Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Re not knowing what they do. This talk of "building cool shit" is much funnier when you do. What a bizarre economy.

the line between the Whole Earth Catalog and Q running through silicon valley, the free software foundation, and gamergate is a very bright and straight one

someone on twitter reminded me that the guy who was canned from Google for “just asking questions” originally had @Fired4Truth as his twitter handle

this will never not be funny

I'm asking what you think. You say it's a bad idea to hire people who say things for shock value. Presumably you mean to include Antonio, or you wouldn't have mentioned this. So are you saying that in a world of properly run companies, he should never work again?

— Paul Graham (@paulg) May 13, 2021

I ain’t clicking through on that

I think you can get the point without clicking. PG just being obtuse and acting like “don’t hire jerks” means that all of our best thought leaders will be unemployed

Ex-Facebook VR exec says he'll turn U.S. troops into 'invincible technomancers,' just raised $450 million https://t.co/xufDyzkh0n

— CNBC (@CNBC) June 17, 2021

"ex-facebook vr exec" doesn't really capture that guy's bio tbf

Is that the worst beard in the world?

Indeed. I don't usually notice facial hair but that's outstandingly bad

an acquaintance launched the public sale of his startup's crypto token, yesterday. it aims to eliminate global poverty by creating "a regenerative, bottom-up universal basic income (UBI) that can elevate all participants above the global poverty line."

"if the Torus can return $2/day to its participants (as Anatha Token), it can make poverty a disease we’ve cured"... so, peak silicon-valley optimism. it would be cool to see crypto/distributed finance eliminate poverty at any scale.

https://anatha.io/blog/token-sale
https://www.morningstar.com/news/globe-newswire/8255815/anatha-announces-its-accessible-equitable-public-token-sale-accepting-fiat-and-crypto

xpost that Facebook guy is Parker Luckey, who I interviewed once and might have been the most awkward conversation I've ever had, absolute basement boy

his sister is engaged to matt gaetz.

the Oculus acquisition still baffles me. "we integrated the phone with the ski goggles. now we want 3 billion dollars."

India was the Y combinator of the British empire

— Daniel Tenreiro 🦧 (@TenreiroDaniel) August 5, 2021

I know he means something stupid, let's click through and see if he clarified his thoughts at all

An outsize portion of the empire’s great talents were nurtured in the Raj. Fascinating phenomenon . . .

— Daniel Tenreiro 🦧 (@TenreiroDaniel) August 5, 2021

*screaming intensifies*

the Oculus acquisition still baffles me. "we integrated the phone with the ski goggles. now we want 3 billion dollars."

I heard Zuck on the radio awhile ago, and he has big plans for VR. Facebook has never been a leader in the hardware world, and he sees this as the future; you'll go to the office in VR, maybe have lunch while in VR, then attend a 'concert' after work in VR. If that doesn't sound dystopian, I don't know what is.

https://i.imgur.com/AFDRfK0.gif

I don't think you need to spend that money just to get into VR. Certainly none of that ip will make up zuck's horrible vr hell.

I don't think VR will ever be a real hit until they devise a blowjob machine that actually feels like a mouth to get the porn-driven mass adoption of VHS/DVD/streaming.

tragic lol @ this thread

25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, its first real salvo in the “Browser Wars”. This launch taught taught me how a giant corporation could move at the speed of a startup. Here’s the story: pic.twitter.com/ZEYcxYrUgI

— Hadi Partovi (@hadip) August 14, 2021

this bit in particular:

Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.

— Hadi Partovi (@hadip) August 14, 2021

the distance between their ideology and the reality of what these people produce is astonishing / beyond parody

ah, I just noticed this dude is a director at the company that makes tasers and police drones

moving at the speed of a 100-person startup

lol seriously

I just can't get over how this was all in service of developing a product that was indistinguishable from an already massively popular one. I want to read the breathless thread about how people wrecked their lives to put out the Zune

"yeah I worked 90 hours a week, destroyed my marriage, and didn't watch my kids grow up but hey we shipped an important product"

"ah well at least you're rich now"

"oh no, no no no, but i have the satisfaction of having made other people rich"

completely deranged

— Kat Cosgrove (@Dixie3Flatline) August 15, 2021

I just can't get over how this was all in service of developing a product that was indistinguishable from an already massively popular one. I want to read the breathless thread about how people wrecked their lives to put out the Zune

in retrospect, the zune was the first time i really became aware of tech overbloat. it's still funny to think about. and the word 'zune' has to be a nadir of the english language. it still makes me cringe-laugh at how bad it is.

https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/z0kxIIl4fc0WfO3u7uB9B_TkCeP919kzD8xY5rqR0fiGzvHGGQfMaSsC7CCmQ3GRneB0Gb3Al07Z=s200

I just can't get over how this was all in service of developing a product that was indistinguishable from an already massively popular one.

That sort of product defined the Steve Ballmer era at Microsoft. Microsoft thought they learnt from Internet Explorer that they could crush any hot new tech product or service from another company simply by throwing money at it and melding it into Windows, but what worked for IE didn't work for Zune, Bing, Windows Phone, and several others - all reactions to competitors who got there first and did it better. Even IE itself would later crash and burn. Microsoft has since replaced it with Edge, a web browser most of us use exactly once, to download Chrome...

Now Edge is just Chrome

don’t forget that msft bought the world’s most popular video calling software and rendered it an unusable add-on to Teams right before the pandemic hit. has to be in their top 5 galaxy brane moves

oh yeah Bing! lmao

Tracer, which one? I’m thinking of Skype here, but they bought that in 2011 and have been fucking it up in various ways for a decade

I don't use Chrome anymore, now Firefox is my best friend

Chrome is spyware tbrr, and on the user end I feel like the diffs between browsers are super minimal now. heck I barely see a diff between DuckDuckGo and Google Search now

i agree that chrome is spyware and no one should use it, and ff is equivalent for almost all users, but the new safari is pretty drastically different from either for better or worse (well, it's definitely worse, but it's good to see someone trying something new i guess).

mh - yeah skype - i guess i mean they finally basically buried it completely within the guts of Teams right before the pandemic. on my work computer at least, it had been hanging on as 'Skype for Business' for several years. incredible to me how thoroughly they nuked the brand equity. 'Skype' was a verb that most people knew! it meant video calling!

but the new safari is pretty drastically different from either for better or worse (well, it's definitely worse, but it's good to see someone trying something new i guess)

ha! I'm not sure I've tried this version, now I'm intrigued

I only use Safari. If I had a BSD or Linux desktop I'd probably use either Firefox or this bullshit http://surf.suckless.org

what's different about the new safari?

https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/06/wwdc-2021-safari-15-to-bring-huge-ui-changes/

they've dialed it back a bit since WWDC but it's still pretty weird

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/06/17/safari-15/

Gonna stick with Firefox. That looks like make-work for a team that should move on to something else.

Bookmarks and tabs have both always been huge problems - people just don't use them well, or efficiently, or at all - so I can't hate them putting some effort into that

safari changes seem just… whatever, to me, so far.

Tracer, I don’t think “Skype for Business” had anything to do with actual Skype, which afaik was a separate, incompatible program. They literally just rebranded their messaging program that came with Office a third time. (Office Communicator, Lynn, then Skype iirc)

haha oh

whoops, typo there, the second one was “Lync”

calling their shitty messaging app that never worked right “Skype” was one of the stupidest branding ploys they’ve done imo

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/28/tech/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-trial-mental-health/index.html

there’s no reason to doubt that Balwani is what she alleges he is but how much of a defense is it? Lee Boyd Malvo is doing life for murders he did while a teenager under the sway of an older man but he’s a Black man and Holmes is a white woman.

I don't think it is much of a defense.

The story just gives me the willies.