Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Just happened upon this gem of a sketch from last year

https://i.insider.com/63a4b3307877e10018fd618e?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp

George Michael on trial!

outside of the fact that he's incredibly guilty and offered up a godawful defense I think this is maybe the flipside of the two systems of justice thing we got goin here, where if you fuck with rich people's money things suddenly start moving very fast. this should've happened with Theranos too but she got lucky with Covid

I think he looks like a descendent of Genghis Khan. Also there's a dude with an apparent pentagram on his shirt behind him.

That's Michael LaRoux Matthews from OnCinema investigations unit.

his attorneys' heads are weirdly small

he looks like a descendent of Genghis Khan

only a few million of those milling around

its very funny to be literally sitting next to a guy while he commits one of the biggest frauds ever and not notice and also write a book about it

walt isaacson seems to be on the same beat

true, tho i hold him to a lower standard than lewis

I find the politics of these people inscrutable

A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) November 4, 2023

Here is the death age distribution in Gaza from before this conflict (from a pro Palestinian source)

The vast majority of "child" deaths were ages 10-18https://t.co/Uo3TYB8Iqb

— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) November 4, 2023

99% of Silicon Valley has the exact politics that leads you to put child in air quotes, and they all worshipped YC until about a month ago.

cultural sociopathy

99% of Silicon Valley has the exact politics that leads you to put child in air quotes, and they all worshipped YC until about a month ago.

Also, what happened a month ago?

And what’s YC

Also 10-18 is a bangable age to these guys

YC = Y Combinator? I don't see how this helps the rest make any more sense.

Was using Silicon Valley as shorthand here for Silicon Valley VCs.

They all have insane political theories and practical politics. The all in podcast is representative of this. This is probably not news if you’re on this thread.

YC (Paul graham, sam Altman, etc.) are not an exception. They are also incredibly influential in that set.

Generally the VC reaction to what’s happening in Gaza for the past month has been as vile as you’d expect.

Yet Paulg is posting stuff that is cautiously sympathetic to Palestine. This is upsetting his professional acquaintances (see replies) and tbh doesnt make a ton of sense given all his other views.

Ok I guess it’s not that surprising if you were paying attention to him 10 years ago

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/07/start-up-guru-has-enraged-israeli-techies.html

he sometimes seems like he isn’t completely subsumed into the weird rhetoric of his peers and acts confused when he pops his head up with a somewhat-normal opinion and gets shouted at

as for his peers, it’s almost refreshing to see andreesen and others admitting in public that they’d like federal contracts. this was always the wellspring of money, all the way back to the founding days of SV. a handful of people made it big in the salad days of the early internet, funded a bunch of things with their new fortunes assuming the money spigot was permanently on, and now it’s becoming clear that their ideas of how to wring infinite profit out of investing in whatever catered to their own interests (making it easy to have other people do all the things they personally did not want to do, making their own lives convenient at the expense of others) is over.

what did the ncsa in ncsa mosaic stand for, hmm

I find it inscrutable to find "A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7" inscrutable - indeed I would say "it is as a general rule very bad when kids are being killed in large numbers and a sign that things have gone horribly wrong" is an extremely normal and widely asserted opinion, presumably in Silicon Valley as much as anywhere else

cool

presumably!

since we’re talking about venture and investment capital, and about investors who have specifically indicated they’re attempting to pivot to being defense contractors, what are defense contractors and their investors saying?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/wall-street-morgan-stanley-td-bank-ukraine-israel-hamas-war

sv vc trying to get into a more serious space is interesting as theyre generally considered unserious by the wider world of investors, but hey if theyve got money im sure there will be takers

sv vc chasing unicorns has led them to weird bad places, crypto ai defense, when theres tons of potentially useful technology thats never going to produce billion dollar valuations that could use their money

I have to admit, had SBF's idea to bribe Trump not to run come to fruition, that really would have put him ahead of most of the YC crew in terms of "this absurd bet that no one should have taken seriously paid off spectacularly!"

FTX and the other pure-crypto efforts are weird because while some get SV backing, they’re now almost purely financial grifts. All the technology’s known and they aren’t doing anything with software or hardware that isn’t already out there

You could say the same of a handful of others that are pure “disrupt this sector” businesses but developers will try to show off the neat tools they made and maybe spin those into their own business. Half of these might just be forks of some open source user interface library but someone working there wants something to post to hackernews

since we’re talking about venture and investment capital, and about investors who have specifically indicated they’re attempting to pivot to being defense contractors, what are defense contractors and their investors saying?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/wall-street-morgan-stanley-td-bank-ukraine-israel-hamas-war

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Sunday, 5 November 2023 16:42 (yesterday) link

The quotes in this article are so dark.

as for his peers, it’s almost refreshing to see andreesen and others admitting in public that they’d like federal contracts. this was always the wellspring of money, all the way back to the founding days of SV.

iirc the original SV was all companies primarily with DoD contracts

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/

one of the greatest things i have ever read

amazing how many of these guys think scifi is realest deepest shit

And Thiel made his money from PayPal, that’s some real Mr. Bladreunner shit not even Omni magazine could imagine

such a disappointing douchebag, trump was right

I don't really know where to put this but I am starting to really dislike the way everything you do online is tracked and fed into the algorithms of what you see on every other site, or even your Microsoft home page, if like me you're dumb enough to still have it as the default. It makes your internet use feel more like a conversation, except the person on the other side doesn't understand any of it except broadly what "topics" you're into. If I have a conversation about Joe Rogan with a friend it should be clear that I'm not really a fan of Joe Rogan and don't really want to hear shit about him, but if I'm reading stuff about him online all this tracking data will say "oh he's into Joe Rogan" and it'll ruin my recommendations for a while. Or say a year ago when people thought Putin was going to start a nuclear war, you read a few articles on that and suddenly for the next year you're being fed junk like "Kremlin insider says nuclear strike inevitable" from outlets like NewsBuzzNOW! Which is stuff I don't wanna see, it's stuff I don't want to think about, it just makes the entire internet feel like Twitter where it's just showing you bad and depressing stuff all the time. It makes me feel like I have to monitor what I'm actually looking at lest fucking YouTube get the wrong impression of me.

otm

when the amount of input we each get is almost infinite and requires personal interpretation—and we are people who have limited time/attention, we all and each need internet agents/filters who will do it for us.

that’s either an argument for personal AI filters, or an argument to outlaw/break the internet.

I find the FB algorithm particularly depressing and intrusive because a few of my not very close just happen to post a ton, so I wind up interacting with those people more and it becomes this awful feedback loop where I never see what like 90% of my FB friends post and I miss even posts from close friends if I just didn’t happen to interact with their last couple posts.

Granted FB is also kind of tired and has a bit of a people who stayed at the party too late vibe.

Or on Instagram, for example, if in a bad moment on a bad day I click on a few thirst trap accounts, suddenly I get tons of thirst traps, to the point that I feel like I have to make sure never ever to click on them. Or conversely I’ll wind up clicking on something completely irrelevant to me and inane (“Questions husky owners are tired of being asked”) out of pure boredom, and suddenly I get tons of husky and dog owner content.

It’s like if I happened to go to the salad place for lunch twice in one week and the next week 80% of the restaurants had turned into salad places.

super otm

I have successfully tuned up Instagram now to where 99% of what I'm shown is videos of gorillas, bears, and/or elephants. Consequently, I love Instagram! It's great!

same here I've got over 500 FB friends but I feel like my entire feed is like the same 10 of them over and over again. I deliberately try not to interact with certain people/groups because I don't want them filling up my timeline forever.

if u r on desktop for fb, you can click "feeds" and it will present you with a chronological feed with (afaict) no ads/algo content, dont know how that works on the app since i dont have it on my phone

(nm there will be ads but i have a fb ad blocker extension on firefox)

I use a chrome extension for Facebook, the Newsfeed Eradicator. bless it, i never look at facebook any longer except to check up on a few specific groups and friends… but no feed, chronological or algorithmic. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg

facebook vaguely able to follow real people in a web browser, the app is terrible. nobody I know actually posts on it, the few parents I know who would put fun kid stuff on there are social media avoidant or put things elsewhere.

so if I open the app 80% of the feed is posts from recommended groups and due to search history and other group membership it’s all people doing home repairs in novel (wrong) ways

stone cold freaks.

Breaking news: The OpenAI drama is real.

We checked our data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this.

Source: @eightsleep data

— Matteo Franceschetti (@m_franceschetti) November 20, 2023

sure sure yeah yeah lol

these people (the mattress people and its customers) are freaks whether or not that is true to be clear.

It was really cold last night (under 50F), also there were a ton of friendsgiving parties.