I'm finding it really hard to escape the impression that the author just thinks Silicon Valley is full of nerds and wants to stuff them in lockers. I'm far from an Elon Musk fanboy these days, but how can you be so incurious that you watch a video of him explaining the practical obstacles to robotic hands, and retort that this is "101-level stuff" because other people in other fields also know hands are complex?

There's real points scattered throughout the article, to be sure. It's a problem that AI slop is polluting the commons. But, like, this:

> How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.

is not a paragraph written by someone who feels that techies or their interests are worthy of respect.

▲

saltcured a day ago | parent | next [-]

From your opening sentence, I really expected you to go in a different direction...

I think the funny thing is how many supposed "tech" people are nothing but business/investment people with a high risk/high reward mindsets. They are not the nerds. The tech is just a contemporary set piece for their visions of revenue and capital gains.

In another era, they'd be dreaming about selling movie tickets, or controlling shipping routes. Not because they care about film making, or transport, but simply because they salivate over the captive market.

Because of the gestalt merger of tech, consumerism, media, and advertising, I think there is a VC mindset that know thinks they can just define the Next Thing and inform the public of their next craving.

▲

SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent [-]

I just don't think any of this is correct. Why would a business/investment person who doesn't care about tech focus on strange-sounding things that most people don't want? If they didn't care which market they capture, they'd pick one of the many normal-sounding things that people do want, or perhaps go become a quant and farm their money directly from Wall Street.

	▲	saltcured 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bear with me while I go in reverse order. These types could not become quants. That is a different person who has the visions of money but is also a nerd capable of the technical work. I'm talking about the VC people who hire programmers, engineers, or quants. These people think they have Big Ideas and to them it isn't really different whether they hire creatives to make art, manufacturing nerds to make semiconductors, software nerds to make SaaS, or biochemists to make pharmaceuticals. It's all inscrutable mundane details to them and their magical thinking. After a career observing such things, I've come to see abstraction as something that can cross from virtue into malignancy. I think the AI dream is driving some of this type towards madness. As someone in another sub-thread observed, It resonates strongly with the way they engage with the world, with delegation of things you don't really understand. But it also promises a kind of pure capitalist scaling where their revenue dreams can be untethered from labor constraints. The current scramble is the attempt to pivot every business dream into one that uses this new set piece.
	▲	Nasrudith 21 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't necessarily agree with the thesis but the venture capital model is a bit weird in ways that explain why a business/investment person would do that. From my understanding 'Strange things most people don't care about' may fail (and indeed, probably will fail) but they have also been major lottery tickets in the past. When you have enough money to throw around 'buying every lotto ticket' has a record of paying off better as a strategy than taking a 'rational' approach of only investing in those which you have strong fundamentals in. It takes a stupid amount of money to diversify in such fields so it isn't for everyone of course. Tech just has the best record for it so far with highly scaleable businesses. They just care about the returns. If instead of what we know as 'tech' the big field was, say, genetic engineering or for the sake of absurdity - literal magic. If it somehow scaled better they would throw their money at that.

▲

JohnFen a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He's not talking about all tech people here. He's talking about a narrow subset:

> a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship.

▲

SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent [-]

I'm sure she thinks she's not talking about all tech people, but she began the article with an anecdote about an acquaintance of hers, describing how it was "mortifying" to listen to him talk about his ideas and directly contrasting him with a "regular human" (who of course would be familiar with Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure).

I don't want to overindex on the one anecdote, because I recognize this is a pretty hostile interpretation, and I could just as easily read it as playful ribbing if the rest of the article were consistent with that perspective. It's kinda not, though.

	▲	JohnFen a day ago \| parent [-]
		I assume that acquaintance was in the narrow subset of techies that she's talking about.

▲

jrflowers 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the author just thinks Silicon Valley is full of nerds

That hasn’t been the stereotype for Silicon Valley in a long time. There was a whole HBO comedy show about a small group of nerds in a town where every other character is a variation of “made a bunch of money overnight and then declared themselves God”