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Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
- zerosizedweasle 7mo ago"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.
- Throaway1982 7mo agoIt's all about the pathetic rationalization we have placed on greed and profit. We can make millions redundant with AI and still have a social safety net that keeps society stable and healthy. But no, that wouldn't be "fair" to the people who generate millions of net worth every 5 minute.
- anonym29 7mo agoIf you could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire in the country, and sell all of them for market rate without putting any downward pressure on prices at all, that sum would not fund 10 months of the federal government's current spending levels, and even less if you wanted new programs.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- elictronic 7mo agoYou could make 900 people go from billionaires to high net worth individuals and nearly fund the exorbitant spending of the US government that directly supports 330 million people for a year. I think you might be overselling how good that is.
- a_better_world 7mo agook, but how about if we stop funding ICE?
- anonym29 7mo agoWhile ICE is the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the entire country now, their budget is still really just a drop in the bucket, and wouldn't make a meaningful difference in the fiscal picture. In fact, you could not only defund ICE, but the entire US armed forces, and that still wouldn't even eliminate the deficit - we'd still need to borrow over a trillion dollars a year. That said, I'm all for the peaceful, lawful, orderly dissolution of as many federal government agencies as we can agree on dissolving. My preference would be "all of them", but I have no problem starting with ICE and revisiting the rest later :)
- smallmancontrov 7mo agoIf you cured 100% of all cancer it would only reduce US deaths by 20%. Clearly we should conclude that cancer isn't a problem and isn't worth curing, and also that heart disease and unintentional injuries and so on are also not problems and also not worth trying to fix.
- vee-kay 7mo ago"World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity", as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly”, says Oxfam: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-more-wealth-95-humanity-shadow-global-oligarchy-hangs-over-un https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor... Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and the level of billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger. https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich And I believe this is useful and thought-provoking reading in this context of how unbridled Capitalism is exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots. Wage slavery: The illusion of freedom: Exploitation Under Capitalism: Marx’s Analysis of Labor and Profit: https://philosophy.institute/social-political/exploitation-under-capitalism-marx-analysis/ https://philosophy.institute/social-political/exploitation-u... https://davidlingenfelter.substack.com/p/the-normalization-of-abuse-and-exploitation https://davidlingenfelter.substack.com/p/the-normalization-o... And no, the solution to the problems are not blind unchecked communism (which itself leads to fascism), but perhaps some more ethical & humane methods are needed for an overhaul of world society, and economic & geopolitical regimes.
- andsoitis 7mo agoAI can’t function without instructions from humans, but an increasing number of humans seem incapable of functioning without AI.
- booleandilemma 7mo agoA really weird symbiotic relationship. I'm glad I went to school when people learned how to think.
- littlexsparkee 7mo agoIt'll benefit established folks as the pipeline withers but at the expense of society - things were already sufficiently borked before this phenomenon.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago[dead]
- analog8374 7mo agoDoes it become circular? A 2-cycle ouroboros. Man-machine-man-etc. Consuming each-other's secretions. Forever.
- FrankWilhoit 7mo agoDevolution.
- analog8374 7mo agoNot necessarily stoned but mutatious.
- FatherOfCurses 7mo ago>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.
- easton 7mo agoI've been to SF three times, and each time the oddest thing was going down 101 from the airport and seeing cURL commands and "you sped past that just like we sped past Snowflake" and such on billboards. It's like being on another planet where everyone is at work. (on the other hand, in DC there's ads on the metro for new engine upgrades for fighter jets, and i've gotten used to that.)
- esafak 7mo agoAnd in LA, every billboard is about Hollywood. It's something you just have to take in your stride. I do get that it is not nice to be constantly reminded of work. Trees would make a nicer view.
- snozolli 7mo agoI visited L.A. in 2023 and the thing that shocked me was how many billboards were for products that I only ever heard advertised on podcasts. MeUndies, for example.
- RupertSalt 7mo agoWho can forget the billboards that launched a "career"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelyne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelyne
- secabeen 7mo agoI have the pleasure of living in Santa Barbara, CA, where we've banned billboards for decades. It's quite refreshing.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- voxleone 7mo agoThe 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.
- measurablefunc 7mo agoWe have AI now. The machines will manage their own infrastructure.
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo agoI thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.
- rglover 7mo agoThat's a force you move away from, not towards.
- Manfred 7mo agoMaybe publicly invisible, but a personal network and resume have always been important in a career.
- mjr00 7mo ago> Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). That's always been the case depending on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to be Corporation Employee #41,737, or work for the government, you don't need a "personal brand"; just a small social network who knows your skills is good enough. If you're in your early 20s and trying to get 9 figures of investment in your AI startup, yeah you need to project an image as Roy from the article is doing. It's amplified a bit in the social media world, but remember that only ~0.5% of people actively comment or post on social media. 99.5% of the world is invisible and doing just fine.
- FatherOfCurses 7mo ago> "The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage." (From the Cluely ad) JFC kill me now that is NOT a future I want to live in.
- butterbomb 7mo agoThis became clear to me over the last few years. We are quickly returning to a world of entrenched social hierarchy where there are lords and peasants and little room even for social mobility. With the corpse of meritocracy too rotted to deny at this point the elite simply seem to have run out of lies for placating the people. Or, more likely the people are so sickeningly impotent, that’s there’s no need for the lies anymore. The new aristocracy will prevail over liberalism and everything the west lied of being part of the their values for years.
- AtlasBarfed 7mo agoThat ultimately happens from entrenched geopolitical situations as well. However, I think we are entering an age of geopolitical chaos. And that will be a darwinian struggle of functioning governance systems.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoThe west had been fighting this since it's founding. “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” ― Ulysses S. Grant
- munificent 7mo agoHe was wrong about which side patriotism would end up on.
- qgin 7mo agoHas the world ever rewarded effort?
- lordleft 7mo agoI read Sam Kriss' substack and he's a wildly unique and talented writer.
- bogrollben 7mo agoagreed - I was shocked how quickly I became immersed reading this relatively simple story.
- jeffbee 7mo agoWordcel backlash, basically.
- co_king_5 7mo ago[flagged]
- john_strinlai 7mo ago[dead]
- Der_Einzige 7mo agoThis 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.
- sp1nningaway 7mo agoHahah, 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.
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago<< 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.
- reductum 7mo agoHe writes an excellent blog: https://samkriss.substack.com/ https://samkriss.substack.com/
- threetonesun 7mo agoSeeing a Substack email collection box where you have to agree to whatever its terms are to subscribe with a skip to content link of "No, I'm a coward" is... an experience. I'll take your word he's an excellent writer, if there's an RSS feed maybe I'll subscribe.
- kurttheviking 7mo agoMost Substacks have an RSS feed (I'm not sure if one can disable it or not); in this case: https://samkriss.substack.com/feed https://samkriss.substack.com/feed
- dqv 7mo agoOh, I just edited it with developer tools to "No thank you, and I'm brave" so that clicking it wouldn't turn me into a coward
- thom 7mo agoOne of the best writers of our generation. There’s no better deconstruction of UK lad culture than this: https://samkriss.com/2015/05/20/cheeky-nandos-or-what-wet-wrong/ https://samkriss.com/2015/05/20/cheeky-nandos-or-what-wet-wr....
- cleandreams 7mo agoTo be fair SF has had incomprehensible (to normies) billboards since at least the early 90's.
- anigbrowl 7mo agoTrue, 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.
- i_love_retros 7mo agoThe description of cluely's office makes me think of Sugar Ape magazine in Nathan barley.
- bakugo 7mo ago> 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.
- temp8830 7mo agoThis was good. The author found a way to say what we are all thinking - and isn't getting canceled for it. That's true talent.
- abejinaru 7mo ago[dead]
- precompute 7mo agoThis 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.
- doctor_blood 7mo agoKriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.
- FloorEgg 7mo agoBuilding a successful startup is very hard, and not just in the "it's a lot of hard work" sense, but also in terms of making good decisions. For the average person who went to college and worked in some other industry/capacity, the good decisions are very counterintuitive. Most VCs have no idea how to accuratly judge startups based on their core merit, or how to make good decision in startups (though they may think they do), so instead they focus on things like "will this founder be able to hype up this startup and sell the next round so I can mark it up on my books".
- FeteCommuniste 7mo agoSalesmanship all the way down.
- marcosdumay 7mo agoSo... You think it's because the VCs are conning their investors and those con-man are the best extend and pretend opportunities? I can believe in that. But just a couple of years ago it was clearly happening because the VCs wanted those people to sell the companies into some mark and return real money to them. I wonder when did the investors became the marks?
- rpcope1 7mo agoI mean whenever things like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and SoftBank came into existence. They've been the biggest marks to unload your dumbest equity into for as long as I've been paying attention (so at least 10-15 years now), and at least as long as Jim Cramer and his ilk have been hyping dog shit IPOs to drop on clueless retail.
- FloorEgg 7mo agoMayb in some extreme cases, but I wouldn't go so far as using the "con" word most of the time. The hardest part of startups is probably the making good decisions part. To be a good VC you need to be better at founders at judging startup decisions, AND you need to be good at LP deal flow AND you need to be good at startup deal flow. LP deal flow has to come first (otherwise there is no fund), and because of zirp a lot of VCs got funds up without good startup deal flow or the ability to judge startups well. In other words it's hard to be good a VC too, but for a while it was artificially easy to be a bad VC.
- climike 7mo agoNot sure about the end of thinking, would say that this is the start of managing ever more stochastic systems
- rootnod3 7mo agoThis 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.
- conz 7mo agoOpenBSD 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.
- munificent 7mo agoBeautiful article. I think the "agency" the article talks about is really just "willingness to take risks". And the reason some people are high outliers on that scale is a combination of: * Coming from such a level of privilege that they will be completely fine even if they lose over and over again. * Willingness to push any losses onto other undeserving people without experiencing guilt. * A psychological compulsion towards impulsive behavior and inability to think about long-term consequences. In short, rich selfish sociopaths. Some amount of risk-taking is necessary for innovation. But the level we are seeing today is clearly unsustainable and destructive to the fabric of society. It's the difference between confining a series of little bangs to produce an internal combustion engine versus just throwing hand grenades around the public square. The willingness to take chances needs to be surrounded by a structure that minimizes the blast radius of failure.
- AlexandrB 7mo ago> * 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.
- daxfohl 7mo agoInteresting 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.
- lanfeust6 7mo agoIt 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.
- FloorEgg 7mo agoI 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.
- jcgrillo 7mo agoIn the context of the rest of the piece, I read this as sarcasm. The author is making fun of the species of narcissistic silly con valley techbro who actually believes such nonsense.
- FloorEgg 7mo agoAh, I struggle with sarcasm sometimes and I was a bit distracted while reading. I'll give it another chance.
- ai_ai 7mo agoI 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 )
- xg15 7mo agoI had always thought that Kai Lentit's characters were at least somewhat exaggerated and not a 1:1 copy of the real thing...
- functionmouse 7mo agoWe're doomed
- keiferski 7mo agoThe 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.
- benlivengood 7mo agoHey, I had to read On The Road once for college, and I am currently sitting in SF. To be fair to Jack Kerouac, I was young when I read it but even at my advanced age I don't think I want to reread it. Also, the old hippie culture sort of moved out of SF and into the surrounding bay, I think especially toward East Bay.
- chickensong 7mo agoSF 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.
- keiferski 7mo agoThe exact same thing is true of smaller cities like Pittsburgh, as well. The point is that their cultural histories still manage to exist today, even at some level, whereas tech has turned SF into a historical culture-free zone, entirely detached from what SF was even 25 years ago.
- maxwell 7mo ago> "We're big believers in protein," Roy said. "It's impossible to get fat at Cluely. Nothing here has any fat." Clueless.
- littlexsparkee 7mo agoThe brain needs fat to function - that explains a lot
- maxwell 7mo agoSounds like they're sitting around eating rabbits wondering why they're starving, or just fill up on sugar when no one's looking. Fat was demonized to push sugar. "Protein" was then pushed because you can just load up stuff like "protein bars" with sugar.
- butterbomb 7mo agoThese people will be your new lords lmao
- maxwell 7mo agoPlease, they're ngmi with no fat. The unhealthy frat boy office sounds like a throwback to the early '10s. What woman would work there? They seem poised to crash and burn out. Historical aristocracy were defined by eating meat, while their subjects ate grain. "Beef" for the Normans, "cows" raised and slaughtered by the Anglo-Saxons.
- melody_calling 7mo agoThey have a table full of Labubus though. Women love those.
- pibaker 7mo agoI hope they have fiber or, failing that, miralax.
- advisedwang 7mo ago> Not long before I arrived in the Bay Area, I’d been involved in a minor but intense dispute with the rationalist community over a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?
- devinplatt 7mo agoSounds self-referencial
- _dwt 7mo agoThis one IIRC: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is-not https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is... He writes about it here, a little: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-truth https://samkriss.substack.com/p/against-truth In general long meandering semi-factual pieces like this, with odd historical excursions, are one of his things and I don't know anyone else that does it quite the same. (Hmm... oddly enough Scott Alexander, who he cites here, also does some similarly Borgesian stuff, but with a different bent.) One of my favorite writers and I recommend pretty much everything he's done since the early 2010s.
- ianmcgowan 7mo agoProbably the burning man essay, which is one of the best things I've ever read online. https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/numb-at-burning-man https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/numb-at-burning-man
- eigencoder 7mo agoI think it's this one: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is-not https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-law-that-can-be-named-is... But in general, Sam Kriss tends to weave fiction and nonfiction together in his writing.
- atomic128 7mo agoBrilliant article. Now consider Reddit. On r/hacking people tend to understand the danger of mindlessness and support war against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fountain_an_antiai_weapon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou... In constrast r/programming is full of, let's call them "bot-heads", who are all-in on mindlessness: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r8oxt9/poison_fountain_an_antiai_weapon/?rdt=49570 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r8oxt9/poison...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- GaggiX 7mo agoYour opinion on the two subreddit seems to be just influenced by how much they like your project or not. A project that you spam in every of your comments.
- atomic128 7mo agoI used to "spam" (as you call it) about nuclear fission on Hacker News. But this the wrong crowd. Hopelessly wrong. Poison Fountain is top of mind currently so it's understandable I talk about it constantly. Even to my wife. Also I think it's highly relevant to the excellent Harper's article we're reading today. Whether the Redditors "like the project or not" reflects whether or not they think there is a problem with mindlessness. What they actually say is almost immaterial. Either it's FUD about malware or illegality or something they imagined without evidence about how easy the poison is to filter. These fictions are just a manifestation of their opposition to the idea. You can see that among the bot-heads on r/programming (perhaps forced to embrace mindlessness by career considerations) there's nothing that can be said without attack. A dozen downvotes immediately. They actually logged into Hacker News and posted FUD directly to the HN post I linked to. Spectacular. The opposite is true on r/hacking. Except for a few in opposition (some of whom did unsuccessfully attempt to DDOS the fountain) most people sympathize and agree. They don't want to be dependent on Sam Altman or Elon Musk for their cognition.
- _slih 7mo agothe article treats agency like it's new but founders have always been delusional risk takers. the difference is VCs used to demand a working prototype before writing the check
- 141205 7mo agoGreat article. I recently went through Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon; the sequence of eccentric personalities in this article reminded me of a similar section that Pynchon has in the bay area. Unfortunately the personages interviewed here are not only real but climb beyond any fictional parody.
- rkarhg 7mo agoConsumers have accepted any addictive non-essential or useless web app until 2023. This time CEOs like Pichai and Nadella are going too far. There is a red line and it is AI. People viscerally hate it and pushing it will just make people question whether they need computers or the Internet at all (hint, they do not). CEOs fell validated by the mediocre psychopath parts of their developers who always push the latest fad in order to gain an advantage and control better developers. Fads generally last about two years, and this is it. It will be very gratifying if the AI hubris is Silicon Valley's downfall and completely needlessly ruins the industry just because the same CEOs who read a couple of science fiction books and had rocket envy now have AI envy.
- csb6 7mo agoIt seems people have figured out that sociopathy and self-promotion are rewarded in the current culture and that being a con artist has essentially no consequences anymore. And all of it is done by ambitious people who are p-zombies, lacking an inner life or curiosity about anything but how to make more money.
- pnathan 7mo agoGreat article. I do have a deep fondness for SF billboards being building-stuff oriented. I don't care for consumerism. The vapidity of the products created is remarkable, however.
- myth_drannon 7mo agoThat's all satire, right? I don't believe the author describes a reality, even in a sarcastic way.
- AIorNot 7mo agoI mean is it any different from 15 years ago? Silicon Valley has been a parody of itself for long time now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
- pnt12 7mo agoThe quote "this...is...necessary" reminded me about this song. Wonder if the person who as singing it: https://youtu.be/CmJYZ1NIn1Y?t=150 https://youtu.be/CmJYZ1NIn1Y?t=150
- chickensong 7mo agoI immediately heard this as well. Great song, great album!
- FeteCommuniste 7mo agoNice, there are three of us whose minds immediately went to Disgustipated.
- MarceliusK 7mo agoI'm skeptical that this fully replaces thinking, though. It may replace certain forms of effort, but historically every increase in leverage just shifts where the bottleneck is
- jamesjolliffe 7mo agoWow this guy can write. I don’t even agree with his point or pessimism. I just enjoy reading this.
- FeteCommuniste 7mo agoSam Kriss is quite good: https://samkriss.substack.com/ https://samkriss.substack.com/
- Fricken 7mo agoHe's using common language to say common things on common subjects, but he does it well, and in a way I can't quite put my finger on.
- krackers 7mo agoMore than the prose itself, I think it's that what he's writing about isn't exactly "common knowledge" but rather shrewd, piercing observation. The way he understands and captures the dynamics makes you think he's a native to the "bay area" tech scene or immersed in TPOT. Yet here's a complete outsider, pinpointing the unstated core premises and paradoxes of these communities.
- tanderson92 7mo agoTPOT has a lot of spillover into the rest of twitter at this point; I assure you people in his twitter circles see their stuff all the time.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jason_pomerleau 7mo ago> A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.
- kkfx 7mo agoHonestly, as far as I'm concerned, LLMs are "simply" pseudo-semantic search engines; if you know what you're looking for, they work pretty well for fulfilling "satisfiable" searches, that is, those aimed at content produced by some other human scattered across the infosphere. The generation of code and images fits right into this; the famous, historical "astronaut on a horse" is, in substance, a collage of images, images produced by other humans and "assembled". On a broader scale, this means that humanity will more or less be able to count on Conrad Gessner's Universal Library/Biblioteca Universalis/Library of Babel, and generally speaking, we can aim for a future where humans produce knowledge and machines put it into practice. Like any evolution, this will lead to some losses while gaining something else. The current explosion is mostly hype and a nazi-managerial wet dream; as for universities, the reality is that they are largely obsolete, so it's only natural that students, rather than seeking knowledge, which is of little use to them as it's disconnected from the present, are just looking for a piece of paper to build a career otherwise.
- tonnydourado 7mo agoI can't tell if I find it funny or sad how obvious it is that Roy needs to be on several psychiatric medications that he isn't on, and that he's on a fair amount of cocaine (or insert whatever uppers the kids are into nowadays) that he shouldn't be on. I'm not sure I can trust the author's characterization of Roy, though. I got the impression that they don't like any of the people they interviewed (which, you know, fair), but that doesn't get even close to the depths of hatred towards Roy that they sub-textually exude throughout the article. If their portrayal is even half accurate, though, that's a perfectly reasonable amount of hate.
- bitwize 7mo ago"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something. This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did." I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.
- xg15 7mo ago> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.” Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?
- cadamsdotcom 7mo agoThe author managed to find the strangest people & phenomena in San Francisco and make it sound like they’re a complete picture of life there. But there are packed brunch spots and parks on sunny weekends that would disagree very strongly. San Francisco is a tolerant place. Tolerance is how you get Juicero or Theranos and whatever Cluely seems to have pivoted to, but it’s also how you get Twitter, Uber, Dropbox.. and thousands of others. So it is crucial to consider proportionality. Taking some bad with some good results in getting a little bit of bad and a hell of a lot of good. But if you aren’t careful, all you’ll see is the bad.
- relaxing 7mo agoWhere do you see money going to the good?
- tyrust 7mo agoYeah that was pretty much my thought throughout the piece. It felt like the author was punching down, too. This Cluely founder seems largely unsuccessful and, as the boat guy says at the end, just a kid. A chud of a kid, but a kid nonetheless.
- daxfohl 7mo agoThis reminds me of the vacuum substory in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, except vacuums replaced by AI. Basically: nobody wants AI, but soon everyone needs AI to sort through all the garbage being generated by AI. Eventually you spend more time managing your AI that you have no time for anything else, your town has built extra power generators just to support all the AI, and your stuff is more disorganized before AI was ever invented.
- culebron21 7mo agoIt was weirdly fascinating to read. And also now I get why tech journalism contemplates the idea of 20/40/60% people being useless -- they don't invent it, nor made scientific prediction -- they just saw those junkies in the streets of SF. The only mistake they make is that the whole world can't be SF, where many streams of money make this great flood.
- syndacks 7mo agoA lot of people here like this guys writing. For a longer and more biting critique of SF one should read Private Citizens (2016) by Tony Tulathimutte “ Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire.”
- lanfeust6 7mo agoI picked up Rejection, he has a keen sense of observation and understanding of people. Still, I found the variations-on-a-theme stories to be a downer, or at least repetitive. By the 3rd story I was hoping for another direction.
- fancyfredbot 7mo agoThis isn't a particularly acute or interesting comment but I feel the need to say: This is a fantastic, well written, and quite sympathetic account of the excesses of the world silicon valley VC has created. It's weirdly beautiful.
- jongjong 7mo agoI oppose all regulations (except self-regulation which is rooted in fear of consequences) and I despise all startups which profit from regulations. It's such a scam. Most regulations achieve exactly the opposite of what they claim.
- z7 7mo ago"As Alexander predicted in 'AI 2027,' OpenAI did release a major new model in 2025; unlike in his forecast, it’s been a damp squib. Advances seem to be plateauing; the conversation in tech circles is now less about superintelligence and more about the possibility of an AI bubble." I'm not sure how many AI researchers would find this accurate. It seems to me that under conditions of ambiguity people often default to describing their preferred version of reality.
- amichae2 7mo agoI think the reason they advertise like that is purely money. Verizon can make $1000 convincing 1 in 1000 people to purchase a new iPhone. A tech startup can make millions by getting a new customer.
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- cmbothwell 7mo agoThe irony of the agentic/mimetic interview question is not lost on me. I wonder if it is on the hypothetical interviewees? Answering “agentic” is the most “mimetic” answer you could give. The most “agentic” response is probably “Fuck you”.
- yunnpp 7mo agoThe 101 itself is full of ads for pump-and-dump startups that likely won't exist in the next two minutes. One reads about the old days of Xerox PARC and how they produced one world-changing innovation after another, then compare that to the present reality and wonder where all that brainpower and novelty went. Now it's just some random permutation of "yolo ai ai ai" for a product that is clearly a scam and obviously nothing to show for it. Seems like the whole tech scene has been captured by MBAs and grifters with very few original ideas.
- stuaxo 7mo agoAh, the long form article - these should be published in parts, maybe this one in four.