Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

google is the best company i love how they work using their advertising empire to fund wacky ideas they then forget about and discard

they built an entire video game platform then didnt do anything with it lmao

yeah, and they're a distant third when it comes to being a cloud service provider. part of that is this instinct that their data centers are for google projects because they're going to come up with something huge any day now and they're going to need all of their capacity for their own shit

um its called dogfooding

i use their cloud (free tier)

theyre actually very generous shout out to google cloud

tbf all of their service offerings seem pretty good and some of them have mock or local versions you can run to proof out your software or run on your own!

they just have no chops for marketing to businesses, really. kind of a fluke that outside of search they ended up settling on email

firebase is really good, i tried to use amazons equivalent and boy was that a mess, tho tbf its basically the opposite of the thing aws does well

amazon's sloppy as hell with their new shit

half of it is a thin wrapper over a couple open source products, and the in-house stuff is basically "this other company has a product that does this, let's stand up a team to crank out something that does that"

if the latter ones are successful, they throw a little more effort in. if it's not, it goes into zombie mode and bug reports take a year to get fixed, if ever

they basically do the google thing of coming up with little projects and then never retire any of them

yeah the shear number of aws products is well a lot too much probably

half of it is a thin wrapper over a couple open source products, and the in-house stuff is basically "this other company has a product that does this, let's stand up a team to crank out something that does that"

― mh, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 10:55 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the aws firebase "amplify" was the former tho it was a wrapper on top of other aws products some of which are prob wrappers of open source things

their pitch was like once your app gets big its already on enterprise scale stuff, buddy no app built with this baby stuff is ever getting big lol

it's pretty funny that their stance is "well, we only have 100 customers using this product and they file bug reports on it constantly. lets just leave it up and if people keep paying who cares"

truly some ruthless bullshit

one of my coworkers found a bug in one of their lesser-used services that had open source components, made a fix and pull request, and then amazon didn't look at it for a full year

just like a real open source maintainer lol

silicon valley like a lot of industries have a social media problem where the loudest voices become defacto spokespeople, the mediating professional pr layer has been deleted

All these founder types waking up to discover a deficit of sympathy for them among the public at large should consider what making lames like Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen the "faces" of their industry has done for them. You guys need faces that are slightly less grotesque.

— Will 🦥 Menaker (@willmenaker) March 14, 2023

the top selling signature basketball shoe was kyrie irvings and nike had to drop him cause he was racist online, its tough for the brands right now

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snRlPpAZMuo

now i get it https://t.co/aLTWnSZsWc

— sophie (@netcapgirl) March 13, 2023

they basically do the google thing of coming up with little projects and then never retire any of them

― mh, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 10:56 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

the "never retire any of them" thing is really part of the DNA, to a fault.

that is not too unusual at any tech company - there are usually a bajillion more urgent things that devs need to get done, they'll never get around to the super low priority stuff affecting a relatively small number of users

duh! that stuff won't get you promoted!

you have to go through lawyers to launch anything here and one of the things they emphasize during that is that you are going to have to have another very long conversation with them if you ever want to shut it down, and you therefore need to have a plan for long term maintenance. the downside of this is this:

yeah the shear number of aws products is well a lot too much probably

― lag∞n, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 10:57 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

why are the lawyers the boss of that situation just cause of all the contacts aws has w clients

yup.

google cloud is presumably constrained in similar ways, but they have fewer customers/contracts and 5 years less cruft.

And then Andrew Jassy names your product something completely stupid

lol

Etsy sellers left in the lurch:

"As you may have seen, we recently experienced a delay in our ability to issue payments to some of our sellers," Etsy posted on its website. "This was related to the rapid and unexpected collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

calling one of the most fawning, uncritical tech reporters of the last two decades the most "vitriolic voice in the tech ecosystem" is an incredible indictment of how unrigorous the press as a whole has been toward these dweebs https://t.co/VzivxfS2VH

— lauren (@NotABigJerk) March 14, 2023

lauren otm

although the distinction where Sacks says "in the tech ecosystem" is kind of telling -- reporters should be reporting on that, and not in it, right?

Is there a Sy Hersh type of reporter in tech? I can't think of one

interview is a nice overview of california capitalism as it relates to this moment

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/malcolm-harris-palo-alto-interview/

we need more mike davises, not more sy hershes

well sure, but by Hersh I mean someone who is embedded but actually critical of the tech industry

mike isaac (NYT) and john carreyou (WSJ) turned their reporting into books about uber and theranos. wirecard was brought down by reporting in the FT (now a major motion picture). etc. etc. and there is a decent amount of less journalistic more cultural criticism in the mainstream press these days.

kara swisher is worthless obviously

casey newton, zoe schiffer, will oremus, matt levine (sometimes), kate conger, julia carrie wong, nitasha tiku, sam biddle etc. are all good reporters afaict. they don't get 20k words in the new yorker, but neither does hersh these days haha.

the end of valleywag and the resulting anti-gawker media shitstorm changed the focus from gossiping about weirdos and their goofy business ideas for a while

a lot of the regulation-dodging hacks by uber, the theranos stuff, etc. kind of drifted until there was enough solid material to be published by larger entities with less legal risk

I'd add Molly White to that list, she's my favorite crypto chronicler.

But yeah, on the Twitter story especially Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton have been great.

Malcolm Harris’ latest book seems worthwhile https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/malcolm-harris-palo-alto-interview/

Article called

“The Obscene Invention of California Capitalism”

A conversation with Malcolm Harris about his new history of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast’s settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.

By Emma Hager

just posted that hun, and yeah, it's really good

The NYT is currently running an intense hate campaign against generative AI technologies, and is thereby creating immense damage not only to tech companies but to society and culture itself. I think it is crucial that we get together to create a counter movement.

— Joscha Bach (@Plinz) March 15, 2023

The Clone Wars are finally here.

just posted that hun, and yeah, it's really good

Oh snap, you did. My mistake

wirecard was brought down by reporting in the FT (now a major motion picture

and a comedy series running on Netflix ... not as funny as Silicon Valley tho tbh