Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

that article is so close to the Byron Barton board books that one reads to 1.5 year olds
otm! is that a... real article? is it a parody?

more to the point, is HSBC hiring? she seems to do about 3 hours of work per day, mostly meetings.

― Larry Elleison (rogermexico.), Thursday, October 18, 2018 8:18 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seriously, her day is broken up by a fucking HOUR AND A HALF LUNCH, and then an HOUR MIDDAY TRAIN RIDE TO PALO ALTO. Meanwhile the rest of her day is just, like, talking to people? Which I get can have its own exhaustion, but it doesn't exactly sound high pressure.

well she does walk along what is basically a freeway while contemplating her key wins. that could be stressful.

Some of the ppl I work with seem to have schedules like this and it's wild to witness

I've hate-read that article like 5 times now and I still can't work out exactly who it's trying to impress.

Shout out to when she says that English Breakfast is her favourite, because after all, she IS British. Using that logic Australian Crawl are my favourite band.

Is this a genre of troll article that I don't know about?

It kind of reminds me of those ridiculous "Here's why a $400,000/year salary doesn't go as far as you might think" articles. Basically designed for hate-sharing.

It almost seems like it was generated using AI

If you look at the author's other articles, this one has like 100x the "fire symbol" as the others, presumably meaning it's been read and shared much more. And I'm guessing the subject has to be her friend or something, right?

this seems..........good

https://techxplore.com/news/2018-10-neural-network-potential-drugs-large-scale.html

hoos i work on this stuff (secure+distributed ML). it's good but it also means more machine learning.

the article had a lot of the same feel as the "avril lavigne is back" one in a way I can't really put my finger on.

more like the pinnacle of emoticon fart

well she does walk along what is basically a freeway while contemplating her key wins. that could be stressful.

"On the evenings that we stay in Palo Alto, we walk down the tree-lined University Avenue, reflecting upon our key wins and challenges and preparing for the adventures of the next day. Then we eat at Wahlburgers," she said.

I haven't been on University Avenue in like 15 years but it wasn't that bad then?
though reading about the restos in Palo Alto that have closed since I live there, dang, it's no utopia anymore

bits of it are like 6 lanes wide but maybe they are on the bit by the restaurants

I haven't been on University Avenue in like 15 years but it wasn't that bad then?
though reading about the restos in Palo Alto that have closed since I live there, dang, it's no utopia anymore

NOLA is STILL open amazingly...

I was thinking of Szechwan Café on California, where you’d tell the guy a few flavors or textures you like, and he’d “harmonize” them and select dishes for you. And Mandarin Gourmet. I know the Thai Café on campus has closed, and the Treehouse too I think. I guess the Palo Alto Creamery is still around.

what could possibly go wrong

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/A-Cryptocurrency-Millionaire-Wants-to-Build-a-13355675.php

“This will either be the biggest thing ever, or the most spectacular crash and burn in the history of mankind,” Berns said. “I don’t know which one. I believe it’s the former but either way it’s going to be one hell of a ride.”

the Blockwan has found a home

buying land in the nevada desert, where summertime temperatures will soon regularly hit 120 degrees, is definitely the kind of smart long-term thinking that bodes well for the success of this project

Boring Burning Man!

You laugh now but wait til this guy makes everyone laugh

worried about climate change? have no fear, y combinator are gonna fix it by uh flooding the deserts or some shit

Imagine flooding a desert half the size of the Sahara. Using 238 trillion gallons of desalinated ocean water to do the job. Creating millions of 1-acre-square micro-reservoirs to grow enough algae to gobble up all of Earth’s climate-changing carbon dioxide. For an encore: How about spreading the water and fertilizer (the dead algae) to grow a vast new forest of oxygen-producing trees?

A Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Y Combinator, unveiled the radical desert flooding plan as one of four “moonshot” scenarios that it hopes innovators will explore as potential remedies to catastrophic global warming.

But would it work? And should it even be tried?

With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance of reducing dangerous greenhouse gas levels. But while they generally believe the climate crisis has become severe enough to push even extreme options onto the table, the experts cautioned against interventions that might create as many problems as they solve.

“We do not want to have this be purely profit driven,” said Greg Rau, a University of California, Santa Cruz climate scientist and part of the team that helped Y Combinator craft the request for proposals. “We are trying to benefit the planet, not just make money. So we need this kind of research and development first, but then oversight and governance over how any of this is deployed.”

hey it's probably not gonna work but let's at least make some cash

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna934551

why are the "smartest" people in the room always so fucking stupid

this is my favourite part:

Y Combinator called filling 1.7 million acres of arid land with 2-meter-deep pools of water “the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken.” Just to pump ocean water inland and desalinate it would require an electrical grid far greater than the one Earth now devotes to all other uses.

tackling climate change by building a mammoth power grid which will draw power from uhh something something fill this part in later

you can desalinate water using sunshine, no need for elec-trickery

not so much the pumping, though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw

how long do we have?

With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance

Ohhhhh boy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

An internal survey found just 52% of employees were optimistic about Facebook’s future, down from 84% the year earlier. https://t.co/enkm61cndi

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) November 14, 2018

remember when people thought Facebook was going to be around forever and was an indispensable part of modern living

they'll be a shell of a company in 10 years, a zombie like Yahoo

Unlike yahoo some of their acquisitions might be worth something for longer, The Facebook itself is probably already in decline

this is kind of it really:

which is easier to quit?

— one-time pad (@adrjeffries) November 14, 2018

I quit Facebook something like 9 or 10 years ago with one relapse after I graduated college and was lonely; it was easy

Amazon…I have one more video game preorder from them coming but I'm mostly done ordering stuff from there otherwise. Obviously AWS is the dominant cloud computing provider and we're all constantly using Amazon in that respect.

Of course this only means I'm going to end up ordering home goods from like Bed Bath and Beyond or Target which probably isn't "better" on any axis

I don't really get anything I need from Amazon. I pretty much only use it to purchase random books I'd like to own

we do use it for birthday/gift lists for the families, so that's a helpful thing that I couldn't easily replace

i wonder about like

facebook collapses, twitter becomes a ghost town

they were both so rapidly interwoven with us culture that their absence, at least from where i'm sitting right now, would feel like a gap

but i guess all i really mean is like 'they show tweets on the news' or 'facebook elected donald trump' and i suppose any next big thing could slot in there for 2028

A large part of my sustenance is tied to spinning up instances to AWS. I also buy a few things every couple weeks from Whole Foods.

I use the "memories" side bar feature of FB to delete content from my account every day, which is probably the most useful and enjoyable feature of FB I've ever used.

TV elected Kennedy iirc

xp

twitter is still great for real-time search, sadly

we can replace Twitter's role there with a website that's just "type here if something terrible is happening around you"

let us never forget the short rise and fall of bloopblorp

Neither Twitter nor Facebook is going anywhere imho, they have total network effect - Facebook was the first place where everyone you knew was on it, and it will serve as a way of keeping in touch with people and arranging gigs / parties for decades to come.

And Twitter is what they show on the news, and what elected the US president.

I mean, both of these are a corollary of "the vast majority of people don't give a shit about the stuff that extremely online people give a shit about"