Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

the True Believers are willing to believe

According to 1970's Andy, this should've dropped around 1982

Whatever you think of them otherwise Zuckerberg seems like a much more interesting guy than Musk. Pro-natalism, media criticism, pro space colonisation etc are milquetoast things you'd pick up in SF tech circles. Zuck is like, no I'm not into that, I'm a Roman emperor actually.

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) July 8, 2023

this guy is endlessly amazing to me

I’d ask you what you think, but I really don’t care 🫶🏻 pic.twitter.com/k77rbk2b3M

— Zero (@bryan_johnson) July 2, 2023

does he actually think this is a look worth spending millions of dollars a month on?

request that user map weighs in on the whole mormanism of it!

also what the absolute fuck is that shirt

He has a store brand Willem Dafoe vibe.

Um “i want to show u nips but i’m skeered? here’s mischevious armpit adjacent holes!”?

full body lasering nbd

That guy kills me because he absolutely looks great for 60 but obviously as we all keep hearing is 45. Spend a million dollars on fun (and normal shirts) my guy

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

from the Krugman link:

One sad but true fact of life is that most of the time conventional wisdom and expert opinion are right; yet there can be big personal and social payoffs to finding the places where they’re wrong.

weird that he doesn't include "financial" payoffs ... like short-selling ... which is perhaps the most obvious example (ok maybe that's just me) of a "payoff" from being contrarian

i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.

let's get that movie made!

(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)

— Sam Altman (@sama) July 22, 2023

after having seen that tweet too many times, I think the bit of the calculus missed is these dudes are really seeing "very socially awkward, dickish guy overcomes some problems and meets some cool guys and is now a real life billionaire with lots of power. he's got a wife and kids, even"

to an extent they're not wrong. not a lot of billionaires out there who didn't screw people over and have a laissez-faire attitude about the personal information and property of others

it's hard to argue for the intended of message of the movie being "you didn't get it, mark. and you'll never get it" when the main character of the movie is an irl person who has never really had to understand that bit of social interaction and seems to be doing pretty ok irl

Idk that last scene with him alone at a laptop was by far the most memorable for me.

I'm just confused about the timing of the Social Network influencing people to be start-up founders. Like didn't Social Network come out AFTER like the 2nd dot.com crash? I feel like there'd been plenty of excitement and booms of startup founding before that movie.

The explanation is simple; that dude is dumm

in my limited experience, this shit really didn’t take off until after 2010: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_accelerator

there was always a hook-up between VC and startup founders but the idea you could just want to start a company, have no idea what you want to start, and then hook up with some people at an incubator hit its stride after that. and if you manage to hit on half an idea that people like, you pivot the whole company to doing that

I have a former coworker who worked at one that had an interesting, if very niche, idea. Within a year, they’d ditched that plan completely and were doing “something new!” which appeared to be shuffling papers around while burning the rest of their seed money so he quit to get a job somewhere that actually did something

the whole thing kind of killed a lot of new ideas that would have organically grown into businesses in that you’re not demonstrating that you have an audience, you’re demonstrating you have an idea that VC types would like. so we get an endless stream of “X, but online” and “uber but for Y”

Also, and I haven't seen the movie yet, but said physicist created a horrific weapon that instantly vaporized hundreds of thousands of innocent people and lived out his days in regret, so I'm not sure this particular physicist would be the one to motivate the kids to enter the field, IDK

but if he was in SV he’d have cashed out his stock options after the bomb was a success and he could ponder his morality in a really sweet house

oppenheimer as angel investor in OPPENHEIMER 2 and he’s funding all kinds of zany ideas and his sole question at the pitch meeting is “this one doesn’t kill people, it just makes their daily lives slightly worse?”

There's not a whole lot of difference between an accelerated VC tech startup incubator and The Manhattan Project.

lol

a lot of the success of the Project wasn't just due to the "brilliant guy" but the fact that the government conscripted a bunch of math / science / engineering workers to do a lot of tedious work ... this was something I was talking to a friend about, both of us had relatives that were basically "the extras" doing a bunch of computations and calculations (some who weren't entirely clear on what they were working on exactly, just like "analyze this data for us")

it takes a village to destroy two cities

xp back when "computer" was a job description and not something you used on the job

it takes a village to destroy two cities

haven’t seen it but i think he might agree

part of me thinks that until ppl recognize what the what was— monstrous, full of fear, and under the fatigue the monstrous behavior preceding it— maybe they’re less prepared to say “no.”

the other parts of me (most) say ppl are not wired for any insights to reach them in time to change anything. only raw fear of m.a.d. has any decisional weight

you’re not demonstrating that you have an audience, you’re demonstrating you have an idea that VC types would like. so we get an endless stream of “X, but online” and “uber but for Y”

― mh, Monday, July 24, 2023

"uber, but for Y (and not a pyramid scheme)"

am i the only one who finds the idea of a film that might make Oppenheimer sympathetic totally and utterly insane?

I do not share that perspective. Oppenheimer was acting during wartime and the war was being fought on a "total war" basis in the sense Clausewitz employed that term. It was also clear that a fission bomb of enormous power was possible and this possibility was known to the enemy who was violently attempting to impose total domination and surrender upon you and your compatriots. That enemy also had quite sophisticated physicists capable of discovering how to build such a bomb and there were clear indications that such work was being pursued. Beyond those bare obvious facts, nothing else was known about the state of the enemy's ability to produce that bomb.

By the time Germany was defeated, work on the US fission bomb was far advanced and nearing completion. The war with Japan was still fiercely contested. Oppenheimer was under military auspices and had he declined to carry the project to completion another physicist would have been appointed to take his place and the work would have been done anyway. It was not in his hands to stop any of it. Focusing solely on him as if he were indispensable and in control of the outcome is counter to the facts. He was genuinely torn by a moral dilemma such as few humans have faced. Sympathy for his untenable set of choices is not insane.

FDR dies 12 april 1945 and VP the table is the table (who nailed down pennsylvania in the '44 election) becomes president

what happens next

Oppenheimer was under military auspices and had he declined to carry the project to completion another physicist would have been appointed to take his place and the work would have been done anyway.

How is this in any way an argument for carrying on? "If this horrible thing is going to happen anyway at least I'll get the credit"?

Sorry, that’s an absolute bullshit argument, Aimless.

Mostly because it doesn’t get at my question, which is whether we should feel sympathy for the historical figure of Oppenheimer, and how that feels totally insane to me. He was part of an apparatus, and he could have stepped away. He didn’t, and that should be damning, not something for fake liberals to wring their hands over, saying “he had untenable sets of choices.” fucking bullshit.

FDR dies 12 april 1945 and VP the table is the table (who nailed down pennsylvania in the '44 election) becomes president

what happens next

vp the table is the table would presumably not have made it past 1944

(but have been pushed out in favor of an airhead who would immediately nuke a couple cities)

"Oppenheimer was under military auspices and had he declined to carry the project to completion another physicist would have been appointed to take his place and the work would have been done anyway."

Lol

Any old physicist will do.

Seriously, I think the question is whether the project would've been completed successfully but also on time.

vp the table is the table would presumably not have made it past 1944

https://i.imgur.com/Gibn5SL.jpg

"Sorry, that’s an absolute bullshit argument, Aimless."

If Oppo had declined the military could've picked up a nuclear physicist off the streets.

Just like you can do with python programmers today.

it shouldn't really matter, there are plenty of positions where you do evil shit that are highly replaceable - if you decide not to take a job as a guard in a detention centre, say, you can be pretty sure someone else will get that position, but that's no moral justification for taking it.

I mean, it's kinda like the thread about the anti-hero protagonist prestige TV "trend" ... you can sympathize somewhat because he is human and wasn't 100% monstrous since birth ... but, still ... is Germany going to come out with a prestige drama called Eichmann?

"He engineered the final solution, but he paid the ultimate price!"

How is this in any way an argument for carrying on? "If this horrible thing is going to happen anyway at least I'll get the credit"?

This didn't all take place in some theoretical, timeless storyland. It took place in a very specific time with a very different social reality, where fighting the war and crushing the enemy was seen by 98% of society as the only acceptable moral position. His thinking was that by retaining that moral credit for the work he'd done to make the project succeed he'd be in a position to use that credit to influence subsequent policy. If he'd walked away, he'd have become a pariah, viewed as a traitor or some incomprehensible fool whose opinions are automatically dismissed, an exile from any further involvement in how the existence of "the gadget" would shape the future.

I've personally met and talked with multiple WWII conscientious objectors (now all dead), because my father-in-law was one of them, and if you all think that walking away from the war effort was a simple, easy, obvious moral choice you have far too simple a view of that era. But I guess that makes me some kind of traitor or incomprehensible fool, whose opinions are automatically dismissed, so I have forfeited any influence I might have upon your thinking.

lol I have no illusions that it would be an easy decision to take, in fact I think that rather than your pariah scenario it'd have been much more likely that the US would've just had Oppie quietly killed. But that doesn't make it a morally complex choice.

xpost to Aimless: My great grandfather was a fighter pilot in World War 1, wrote several major newspaper editorials against WW2 from a pacifist perspective, and then took a long walk off the Staten Island ferry in 1951 because he had what today would be called PTSD. I know the stakes. He wished he’d walked away, and I wish he had, too.

His daughter was arrested more than 50 times during her life for blocking and chaining herself to war recruitment offices and other anti-war protests.

But I’ve given this family history before. I don’t take the historical context for granted, and that you think I would is frankly kind of insulting, which is why I’m reacting the way I am.

you might even say oppenheimer was just following orders makes u think

it was not my intention to insult you ttitt. your defense of your position is now somewhat clearer, but when the earlier statement of your position was simply "that’s an absolute bullshit argument", it becomes very difficult to see the complex moral argument upon which you are basing that conclusion.

you might even say oppenheimer was just following orders makes u think

thinking is a good start, but you stopped too soon