Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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

i haven't read it but yasha levine's surveillance valley: the secret military history of the internet is maybe towards the hersh end of tech reporting?

(he wrote for pandodaily, which certainly had pretensions to proper investigative reporting in that world -- tho i mainly encountered them via tiresome inter-title sniping and beefing) (before that levine was an editor at the exile, where i get the impression he was more of an actual real journalist and less of a gonzo asshole than the better known names from that quarter, tho this isn't exactly a high bar to clear)

Pando held some promise but there was also a fair amount of toothless cheerleading. And then she crossed the "wrong people" a few times and it was game over for Sarah Lacy.

Also this:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-barney-frank-went-to-work-for-signature-bank

"Well, this all came up very suddenly."

This guy dashing away from his responsibility at full speed is breathtaking.

would be considered a little credulous by modern standards, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine is a great slice of cultural/technical history.

Fun chat https://theinsurgents.substack.com/p/ep-159-vcs-to-the-rescue-ft-ed-zitron

holy shit @ that barney frank interview, bro is snappish

BF went on the interview circuit immediately and had the same tone in everything I read.

The guy was on the board of the bank, he comes from the deepest of insiders, and then gets defensive when asked why he didn’t perform his job as expected.

I like his attempt to make a case that regulators don't have to wait until banks have crossed the legal boundary to be advised to increase their liquidity, whatever

sure, that sounds nice. I'm sure the government has the resources to do that, and that banks would totally listen when there's no threat of legal action

c'mon, Barney

VCs are geniuses, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise pic.twitter.com/gAYEvyjrem

— @shitmgmts✧✧✧@ms✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧ (@ShitMgmtSays) March 17, 2023

beautiful

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Frg4wsWXgAM-Jax?format=jpg&name=medium

love to rat out my bank that didn’t comply with banking law

chase apparently is highly algorithmic these days, though. some local lottery winner tried depositing her winnings and not only would they not accept it, they notified her they were closing the account. local bank personnel couldn’t override it!

they should be praising chase for loving the algorithm imo

The only metaverse story that’s worth it about now.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html