schwartzenegger. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-voting-history/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-voting... In both eras, its GDP and population went up, until it became the 5th or 4th largest economy in the world. A bit of mean reversion occurs, after massive spikes in housing prices, wildfires and a pandemic and everyone loses their crap. Seriously, people... this is about as bad as cries of "CARNAGE!!" in 2016 when crime has a slight uptick after 10 years of decline.

baloney1 6y ago
Correlation does not imply causation, son.
- seniorivn 6y ago
  but he clearly does
throw-away_42 6y ago
Perhaps you're thinking of some other state? https://governors.library.ca.gov/36-wilson.html https://governors.library.ca.gov/36-wilson.html

TedShiller 6y ago

The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who have left have all peaked in their careers. The real loss would not be of people who have peaked leaving but of people who haven’t peaked yet leaving.

brandmeyer 6y ago
> people who haven’t peaked yet leaving. No, it is people who haven't peaked yet not even coming in the first place.
- TedShiller 6y ago
  True. Hence the wrong focus in the article. It’s like if Bill Gates leaves Seattle. Nothing happens because Gates is done in his career.
  - ulfw 6y ago
    Bill Gates is not done at all. In fact he is doing more and better things for mankind with his career now than he did when he ran Microsoft.
    - TedShiller 6y ago
      Sure, but Bill Gates leaving Seattle would not impact the Seattle tech industry at all.
NeverFade 6y ago
Elon Musk has "peaked in his career"? I understand that we need to rudely dismiss everyone who left NorCal, but maybe let's try to maintain some semblance of connection to reality?
- dang 6y ago
  Please let's not go into the Musk Wars. They're all the same and always lame.

caslon 6y ago

High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars putting literal lives at risk, a figurative vampire (infuses literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a company that hasn't been relevant since the 1970s all are leaving the Valley! I don't even live there, and I never plan on living there, but they're not citing anyone all that meaningful. Larry Ellison is somehow the person who comes off the best out of that group! Larry Ellison! A guy who can best be described with a lawnmower metaphor! Come on! And now a guy who corporatized free software to the point of it being completely unenforced and also coined Web 2.0 to sell you books is telling you to leave! I'm skeptical about this "end" of the Valley, somehow. Almost seems like they're trying to get you to leave to devalue the price of real estate, scoop it up and then advocate once more for the Valley.

busterarm 6y ago
Oracle is, unfortunately, extremely relevant, just in none of the places you care about. Your biases keep you from seeing it. In fact I was just recently involved in some conversations that could see the spend of tens of millions on their Cloud platform and where they are seriously looking like the strongest contender on both the technical and the business side. Second tier cloud providers should be extremely worried about Oracle eating their lunch. Eventually the big three might have to too...
- caslon 6y ago
  Silicon Valley's value is in innovation. Oracle doesn't innovate, and Amazon's in Seattle anyway. There's really nothing that matters as far as any of the cloud companies; they're valueless.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Was. Now it's just a myth that people perpetuate. What SV has now is a bunch of greedy people looking to give money to ideas. It's not that SV technologists are innovators anymore, it's just that they are in proximity to money. Now the business people and their greed and money are leaving SV en masse. What does it have left?

op03 6y ago

Its been in decline ever since outsourcing began. Inevitable in a connected world. Time to move on. Whats the Chinese/Indian equivalent of HN?

mempko 6y ago

Overall this is a really good piece. O'Reilly is wrong that the world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it Amazingly. It's not just communist governments that did well, New Zealand and Australia did well too. However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK. O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development. And he may be right the skills needed are elsewhere.

cblconfederate 6y ago
Oceania's willingness to be bold may be a good omen for their future
- refurb 6y ago
  Oceania will be on the front lines of the geopolitical rivalry between China and the West. Australia is already hurting because China is screwing with their exports.
geomark 6y ago
What you say is true, but I wonder what you mean by "failed it's people". Because from what I saw it wasn't just really poor leadership. It was the prevalent attitude of individualism above everyone else that made things really bad in many western countries. People failed themselves. And great leaders aren't going to change that culture.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development Solving climate change in relevant timescales involves severe cuts to consumption, which will cause havoc because it will mess with all the economic growth projections people expect, which will cause short term pain even if it accomplishes long term gain. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
- lanstin 6y ago

shinkim0914 6y ago

There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and encouraged.

earthscienceman 6y ago
... that's because it's not a career risk when you're a multi millionaire who will just be rehired by your friends if your venture fails.
- WalterGR 6y ago
  Who are these multi millionaires? Clearly I know the wrong people in tech in the Bay Area.
  - opportune 6y ago
    Probably most people I work with in their 30s or 40s are multimillionaires.
    - WalterGR 6y ago
      Yeah? On paper, 401k, or elsewhere? Where have they worked and for how long? Because in my experience, the “everyone who works at a FAANG is a multi-millionaire” meme is 100% bullshit. Especially when I read things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336029
      - astrange 6y ago
        What company uses the scale in this comment? (IC5 IC6 IC7 etc)
        Zanneth 6y ago
        At least Apple does. I'm not sure if other companies use it as well.

Haarisgrey 6y ago

Of course we got people like this!. I smoke and I’ve been a smoker for years. Most of the time I am surrounded by people who do not smoke at all. Doesn’t amaze me. I have some close friends, we hangout together international;y and vacation parties but they both have never smoked weed and I am a regular smoker and this thing doesn’t affect our friendship at all. It’s not about something being legal or illegal. If a thing is facilitating you either way it is totally okay for the other person to use it. I started using it for my chronic pain and eventually ended up like this. https://www.weedmarket420.us/ https://www.weedmarket420.us/ Being a marijuana enthusiast I keep on researching for good material and here I came across 5 new researches! Have a good day!

baby 6y ago

I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...

pottertheotter 6y ago
There's a lot more to Silicon Valley than San Francisco. It's just as expensive with a lot of people absorbed in their work, but does away with the bad weather and crime. I've never understood why so many tech companies over the last decade went up to SF. Before that most were down the peninsula and in San Jose. I'd pick the lower peninsula over SF no question.
- mrgordon 6y ago
  Because the younger talent they’re trying to attract prefers a lively city to the suburban sprawl with good schools
  - slimsag 6y ago
    The younger talent they are trying to recruit prefers a lively city with broad culture and opportunities, which exist in many places outside of SV - and in different forms than just the tech mono-culture that SF is today.
    - mrgordon 6y ago
      Sure but the person I was replying to was talking specifically about Silicon Valley versus SF. There are many cities out there that will attract people certainly. I don’t live in the Bay Area anymore so I can relate.
- opportune 6y ago
  The South Bay is either boring or very expensive. SF still feels very genuine and has a lot more going on compared to Sunnyvale. Not to say there is no reason to live there, but it seems to mostly attract families who like suburban living

davmar 6y ago

LOL @ rabois being a harbinger of things to come.

networkimprov 6y ago

This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecurity-202-global-losses-cybercrime-skyrocketed-nearly-1-trillion-2020/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-hammered-by-record-50-billion-dollar-weather-disasters-in-2020/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-hammered-by...

pjc50 6y ago
That seems astonishing and hard to believe; the WaPo is paywalled, where are they getting that number from? Is it by any chance an organization trying to sell cybercrime solutions? SV has probably had just as much a role in enabling cybercrime as fighting it.
- sva_ 6y ago
  > The projection of $945 billion in losses, from a new report out today[0] from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and computer security company McAfee, is almost double the monetary loss from cybercrime than the $500 billion in 2018. McAfee's report "The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime"[0] seems to be the source. [0] https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/assets/reports/rp-hidden-costs-of-cybercrime.pdf https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/assets/reports/rp-hi...
- networkimprov 6y ago
  I can read the WaPo article in a private/incognito browser window. The IETF in particular has had a huge role in facilitating phishing via SMTP.
logicchains 6y ago
The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals, it's a result of really really poor security practices, a solveable problem.

armatav 6y ago

Nope.

dang 6y ago

All: please respond to the substance of the article, not the baity title. The latter leads to boring flamewar, while the article (and we all) deserve better. To help with that, we've changed the title above to the what high school English teachers would call its thesis statement.

betwixthewires 6y ago

I don't think a lot of people quite grasp how big of a scam silicon valley is. I've pieced most of the information together from articles that I have seen here. Do you know who owns the majority of rental properties in silicon valley? East coast and Midwest pension funds or investment firms using their capital. This includes office space and residential areas. Care to take a guess who's capital the majority of VC firms are investing? If you guessed east coast and Midwest pension funds, you're right. Moving to silicon valley to get a good paying job? Prepare to spend most of it on rent, basically paying a significant portion if not the majority of your salary to the very individuals that own controlling interest in the company paying you. Going to silicon valley to start a company? Prepare to pay a significant portion of that funding you got right back where you got it for office space. Imagine if you could take a significant share, potentially a controlling interest, in every major tech startup basically for free. You create an engine to suck productivity out of some of the most creative, technically proficient innovators in the US by owning land in northern California and convincing them that they have to go there and rent from you to get your money to make their big ideas happen. Now you get to own some of the most productive people on the planet. That's one hell of a profitable scam. And the funny thing, we all forgot why you had to go there in the first place, that the silicon was made there, and we just take it as gospel that you have to go there to work in tech, even though the silicon is all made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China now. And let's not even get started on the hypocrisy of pension funds that exist due to union lobbying doing this. Now, if you're still considering going there, as an added bonus consider that you'll be surrounded by people that step over homeless people on the way to work where they will write social media posts about income inequality.

blast 6y ago
You're not entirely wrong, but you're more wrong than right. For example, yes, a good paying SV job involves spending a lot on rent, but nowhere near "most of it"...very much the opposite. Yes there are issues, but it's not "how big of a scam", and by describing it that way you lose credibility.
- keenreed 6y ago
  When I looked a few years back, nice houses would go around 12k/month. Maybe shared condos are not expensive, but not everyone wants to live that way.

Apocryphon 6y ago

The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” Not to mention, I would wager most commentators are not equipped to address his point about SV being unable to deal with medical regulations, seeing as there’s been medtech startups that have already attempted to flout FDA regulation. > The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley Isn’t South SF a biotech hotbed? His points about regulators actually doing able something substantive towards big tech platforms, and the end of “casino capitalism” also feel too Pollyannaish for our current lamentable moment. Maybe it has to all get worse before it’s foreseeable. O’Reilly certainly calls it out as he sees it with the social commentary: > When the “superstar firms” ruthlessly compete with smaller firms that come up with fresh ideas, not only starving them of talent but often introducing copycat products and services, there is decreased innovation from the market as a whole. Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers; wages and working conditions of workers in less profitable industries are squeezed to drive the growth of the giants. Their very jobs are made contingent and disposable, with inequality baked in from the beginning of their employment. Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance. The list is far longer than that. Honestly, this article’s a great read.

weinzierl 6y ago
“The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds me of these tests where you are presented a list of words that are related somehow and you have to find the one word that doesn't fit in the set. For me materials science seems to almost fit at first glance, but not really when you look at it. Both the other areas have already changed our life more than anything in the past decades and there is good reason they will continue to do so even more in the near and intermediate future. I don't see this to be true for materials science. At least there seem to be at least a dozen fields that are equally influential. Does anyone know why materials science is so often included?

spoonjim 6y ago

It honestly doesn’t really matter to the world if “Silicon Valley” moves to another or multiple other locations. What’s far more important is, “does the ever-accelerating dominance of a small number of companies show any signs of weakness?” and this article doesn’t seem to think so.

laurent92 6y ago
It may seem unfair. However, population increases (fast, actually), so hierarchical structures grow in size, and concentration as well. A CEO of a large company in 1980 would be considered a small CEO in 2020. There are more employees everywhere and necessarily more layers of management (and the same goes for the startup/VC ecosystem, and the same goes for democratic structures which require more stringent rule so everyone lives on the same planet). Concentration is more a side-effect of population than any other trend.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I have been a long time fan of Tim O'Reilly for the past ~20 years or so. Recently I had the opportunity to interview him [0] for a podcast/videocast I run, in which we covered his friendship and work with Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, how the O'Reilly Media company came to be; but most importantly, Tim's "political" involvement in keeping the internet free and open. In particular, I really like his way of looking at good startups and good companies: the ones that don't simply intercept or capture value, but that instead create it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4

cblconfederate 6y ago

> The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there Is it? I think it's dying with the generation that believed in that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects created by young inventors? Even this article is written by someone who is of an older generation

DaedPsyker 6y ago
There are sv open projects but many are extentions of some company effort, i.e pytorch/Facebook, tensorflow/Google. Much of the traditional spirit of open source seems to be coming from Europe and South America.
- lansdale10 6y ago
  The spirit is still there outside the USA, but especially developers from Europe catch on to the fact that their free labor is exploited by U.S. Foundation and Council members, who build their careers on the work of others. This is not "ideological flamewar", it is a fact that international contributions are monetized and governed in America.

deleted 6y ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

"To be sure, a great deal of content on the World Wide Web and in social media is produced and consumed with commercial intent, but a remarkable amount is produced entirely without a profit motive. Google economists have told me that only six percent of Google search result pages carry any advertising at all. The other 94% of pages are the product of the joyful exuberance of humanity, creating and sharing for the joy of it." I have been repeating the second part of this statement as a truism for decades as internet advertising keeps growing. Apparently I have have been living it too because nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero targeted ads. To the gatekeeper companies controlling the www today there appears to be no commercial/non-commercial distinction. For these companies and all those who ride their coattails, data collection for the ultimate purpose of internet advertising is fair game anywhere and everywhere. "Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and corporate governance, not the cause of it, or even the worst exemplar. (Tobacco, oil, and pharma companies vie for the top spot.)" Tobacco, oil and pharma are all highly regulated industries. SV is highly unregulated. It is curious to me why financial services did not make the the list of exemplars. Meanwhile the author then proceeds with a criticism of "casino capitalism". Perhaps there are links between the rise of "casino capitalism" and the rise of the www as a promoted commercial prospect, in the late 1990s/early 2000's and again more recently.

cblconfederate 6y ago
> nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero Google has pretty much eaten all advertising they can eat, there is no more to eat no matter how many ads they add. They can pretty much set the prices of their ads arbitrarily high since they have control over both advertisers and publishers. > financial services did not make the the list of exemplars Yeah, from the outside , SV currently seems to be Finance #2: greed is good, morals are for losers, grow fast and gtfo mentality

sradman 6y ago

> as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said: > Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce a lab-on-a-chip. Theranos failed to combine more than a handful of microfluidics together and scrambled to find alternatives to bridge the gap. Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests. Our collective small minds couldn’t focus on anything but the people involved. The core idea is still an outstanding hard problem.

rcxdude 6y ago
> Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests. As I understand it, for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they were trying to use: the concentrations of the substance they were testing for were so low the statistical variation of the amount in any given small volume of blood would invalidate the test, even if you could accurately count it.
- sradman 6y ago
  > for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they were trying to use This is exactly the right question to ask. Right from the start we should have had a scorecard of the common lab tests doctors request (under 50 I think). For each test you should ask “is it possible with microfluidics?” and then “has it been combined on a single strip/card yet?” I’m not sure if any concentrations are too low for microfluidics rather than the dilution required to meet the volumes specified in the standardized tests. Are fingerpick volumes too small or are the regulatory tests outdated? The same issue applies to self administered rapid antigen tests during the pandemic. Regulators focused on the “gold standard" PCR tests and ignored the benefit of cheap and easy unamplified tests that can be used in a daily regiment.

AussieWog93 6y ago

I started a PhD in biomedical engineering back in 2017, coming from a EEE background. The topic I was studying was the application of machine learning for neurosignal decoding. Imagine the development of a "thought keyboard" that could be used by someone with motor neurone disease to communicate with their family or drive a robotic arm - young me was excited! While it's true that the field had shifted towards machine learning in the decade preceding, that wasn't because ML techniques showed any amazing promise or were likely to be the foundation of any breakthrough. Quite the opposite, in fact - there was strong evidence to suggest that the "ML revolution" would go nowhere, but that's where all the grant money was. So day after day, year after year, hordes of researchers would churn out ML papers they knew would yield no fruit simply because that was the path of least resistance. Occasionally they would get a "breakthrough" result that never generalised to other datasets. It could be the case that ML is showing genuinely amazing results in other biomedical fields, but after going through that I'm always a bit skeptical. (For anyone wondering, I left after a year and basically gave up the right to ever study a PhD in Australia again.)

purple-again 6y ago
Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain. That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of a false positive is marginal. In the industry we frequently refer to it as “professional judgement” and anyone who has ever referred to that statement in the course of their work should be concerned because ML is coming for you. As far as the false positive part of it, we’ll no on bats an eye when a surgeon loses a patient, but we’re unlikely to accept the same from a computer any time soon. The biggest area where I can think of that this narrow problem space exists to be capitalized on is...search. Not surprising then that Google became a king of ML because to them it was actually a revolutionary leap forward to their core problem.
- nikanj 6y ago

627467 6y ago

> The final, and perhaps most important, reason why Silicon Valley as we know it may be over is that its current incarnation is a product of the extraordinarily cheap capital of the years since the global financial crisis of 2009. Seems to be implying that cheap capital is ending? Isn't the narrative everywhere right now that capital will remain cheap (almost) indefinitely and one of the reasons why many fear inflation and money is rushing to wallstreet and sv-casino (SPACs)?

helen___keller 6y ago

There are countless takes on this, but I'll add one more: Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building. For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers. Monoculturalism is a failure to diversify, and it stems from an inability to build an effective dense urban region. The bay area could have had human AND financial capital rivaling NYC, a megapolis perhaps in league with Tokyo, but this failed to materialize so instead the region will likely go the way of Detroit: rising and falling in step with the industry it's built around.

kory 6y ago
I think a big challenge here is single family housing with a yard is by far the most desirable housing in the US. I doubt folks would accept a significantly more dense living if they were the engineers of tomorrow. They’d expect the single family home and yard for their work. Where in the USA is this not a challenge? Single family zoning is everywhere and existing residents in most American cities have little reason to want that to change.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  I don't think this is all democratic will. The legal and government structures we have that enable the NIMBYism undermine democracy. Yes, single family homes are the greater meme, but I'm convinced if we actually built the density we need (building and public transit) it would be prosperous and people wouldn't flee it. Simply put, the fact that prices go up in densest parts of SF and NYC basically confirms that there's people that enough people want real cities to bootstrap the process.
- novok 6y ago
  Many engineers of today and tomorrow would much prefer a large apartment in tokyo with SF weather than droll american suburbia and the worst of all worlds that is american city life with bad transit, choking car life and a lack of safety and hygiene due to a failure of public institutions. Millenials have show a preference for good cities, %50+ of SV engineers are immigrants from all over the world. A truely urban SV would be amazing.

sradman 6y ago

At the heart of progressive thought is concern over the twin evils of oppression and exploitation. O'Reilly’s piece focuses on the latter but relies on the assumption that profit==exploitation. I’m not convinced it is that simple. I wish I could have had a chat with Milton about the Friedman doctrine [1]. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective, shareholder value is a relatively easy measure that acts as a proxy for the true goal of a corporation: creating sustainable customer value. Within the context of his original article, Friedman was arguing that customers, employees, and shareholders could choose to give to charity, for instance, but it is wrong for a corporation to do it on their behalf. The concept is not intuitive but it is far from promoting selfishness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

m0llusk 6y ago

Just a quick review of the four main points based on my own experience and also reworded hopefully respectfully: 1. Consumer internet founders are not great at life sciences This is a distraction. Most of the money in internet has been with automating or supporting business operations for medium to large sized businesses. Life science tech brings unique challenges which is why so many life science tech companies are based in the valley or have offices here. Just to pick out one example the highest resolution ultrasound machines made come from a company based in the valley. This statement appears to be based more on the distracting powers of social media and consumer tech. 2. Internet regulation is upon us This is good thing because regulations give consumers confidence in the reliability and safety of new technologies. Even the most care free developers do not expect that the current order of things will endure. 3. Climate response is capital intensive This is a distraction from the fact that the most promising technologies for addressing climate response are extremely well represented in the valley. Analysis of orbital and aerial sensor data, automated sensors, control systems for solar and wind generation, modernized electrical grid support systems, and more were all led in part by companies in the valley. More to the point all of these technologies were initially developed by small companies for small applications. Real progress with climate response is likely to involve some big projects, but these projects will be successful because they are based on much smaller works. 4. The end of the betting economy Economies are based on bets and consist of bets, as is said, all the way down. The difference is that the terms are changing. Instead of throwing money at pets.com or Facebook plugins or cryptocoin wallets founders are going to have to be more careful and sparing of resources. This is actually a good thing and is likely to at least in part lead to a return to business success competing with hype for available capital. The situation now is that investors can outspend customers in any sector so the venture capital space has become disconnected from genuine business success. Squeezing the slop out of the system should be good for everyone. The analogy that comes to mind is being told that the future is being researched and started at universities and then concluding that frat parties do not yield meaningful tech progress, frat parties are consistently targeted for regulation, frat parties do not address social issues, therefore universities are not actually likely to host research and development that shapes the future. And yes, in this example the current giants in the valley are what amounts to a loud frat party.

pdimitar 6y ago

SV is a bubble and it will be defended by those who benefit from that status quo for quite a while still. I do agree with the article decrying humanity's chronic inability to act on preventable crises. But it seems (a) most of humanity is much more inert and passive than we are inclined to think and (b) the vested interests and/or the powers-that-be are really that powerful so as to prevent the action of everybody else. At the same time the article is overly optimistic: it claims that the consumer internet and social media are coming to an end.

azinman2 6y ago

What I don’t understand about the article is saying that SV is doomed because other areas are likely to be so huge is to ignore that there are already so many other areas of the economy even during SV’s growth. True FAANG grew at incredible rates over the past decade. It’s unclear that’ll slow down at all as software and computerization continues its current path. But all these biotech / green economy jobs it talks about will still run on software and microchips... in R&D, manufacturing, logistics, etc. Why can’t this be an AND versus an XOR? The article also implies there’s no biotech in SV - the Bay Area is home to many world leading biotech companies. Yes there are other gravitational pulls in SD, Boston, NJ (and I’m sure others internationally), but it’s not like that mix doesn’t exist here. And once the green economy starts really going, why wouldn’t there be places for new companies for follow in SV?

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

I really wish I believed this article more, but it strikes me as too optimistic :( It says a bunch of changes are coming that I wish were coming, but don’t believe we’ll get soon. Weird to come away from a “SV will die” article with that feeling.