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This industry has drawn scum like flies to shit for decades. When I was a kid starting out, it was the beginning of the dot.com boom, and you'd see these endles

This industry has drawn scum like flies to shit for decades. When I was a kid starting out, it was the beginning of the dot.com boom, and you'd see these endless stupid startup ideas thrown together by MBAs who suddenly thought SF or the Valley were the place to be instead of Wall Street. (Many of these back then involved unrealistic or bizarre schemes involving streaming media, as I recall.) Then it was social media. The same sketchy freaks were all gonna do the new MySpace or Facebook. I remember one dude telling me at a meetup that he was doing "Facebook for payroll". What the fuck does that even mean, dude? Then came crypto, and the serious scumbags and loonies showed up, because you didn't even need VCs to make money - the money itself was the product. Every ancap dipshit and New Age cokehead and Eastern Promises ass connected-to-scary-Russiam-sex-traffickers jerkoff came squirming out of the woodwork. Now it's AI. As soon as any tech can be utilized by stupid or sociopathic people to scam or spam other people, it's suddenly hailed as a "boom". And now millions of human-hours and trillions of dollars will be thrown at teaching ML models to sell you boner pills and get your grandma's credit card number. And all the interesting, useful directions we could be going as technologists are being mostly ignored, so that failed child actors and Patrick Bateman ass hustlers can throw extravagant launch parties and hype up their worthless companies until their investors finally figure out it's a scam and they go to jail, at which point Hulu or Netflix makes a docudrama miniseries about them starring somebody who was a box office draw when the last wave of tech hype was upon us. Capitalism is so boring and predictable. Always the lowest hanging fruit, always the creepiest scum trying to pick it. I'd probably go be Amish if I could convince myself to believe in Jesus.

terminal_d 4y ago
Well said. Most of this shit just circles back onto itself. Unfortunately having a very public, very unequal distribution of rewards only seems to perpetuate the cycle, and with commodities where the service is the product and the reward, the gravy train never ends and there's a sucker born every minute. The only way to be content is to not play.

terminal_d 4y ago

Well said. Most of this shit just circles back onto itself. Unfortunately having a very public, very unequal distribution of rewards only seems to perpetuate the cycle, and with commodities where the service is the product and the reward, the gravy train never ends and there's a sucker born every minute. The only way to be content is to not play.